Free Republic

The Environmental Protection Agency's plan to repeal or weaken more than two dozen regulations could deliver a direct blow to California policies on air and water quality standards, electric vehicle initiatives and efforts to curb planet-harming greenhouse gas emissions. The changes announced this week are geared toward rolling back trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and hidden taxes on U.S. families, according to President Trump's new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who described the action on Wednesday as "the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history." "This isn't just a step backward — it's a wrecking ball aimed at decades of progress,"...

Sebago, Maine — You know you're in Maine when the pancakes come hot off a 100-year-old wood stove. But drill into Alan Greene's eighth-generation maple syrup operation in the town of Sebago, and you'll find it doesn't run as smoothly as it used to. "The last 10 years, we are definitely becoming warmer earlier," said Greene, who runs Greene Maple Farms. "We're not getting the cold and the gradual warm-up. We're getting warm-up, warm-up, warm-up, with deep freezes in between." It's been a cold winter in Maine so far this year. But across the country, over time, climate change has...

Climate change is already causing all sorts of problems on Earth, but soon it will be making a mess in orbit around the planet too, a new study finds. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated that as global warming caused by burning of coal, oil, gas continues, it may reduce the available space for satellites in low Earth orbit by anywhere from one-third to 82% by the end of the century, depending on how much carbon pollution is spewed. That’s because space will become more littered with debris as climate change lessens nature’s way of cleaning it up....

We are witnessing the most radical counter-revolution in the last 100 years, as the Trump administration attempts to slash government spending and the federal bureaucracies. It insists on reciprocal tariffs with friendly, neutral, and hostile nations alike. It will vastly expand energy production, end once and for all illegal immigration, fire the DEI industry and its overt racism, reboot public health policies, redirect the Pentagon, and, in general, reexamine almost every entrenched left-wing government institution and policy of the last 50 years.

As the Pentagon and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency set their sights on climate-related programs at the Defense Department, officials and experts are warning that slashing them could put US troops and military operations at risk, both in the near and long term. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior Pentagon officials have pointed to climate programs as a prime example of wasteful spending in the military. Hegseth told reporters in Germany in February that the Pentagon is “not in the business of climate change.” But some officials and experts argue such thinking is short-sighted. “I think they’re...

Carolyn Jones never thought it was controversial to herd her cattle to different parts of her 200-acre ranch in northeastern Mississippi to give the grass time to grow back between grazing. “This is really simple stuff we have been doing since the beginning of time,” said Jones, a lifelong farmer and the head of the nonprofit Mississippi Minority Farmers Alliance. About 40 percent of U.S. cattle ranchers already use this technique. It helps ranchers keep their grass healthier, but it also helps the environment. Last year, the Alliance won a USDA contract to educate other farmers about these long-standing conservation...

WARREN, Mich. (AP) — Bernie Sanders is standing alone on the back of a pickup truck shouting into a bullhorn. He’s facing several hundred ecstatic voters huddled outside a suburban Detroit high school — the group that did not fit inside the high school’s gym or two overflow rooms. The crowd screams in delight when he tells them that a combined total of 9,000 people had shown up for the rally. “What all of this tells me, is not just in Michigan or in Vermont, the people of this country will not allow us to move toward oligarchy. They will...

Funding for activities designed to provoke discussions about climate change and the planet has been awarded to museums in Herefordshire. Two awards of £3,000 and £2,000 will be spent on activities that engage people and encourage them to join in the conversation about the "huge effects" of climate change and people's "impact on our natural world", Damian Etheraads said. The museum and art gallery lead at Herefordshire Council said competition for the grants was extremely tough and staff were "thrilled". He said the funding would allow them to connect with people in new ways around the subject. The Herds is...

Justin Trudeau was brought to tears as he spoke of the ongoing feud with President Trump and the US-imposed tariffs that have rattled Canada in his final days as prime minister. Trudeau, 53, appeared at a press conference on Thursday in Ottawa, where he discussed childhood health care, but became visibly emotional while vowing that he’s always “Canadians first.” “On a personal level, I made sure that every single day in this office, I put Canadians first, and I have people’s backs, and that’s why I’m here to tell you all that we got you,” the outgoing PM said as...

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) -The United States will look for every opportunity to move ahead and enact a global minimum corporate tax agreement despite the opposition of a key Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, to raising corporate taxes, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said. Yellen told reporters on Saturday that finance officials from the Group of 20 major economies reached strong consensus about many issues, including the need to address a worsening food security crisis, despite differences over Russia's war in Ukraine that prevented the leaders from issuing a joint statement. Manchin, who holds the pivotal vote in the evenly divided...

