Free Republic

The economy and the environment hang in the maritime balance.A big, beautiful brouhaha went down between the Trump administration and a globalist initiative by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to impose a tax on the world’s shipping industry. Amid growing doubt about the scientific legitimacy of alarmist claims of human-caused climate change, the same international bodies that have led the charge against carbon dioxide for decades now seek to launch a complex new scheme that will impose huge costs on maritime shipping. Within these machinations were the usual seeds of inflation, control, and a vision for a one-world domination by...

Later this week the United Nations will hold a vote on a multibillion-dollar climate change tax targeted squarely at American industry. Without quick and decisive action by the White House, this U.N. tax on fossil fuels will become international law. This resolution before the International Maritime Organization will impose a carbon tax on cargo and cruise ships that carry $20 trillion of merchandise over international waters. Roughly 80% of the bulkage of world trade is transported by ship. The resolution is intended to advance the very “net zero” carbon emissions standard that has knee-capped European economies for years and that...

President Trump was not a happy camper when he stepped off a faulty escalator on his way to address the United Nations General Assembly recently. By the time he had finished speaking, many in that self-important assemblage were in an even worse mood. Trump was not the only world leader firing bullets into the UN’s climate and environmental policies that heretofore have been deemed sacrosanct but are now exposed as economy killers. While China is not subject to the UN’s meddling scrutiny, Europe and Africa (and the U.S.) are. While Trump devoted the bulk of his address to foreign policy...

Terradot, a carbon removal company, is using “enhanced rock weathering” to sequester carbon by spreading crushed volcanic rock over farmland.STATE OF SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Across vast stretches of farmland in southern Brazil, researchers at a carbon removal company are attempting to accelerate a natural process that normally unfolds over thousands or millions of years. The company, Terradot, is spreading tons of volcanic rock crushed into a fine dust over land where soybeans, sugar cane and other crops are grown. As rain percolates through the soil, chemical reactions pull carbon from the air and convert it into bicarbonate ions that...

Desperate to stay relevant, climate activists now claim they can trace individual heat waves to specific oil companies—just as Washington steps away from their agenda. In the wake of a federal government no longer serving as its obedient lapdog, the desperate lengths to which the climate cult goes to maintain its standing are increasingly imaginative. Case in point: CNN recently reported that “for the first time, scientists have quantified the causal links between worsening heat waves and global warming pollution from individual fossil fuel and cement companies, pushing the boundaries of extreme weather event research in multiple surprising ways.” In...

The European Union is poised to fully implement the world's first carbon border tax from Jan 1st...The EU is poised to implement the climate policy as part of an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote cleaner production processes outside the bloc.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical transgender activist has once again spotlighted the growing militancy inside the LGBTQ+ protest movement. What the mainstream media won’t tell you is that this rising wave of aggressive activism isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s being carefully studied, organized, and in some cases directly subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars. At the center of this network sits Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor who identifies as nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns. Chenoweth has built a career researching how youth and LGBTQ+ activists can be mobilized in protest movements, focusing less on morality or safety...

No Republican is safe from CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s wrath, not even former President and quintessential moderate George H.W. Bush. According to Colbert and actor Jeremy Strong on Thursday, “we risk losing essentially everything” to climate change, and it is Bush’s fault. Colbert teed up Strong, “You have a documentary about our burning world.” An appreciative Strong took the opportunity to promote the project, “Yeah, I executive produced an incredible documentary called The White House Effect that is coming out on Netflix at the end of next month. It’s coming out on Netflix on October 31,...

When the Obama Foundation snagged a sweetheart deal to build its beleaguered Obama Presidential Center on a Chicago public park, it pledged to create a $470 million reserve fund to spare taxpayers should the project ever go belly up. But new tax filings show the foundation has only deposited $1 million into the fund and has not added to it in years, with critics saying the empty promise could potentially leave Chicagoans on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars. Under its agreement with the city, the foundation was required to create the fund, known as an endowment, in...

A coalition of 10 campaign groups is calling on the Bank of England to do more to tackle the climate crisis, a decade after the then governor Mark Carney warned of the “tragedy of the horizon”. Carney, now prime minister of Canada, argued in a speech at Lloyd’s of London in September 2015 that the short time-horizons of politicians and policymakers made it difficult to tackle the climate emergency, despite the threat it posed to the global financial system. Carney said: “The combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the...

​​​​​​As expected, President Donald Trump’s rebuke of the climate change hysteria in front of the pious apparatchiks at the United Nations sent the media into a tailspin, with The New York Times leading the pack. Times climate reporters Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman snorted at Trump following his September 23 speech at the U.N. for alleging that the so-called “scientific consensus on global warming was created by ‘stupid people’” and having “lashed out at wind turbines, environmentalists and allies around the world while dismissing the dangers of climate change.” Sengupta and Friedman railed that Trump’s remarks were “an extraordinary diatribe...

