Free Republic

The American withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to fight climate change came as the bunk about impeachment and collusion of the Trump campaign with the Kremlin dies down, and on a day when the United States moved to all-time stock market highs as measured by Dow-Jones, NASDAQ and S&P, and the Commerce Department posted stunning 3.8 per cent annual economic growth figures. snip Having been routed in the Cold War, and domestically in the West by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the international left retreated into the unsuspecting arms of the 1980s environmentalists: butterfly and bird-watchers, the Sierra Club, Ducks...

Former Vice President Al Gore said Sunday that President Trump ignored science and Mother Nature in pulling out of the Paris climate change accord, saying nightly news reports resemble “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations.” That helps explain the Trump administration’s clumsy explanation for the president’s decision to exit the agreement, said Mr. Gore, who is chairman of the Climate Realty Project and a leading advocate for reducing carbon emissions. “The administration comes off as tongue-tied and confused about the climate crisis because the truth is still inconvenient for the large carbon polluters and they don’t want to...

I’ve just watched the London liberal media’s heads exploding like ripe watermelons. It was great – a bit like that No Pressure video that the enviro-loons made a few years ago, only better because this time the victims weren’t blameless schoolchildren but grisly, puffed-up, righteously eco, Trump-and-Brexit-hating TV and newspaper Environment Correspondents, all of whom hate my guts. (They hate yours too, so don’t get smug.) The occasion was a press conference hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation for Myron Ebell, head of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Satan’s Emissary, as liberals prefer to think of...

George Orwell devised the word 'unperson' to describe someone who had so offended official thought, he or she was vaporised - not just liquidated but wiped from the record for eternity. That way the unperson couldn't set a bad example. All memory of the impertinence would be forgotten, Comrades! ... When a Politburo member called Nikolai Yezhov, People's Commissar for Water Transport, fell out of favour with Joseph Stalin in 1940, he was not just killed. A photograph of him beside Stalin in happier days was doctored to remove all trace of the unfortunate Yezhov. It was as though he...

An Inspector General of the Department of Energy report that picked over the bones of the Solyndra green energy fiasco placed most of the blame on Solyndra executives for losing more than $500 million in taxpayer money. But a close reading shows DOE made plenty of mistakes as well. The report authored by DOE Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman came just short of calling Solyndra’s highest officials liars, saying their actions during the loan process were “at best, reckless and irresponsible or, at worst, an orchestrated effort to knowingly and intentionally deceive and mislead the Department.” While the 13-page report...

President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered. As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, "key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials," the Washington Times reported yesterday. Collusion between the EPA and the green's isn't exactly breaking news. They've been doing it for years, but...

Pope Francis says that global warming is a fact and that a new global political authority is necessary in order to save humanity from utter disaster. The new encyclical that was scheduled to be released on Thursday has been leaked, and it is being reported that this new global political authority that Pope Francis envisions would be in charge of “the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions”. The funny thing is that this sounds very much in line with the new sustainable development agenda that is going to be launched at the United Nations in...

Oh, dear. They even have a name for them: Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed....

There was a time, before the baby-boom generation took over, when we took pride in the achievements of our builders, producers, and innovators. There was always great celebration when settler families got a phone, a tractor, a bitumen road, or electric power. An oil strike or a gold discovery made headlines, and people welcomed new businesses, new railways, and new inventions. Science and engineering were revered, and the wealth delivered by these human achievements enabled the builders and their children to live more rewarding lives, with more leisure, more time for culture and crusades, and greater interest in taking better...

Fresh off promises from CNN boss Jeff Zucker that the channel will pursue more stories on global warming — whether their audience likes it or not — CNN anchor Carol Costello presided over a segment with two religious figures agreeing that to deny climate change is to sin against God. But Costello did much more than just moderate the “debate,” railing against “deniers” and questioning whether they’re “reading the Bible.” In the eye-popping intro to the segment — which aired during CNN’s “Newsroom”, not an opinion program — Costello pulls no punches while savaging those who dare to question the...

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Greenpeace International says it is sending a ship out to protest the arrival of a tanker that is bringing the first oil produced at a new Russian offshore platform in the Arctic circle to Rotterdam. The environmental group said Monday it has sent the "Rainbow Warrior III" to meet the Russian-flagged Mikhail Ulyanov. Greenpeace spokesman Arin de Hoog could not immediately say Monday when the two vessels are expected to meet and what form the protest will take. In September, 28 of the group's activists and two freelance journalists were arrested and charged with piracy after a...