The world's strongest ocean current could slow as melting Antarctic ice sheets flood it with fresh water, according to research published on Monday that warned of "severe" climate consequences. Scientists used one of Australia's most powerful supercomputers to model how melting ice sheets might change the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which plays a major role in global climate patterns. If fossil fuel emissions increased over the next 25 years – a so-called high emissions scenario – the current could slow by around 20 percent, the peer-reviewed research found. Melting ice sheets would "dump vast quantities of fresh water" into the current,...

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has privately urged the White House to strike down a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat climate change, according to three people briefed on the matter. The 2009 “endangerment finding” cleared the way for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act by concluding that the planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. Both the Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on emissions from cars and power plants. By repealing the endangerment finding, the Trump administration would be taking one of...

Freedom of expression is guaranteed in Article 5 of the Basic Law, the German constitution, which also makes clear that this freedom has limits in order to, for example, to protect young people, privacy or personal honor. The protection of personal honor plays a particularly important role in the German legal system, said lawyer Ralf Poscher, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg. “This originates from the time in history when notions of honor were even more important. They were then embraced by the middle classes too, and were incorporated into...

CHINGUETTI, Mauritania (AP) — For centuries, poets, scholars and theologians have flocked to Chinguetti, a trans-Saharan trading post home to more than a dozen libraries containing thousands of manuscripts. But it now stands on the brink of oblivion. Shifting sands have long covered the ancient city’s 8th-century core and are encroaching on neighborhoods at its current edge. Residents say the desert is their destiny. As the world’s climate gets hotter and drier, sandstorms are more frequently depositing inches and feet of dunes onto Chinguetti’s streets and in people’s homes, submerging some entirely. Tree-planting projects are trying to keep the invading...

Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world’s mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s. The study drew on an international effort that included 233 estimates of changes in glacier weight. The world’s glaciers have lost more than 7 trillion tons of ice since 2000, according to the study. “The thing that people should be aware of and perhaps worried about is that yes, the glaciers are indeed retreating and disappearing as we said they would. The rate of that loss seems to be...

When the coalition government emerged after the last German federal election in the fall of 2021, then-incoming Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) did not object to being called the "climate chancellor." That was no surprise: the climate crisis had been a top issue during the election campaign. Three and a half years later, campaign speeches barely mention climate protection. The dominant issues are how to curb irregular immigration and how to boost Germany's sluggish economy. Recently, the environmental group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was appalled when Chancellor Scholz expressed approval of importing oil and liquefied gas from the US...

Latinopoulou began, “Seriously, ladies and gentlemen?” “Did the right destroy industry? Did the right idolize Greta Thunberg? Did the right impose green energy at the expense of industry, destroying the EU’s competitiveness?” “Or was it the socialist governments that have been ruling the European Union for 50 years?” “France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and my homeland Greece have been devastated by groundless socialist policies.” “And today you, the destroyers of Europe, have the audacity to point fingers at us, saying that we conservatives are a threat to Europe?” “I laugh. I truly laugh.”

You can’t rebuild the same. We have to rebuild with science. We have to build with climate reality in mind," California Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN last week in an interview about rebuilding the burned-out Pacific Palisades. ... Whatever happened to Newsom's promise that he'd eliminate red tape and accelerate the rebuilding of one of L.A.'s nicest and most historic neighborhoods? The former homeowners of Pacific Palisades who were hoping to quickly rebuild from the ashes now understand to their very cores what Otter told Flounder in "Animal House": "You f***ed up, you trusted us." Anyone dumb enough to believe...

Israel on Wednesday made public for the first time some 200,000 pages of documents related to the fate of the 1950s missing Yemenite children, something Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was meant to “correct the historical injustice” of hiding the fate of the children. “It is difficult to believe that for almost 70 years, people did not know what happened to their children,” Netanyahu said. “And as difficult as the reality may be, we are not willing for this to continue.” Netanyahu's comments came at a ceremony in the Prime Minister's Office where a website was launched with the documentation...

The corrupt dictatorship gets a wake-up call.. In myth, post-apartheid South Africa became a land of unity, peace, and brotherly love. In reality, it became a corrupt racist dictatorship: a slow-motion Zimbabwe whose more gradual pace of self-destruction was only made possible by the vastly greater wealth that the corrupt Communist movement that took it over had to play with. In its greed for wealth, the ANC just starved dozens of miners to death and is plotting to seize the land of white farmers. The African National Congress presided over the destruction of South Africa’s economy and its transformation from...