Free Republic

Lawmakers and bureaucrats in official Washington often act as if their decisions lead the nation forward. News from Iowa this week, however, shows once again that the culture leads and politicians lag behind. Kim Reynolds became Iowa's Governor last May when her predecessor (Terry Branstad) resigned to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to China. Reynolds is now running for her own full term in a state where the average Obamacare premiums jumped 57 percent. "Many Iowans faced a choice of going broke or going without insurance," according to Reynolds. "And that's really not a real choice." Seizing the opportunity...

The Trump administration seems to be leaning towards allying with the oil refining industry in its fight against Big Corn and federal rules requiring the use of corn ethanol. Reuters reports that the U.S. EPA apparently granted an exemption to Andeavor, a large oil refiner, from having to comply with blending requirements as part of the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) last month. The RFS requires refiners to blend biofuels, such as corn ethanol, into their refined fuels. If they can’t or find it too costly, they are required to purchase credits. The law dates back to 2007 under the George...

America’s anti-fracking enviros had a strange benefactor. While allegations of the Donald Trump campaign colluding with Russians to alter the presidential election outcome remain unproven at best, a clear money trail and U.S. intelligence reports demonstrate Russia’s active campaign of funding U.S. environmental groups. On March 1, U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), released a report on “Russia’s Social Media Meddling in U.S. Energy Markets.” The report details Russia’s motives in interfering with U.S. energy markets, influencing domestic energy policy, and manipulation of Americans via social media propaganda. “This report reveals that Russian agents...

There was a time in America — and it wasn't even so long ago — that liberals cared a lot about working-class people. They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions — e.g., raising the minimum wage — but at least their hearts were in the right place. Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago. Radical environmentalists took control of the Democratic Party. These leftists care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these...

Hillary Clinton owes Bernie Sanders’ campaign an apology, the campaign said Friday. Clinton on Thursday accused Sanders’ camp of “lying,” alleging that his campaign has been claiming Clinton accepts money from the fossil fuel industry — a statement she forcefully rejected when confronted by an environmental activist. “I think she probably owes the senator an apology for that because the senator is not lying about her record,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told MSNBC. “He’s talking about her record. He’s talking about her practices. She obviously doesn’t like it, but that doesn’t make it lying because you don’t like it.”...

Take a look at this abstract from the journal Progress in Human Geography: ………………………………………………………………………Glaciers, Gender, and Science:A FEMINIST GLACIOLOGY: framework for global environmental change research Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, Jaclyn Rushing ABSTRACT Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging...

Washington could become the first state in the nation to impose a direct tax on carbon emissions from fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline and natural gas. A ballot measure before the state Legislature would create a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton of fossil fuel emissions burned in Washington, while reducing taxes. ...

Wood Mackenzie's report, cited by the energy news service Platts, said about 3.4 million barrels' worth of oil a day was not profitable below $35 a barrel. According to the International Energy Agency, the world's supply is 97.07 million barrels a day. While today's oil prices are below this threshold, the report suggests the price at which US shale and other producers would be forced out of the market is lower than previously thought. As Platts writes, "For many producers, being cash negative is not enough of an incentive to shut down fields as restarting flow can be costly and...

If Donald Trump is the Tony Soprano of American politics, Ted Cruz is a less-affable version of Mr. Haney from Green Acres (Ok - not quite, but sort of! Do feel free to say, H&R readers, which movie character is a better fit with Cruz). But the only thing cleverer than Cruz's impression of Inigo Montoya in Princess Bride (and not the least because it irritates Billy Crystal and the insufferably self-righteous Mandy Patinkin so much) is the campaign strategy he devised in Iowa to defeat the ethanol cartel and win the primary, I note in my column at The...

When Obama carried out his Solyndra con game, he broke the same law that Martha Stewart went to prison for breaking In 2009 the Obama administration gave $535 million to Solyndra, claiming that it would create 4,000 new jobs. However, instead of creating those 4,000 new jobs, the company went bankrupt. It was later revealed that the company’s shareholders and executives had made substantial donations to Obama’s campaign, that the company had spent a large sum of money on lobbying, and that Solyndra executives had had many meetings with White House officials. It was also revealed that the Obama administration had...

From the “fresh melt water will disrupt the planet” department, except that this ongoing alarm has already been debunked by NASA, see: NASA refutes Mann and Rahmstorf – Finds Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Not SlowingIllustration depicting the overturning circulation of the global ocean. Throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the circulation carries warm waters (red arrows) northward near the surface and cold deep waters (blue arrows) southward. Image credit: NASA/JPL Melting Greenland ice sheet may affect global ocean circulation, future climateUniversity of South Florida and international scientists find influx of freshwater could disrupt the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an important component of global...