Solar installations have been taking off in many areas of the Midwest, but perhaps nowhere more so than in farm country. “It’s a huge buzz now throughout the agriculture industry,” said Todd Miller, sales director for CB Solar in Ankeny, Iowa. In Washington County, Iowa, for example, farmers with access to an unusual and lucrative combination of federal, state and utility incentives were anticipating payback periods of as little as two years, according to Ed Raber, director of the county’s economic development corporation. In Washington County, Iowa, for example, farmers with access to an unusual and lucrative combination of federal,...

I spent the evening comparing USHCN V1 and V2 graphs, and discovered a huge discrepancy between their V1 and V2 adjustments. This is their current US graph. Note that there is a discontinuity at 1998, which doesn’t look right. Globally, temperatures plummeted in 1999-2000, but they didn’t in the US graph. But when they switched to V2, they started adjusting older temperatures downwards, and left post-2000 temperatures more or less intact. This created a huge jump (greater than one degree) downwards for all years prior to 2000. By the time they are done corrupting the data, they have hidden the...

Far below the Appalachian Mountains, in a space barely big enough to stand up straight, Bobby Combs works a job his father and his grandfather worked. Coal-mining is the highest-paying job available to him in eastern Kentucky. As he skillfully maneuvers a massive machine and rips into a seam of coal, though, Combs wonders if the family tradition ends with him. “It’s not looking good,” he says, dirt smudging his face. Coal has come under the crosshairs of the Obama administration in the push to transition to renewable energy sources. Coal mines are burdened with a never-ending stream of federal...

If You Think Communism Is Bad For People, Check Out What It Did To The Environment (And it's not a coincidence or accident of history) When pressed by Twitter critics earlier this month over the horrendous human rights record of his chosen ideology, Jesse “#FULLCOMMUNISM” Myerson struck back with this tweet: 'Jesse A. Myerson @JAMyerson If I have to answer for Soviet gulags, these market/capital twits have to answer for climate collapse, the greatest genocide in history. 8:44 PM - 3 Jan 2014' In addition to being an advocate for an ideology directly responsible for tens of millions of non-war...

CLIMATE change is real and it is happening very fast. The climate of opinion, that is, regarding the rapidly imploding fantasies of the global warming alarmists. After a decade in which sane commentators have been angered and frustrated by the purblind adherence to the warmist superstition by followers of the Al Gore cult – prominent among them our own esteemed First Minister and President for Life Designate – the whole climate change scam has finally degenerated into a joke, provoking widespread derision. That has not deterred the climate Gnostics, sustained by their mystical insight into inner truths hidden from sceptics...

The fact that a state legislature would decree population density mandates to cities in the state is an intolerable tyranny. Naturally, the California legislature is doing it. But it has officially decided to worry about the environment of a fantasy world, not the real one.

Tom Steyer is Virginia’s $8 million man. The California billionaire spent nearly that much from his personal fortune to make an example of Republican Ken Cuccinelli for his arch-conservative views on the environment. The sum is more than three times the investment that’s been previously reported, and it nearly matched what the Republican Governors Association, the largest GOP outside spender, put into the Virginia governor’s race. It is more money, on a per-vote basis, than the famously prolific conservative donors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson spent in the 2012 presidential election. Steyer’s political committee, NextGen Climate Action, publicly entered the Virginia...

Greenpeace, the world’s biggest and most battle-hardened environmental campaigning organisation, is in a state of shock. Last week, Russian investigators said that they had found ‘narcotic substances’ on board Arctic Sunrise, the Greenpeace vessel they seized after its crew had used it in an attempt to storm an oil rig of the state-controlled firm Gazprom. They added that the drugs included poppy straw, an ingredient for opiates. You would think that Greenpeace might be proud to have been identified as scrupulously organic in its drug use; but its spokesman denounced the Russians’ claim as a ‘smear, pure and simple’. Of...

MOSCOW, October 9 (RAPSI) - Greenpeace activists on trial for maritime piracy in Russia soon may face new charges after drugs were found at the Arctic Sunrise ship, Investigative Committee's official spokesperson Vladimir Markin told journalists on Wednesday. Markin added that the investigators have secured an official court order to seize the ship. Earlier, 30 members of the crew were charged with maritime piracy. "With this new evidence that came to light during the investigation, the charges against the accused will be augmented accordingly. It is very clear to the investigation that a number of participants will be chraged with...