The partially taxpayer-funded Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert is set to shut down in 2026 due to inefficiency in generating solar energy, according to the New York Post. The $2.2 billion plant, which features three 459-foot towers, was greenlit in 2010 and completed in 2014. According to the New York Post the closure stems from the site being “outpaced by solar photovoltaic technology” and proving both inefficient and costly. The shutter of the site comes more than a decade ahead of its original 2039 end date, according to the Associated Press. Speculation about Ivanpah’s early closure began...

Seen from the sky, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert resembles a futuristic dream. Viewed from the bottom line, however, Ivanpah is anything but. The solar power plant, which features three 459-foot towers and thousands of computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats, cost some $2.2 billion to build. Construction began in 2010 and was completed in 2014. Now, it’s set to close in 2026 after failing to efficiently generate solar energy. In 2011, the US Department of Energy under former President Barack Obama issued $1.6 billion in three federal loan guarantees for the project and the Secretary of...

New research reveals that climate fairness calculations have long favored wealthy, high-polluting nations by letting them delay urgent action while shifting responsibility onto vulnerable countries. Credit: Shutterstock Scientists have uncovered a hidden bias in climate pledges that rewards big polluters and penalizes vulnerable nations. Past calculations allowed high emitters to dodge responsibility and delay action. The new approach emphasizes historical responsibility, demanding steep cuts from wealthy countries and funding for poorer ones. Climate Goals Under Scrutiny Climate efforts are falling short of the Paris Agreement’s targets. To stay on track, each country is expected to contribute its ‘fair share’ of...

Every month, the electric bill arrives, and it’s larger than the month before. The region pays more for electricity than almost anyone else in America—higher than the national average and, outside of Alaska and Hawaii, higher than anywhere else in the country. This is not a coincidence. It is the inevitable result of politicians who pushed the risky and unreliable green agenda while forcing reliable power plants off the grid. The forced closure of coal, oil, and natural gas plants in the name of “climate progress” is why rates are climbing. In 2022, Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey...

Yesterday, along with two excellent colleagues, I submitted a Comment to EPA on the subject of the proposed and pending repeal of the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009. The Endangerment Finding (EF) is the absurd regulatory action by which the Obama-era EPA purported to find that the trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes a “danger” to human health and welfare as it accumulates in the atmosphere from the current level of about 0.04%, to perhaps 0.05% or maybe even (the horror!) 0.06% by some time later this century. The EF is then the basis for all the subsequent regulatory initiatives...

The Obama library — which isn't a library — has ballooned to a construction cost of more than $615 million, up from the original estimate of $300 million when the edifice was proposed in 2019. As 2024, the estimate had soared to $615 million, with the cost adding up to a whopping $615,674,047. But according to the Chicago Tribune, other estimates have already placed construction costs past the $700 million mark. Along with these massive cost overruns, the Barack Obama Presidential Center has had a very troubled history already, and it hasn’t even been completed yet. Originally, the Obama Center...

Early emissions estimate says Canada’s climate progress has stalledYears of progress on bringing Canada's carbon emissions down have stalled, and future progress looks increasingly fragile, according to an early 2024 emissions estimate from the Canadian Climate Institute (CCI). The leading climate policy think-tank, which publishes its estimates a few months before the government does, is saying for the first time that Canada will not meet its 2030 emissions target. Emissions from the oil and gas industry rose, especially the oilsands, offsetting any emissions reductions in other sectors like transportation and buildings, it said. The institute estimates 2024 emissions at 694.3...

Turns out, as much money as those Biden bozos blew through, prepaying for electric buses up front that were never and will never now be delivered?EPA head Lee Zeldin says the Biden administraiton sent $160 million dollars to a Canadian electric vehicles company.... which then pocketed the money, didn’t send the school buses promised and then declared bankruptcy!“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric… pic.twitter.com/hANBqhFPfm— Mike Netter (@nettermike) August 16, 2025...“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric vehicle bus manufacturer. The Biden administration sent all of the money — They gave all the money...

Editor’s note: We expected the leftist thought police at Google would declare that this editorial was “unreliable” and “harmful“— because it blasphemes the climate religion — and strip its AdSense ads from the page. And we were right! (See below.) Al Gore famously warned that sea level rise caused by man’s use of fossil fuels was going to kill us. Barack Obama implied that he had magic powers that would control surging sea levels. A fresh study shows just how dishonest this pair and the many others who did their best to misinform the public have been. Gore’s 2006 propaganda...