Last year, 42 North American drillers filed for bankruptcy, according to law firm Haynes and Boone. It's only likely to get worse this year. Experts say there are a lot of parallels between today's crisis and the last oil crash in 1986. Back then, 27% of exploration and production companies went bust. Defaults are skyrocketing again. In December, exploration and production company defaults topped 11%, up from just 0.5% the previous year, according to Fitch Ratings. That's a 2,000%-plus jump. It's just the beginning, says John La Forge, head of real assets strategy at Wells Fargo. If history repeats, people...

**SNIP** 1. Biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted in the 1970s that: "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make," and that "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." 2. In January 1970, Life reported, "Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support... the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution... by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half..." 3. In...

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries are scooping up farmland in drought-afflicted regions of the U.S. Southwest, and that has some people in California and Arizona seeing red. Saudi Arabia grows alfalfa hay in both states for shipment back to its domestic dairy herds. In another real-life example of the world's interconnected economy, the Saudis increasingly look to produce animal feed overseas in order to save water in their own territory, most of which is desert. Privately held Fondomonte California on Sunday announced that it bought 1,790 acres of farmland in Blythe, California -- an agricultural town along the...

A brutal new year selloff in oil markets deepened on Monday, with prices plunging more than 6 percent to new 12-year lows as further ructions in the Chinese stock market threatened to knock crude into the $20s. On Monday, China's blue-chip stocks fell by another 5 percent and overnight interest rates for the yuan outside of China soared to nearly 40 percent, their highest since the launch of the offshore market. Morgan Stanley warned that a further devaluation of the yuan could send oil prices spiraling lower still, extending the year's nearly 15 percent slide. While China's ructions are spooking...

The “fair and equitable” piece is where the Obama administration is most vulnerable, said David Gantz, a trade law professor at the University of Arizona College of Law. “The issue becomes, if there is a very detailed procedure for approval or disapproval of pipelines, whether the U.S. followed those procedures or whether it went beyond the criteria or procedures,” Gantz said. “I would say the U.S. is pretty vulnerable on that one issue,” he said, “in part because the White House staff and others essentially said, ‘we know we’re doing this politically and to make a statement,’ but the regulations...

OTTUMWA, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump escalated his criticism of GOP rival Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) here in Iowa Saturday, painting him as a political follower beholden to pro-oil special interests and the donor class. Trump’s strategy: to raise further questions about Cruz’s stance on ethanol— an important industry for voters in the Hawkeye State — in the final weeks before the Feb. 1 caucuses. Cruz has faced renewed scrutiny over his opposition to the 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires gasoline to be blended with amounts of corn ethanol and is set to expire in 2022. “As...

The ethanol mandate, known formally as the Renewable Fuel Standard or RFS, is an object lesson in misguided government policy surviving long after its original rationales have been destroyed. The national security rationale was that oil was scarce, but now we're the world's leading oil producer and have begun exporting crude. The environmental rationale was that ethanol would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but since a landmark study was published in Nature in 2008 we've known: "there's little doubt that ethanol is making global warming worse." Even the jobs rationale fails. Per the Congressional Budget Office: "roughly the same amount of...

It was broadly reported yesterday that Ted Cruz had "flipped" on the question of ethanol mandates. Pretty much immediately, Cruz's critics suggested a) that this shift in position must mean that he is worried about his position in Iowa, and b) that his "steadfast conservative" claim was being exposed as a charade. I was among those who took the claim that Cruz has shifted his position at face value. The problem with that? It's not quite true. Cruz has changed his mind on ethanol in the past. But he did so in 2014, in which year he moved from supporting...

With some hasty blogging--and exacerbated by an Iowan's mistaken assertion about the ethanol mandate, Ted Cruz's shrewd answering, and the ethanol lobby's odd response--I contributed to some confusion about Ted Cruz's views on the ethanol mandate. (For the sake of candor, my original [probably misleading] post is at the bottom of this article.) Sen. Ted Cruz in 2013 co-sponsored the "Renewable Fuel Standard Repeal Act," which would immediately repeal the ethanol mandate. In 2014, he introduced a broad energy bill that would wind down the mandate over five years, slashing the federally mandated volume of renewable fuels (including corn ethanol)...