Free Republic

The New York Times has an article worth reading discussing EPA’s efforts to influence comments submitted to them by the public regarding the agency’s and Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal to redefine “Waters of the United States (WOTUS).” Notably, Gina McCarthy, administrator of EPA, went before a Senate committee earlier this year touting the fact that almost 90 percent of all comments submitted expressed support for the rule as proposed. It turns out that many of these comments were submitted as a result of an unprecedented outreach initiative, which is being led by a former Obama campaign staffer. Thunderclap (a...

Environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, a vocal opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline – and any Democrats who support it – hosted a $2,700-per-person fundraiser for Hillary Clinton at his San Francisco home, riling some green activists, Politico reports. Though Clinton has avoided public comment while the Obama administration weighs the fate of the pipeline, as secretary of state, she presided over studies that said the pipeline would pose few environmental risks – and even said in 2010 the administration was "inclined" to support it. "I am not surprised that he would want to get on-board the Clinton train, but I'm...

California Gov. Jerry Brown had some sharp words for environmentalist critics of his proposed Sacramento River water tunnels. On Wednesday, Brown told critics of his $15 billion plan to “shut up, because you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” according to the AP. Brown’s office told Sacramento Bee blog Capitol Alert that the governor’s remarks were made in “jest.” But the sharp rebuke highlights the tension surrounding the pricey project, which would send water from the northern part of the state south by using a pair of underground water tunnels to divert water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River...

I recently discussed what it would take to prove that global warming is actually occurring, that it is caused by humans, and that it will be catastrophic. But that’s not the full picture. To understand why so many of us are so skeptical about global warming, you have to understand the environmentalists’ larger track record: a long series of failed predictions and bogus prognostications of doom. It has been 45 years now since the first Earth Day. You would think that in this time frame, given the urgency with which we were told we had to confront the supposed...

The terms racism, white supremacy, and crimes against humanity are bandied about so often that they have become almost meaningless. But they are absolutely appropriate in an arena where they are too rarely applied: radical environmentalism’s campaigns that perpetuate poverty, disease and death, by denying Earth’s most impoverished and powerless people access to modern life-saving technologies. Imagine activist groups preventing you from having your child vaccinated against polio or hepatitis, or from starting her on chemotherapy for leukemia – because they are “concerned” about “possible side-effects” and the “ethics” of permitting such “risky” procedures. Absurd! you say. Outrageous! Of course...

Want to know why the president and his team are stampeding to talk about global warming despite increasing public disinterest in the topic, a bitterly cold and snowy winter and deepening skepticism about the costs of clamping down on industry as the economy again falters? It turns out that money talks. From the NYT: “A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers. The donor, Tom Steyer, a...

The Ebola crisis in the United States has become an anchor threatening to sink the Obama presidency. Already under fire from critics who saw the federal response to the outbreak as disorganized and timid, things went from bad to worse on Wednesday when it was revealed a second nurse had contracted the disease while treating a Liberian man at a Dallas-area hospital. More alarmingly, the diagnosis was made just hours after the nurse, 29-year-old Amber Vinson, had flown from Cleveland to Dallas on a commercial airliner, despite reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that she had a...

Environmentally-driven encroachment: Regulating farming, compliance with environmentalist demands, control and tracking of the food supply, water supply, land use The Agricultural Resource Management Plan in Virginia, Environmentally-driven encroachment: Regulating farming, compliance with environmentalist demands, control and tracking of the food supply, water supply, land use My late father-in-law was a successful farmer and cooperative extension agent with 40 year’s experience who advised farmers in his county on crop management, land and water use, fertilizers, soil analysis, pests, and plant and animal disease. He valued the land he owned and knew that it was very important to properly care for the...

Former “Baywatch” beauty Pamela Anderson said she was gang-raped by seven boys in high school — including her then-boyfriend — and was also subjected to sexual molestation by a babysitter between the ages of 6 and 10. Ms. Anderson, speaking during the launch of her Pamela Anderson Foundation, said she was raped, too, at the age of 12 by a 25-year-old, NBC News reported. “My first boyfriend in grade nine decided it would be funny to gang-rape me, with six of his friends,” she said, NBC reported, citing a transcript of her speech that was posted on her foundation’s website....

The bloodcurdling National Climate Assessment is here and it portends catastrophe; floods, clouds and other assorted weather events are imminent! … but , says the report, “there is still time to act to limit the amount of climate change and the extent of damaging impacts.” Have you noticed that we’re always at the cusp of a cataclysm, yet the deadline to act always moves to a politically convenient not-too-distant future? I guess when the time to act runs out – it will at some point, right? — we can begin thinking about defunding all these panels and reinvesting in...

Phillips 66, formerly a division of energy giant ConocoPhillips, recently filed a project proposal to bring mile-long crude oil trains from Canada and North Dakota to its refinery in California’s San Luis Obispo County.  If approved, the project would mean up to 250 trains a year will each haul 2 million gallons of crude oil into California and travel on the same tracks used for Amtrak commuter railtrains in the San Francisco Bay Area. With oil fracking increasing America’s domestic production by 60% in the last three years, political delays in building the Keystone XL Pipeline resulted in California having the only...

Right on cue, as it becomes obvious that Europe needs to be less dependent on Russian gas and oil, environmental groups here in the US have begun stepping up presure on President Obama to reject building the infrastructure necessary to help realize that strategic need. A coalition of environmental groups is calling on the administration to reject permits that would build Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) export terminals. Environmental groups called on President Obama Tuesday to reject pending applications to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, citing the negative impacts from natural gas throughout its life cycle.The pressure from green...

PARIS -- An environmentalist lies down alongside his fellow organic cucumber aficionados to block the construction of an oil pipeline and wakes up a member of a proxy army serving the billionaires who are fighting against America's economic and national security interests to line their own pockets. How did that happen? This phenomenon is on display in the battle against the Keystone XL pipeline project, the cornerstone of Canada-U.S. energy independence, set to run from Alberta, Canada, into Nebraska, then ultimately to the Gulf Coast of Texas where it can be exported. None of this pleases environmental activists, whose actions...

MOSCOW, November 7 (RAPSI) – Some participants of the Greenpeace raid on a Gazprom drilling platform, dubbed the “Arctic 30”, may face new charges in the ongoing trial, the Investigative Committee’s official spokesman Vladimir Markin said on Thursday. “Some of the raiders, in addition to the hooliganism charges, will be charged with resisting law enforcement officials," Markin said in an online interview to Gazeta.ru. The Arctic Sunrise ship was seized by Russian border guards on September 19 in international waters, within Russia's exclusive economic zone, a day after two Greenpeace activists scaled the Prirazlomnaya drilling rig in the Pechora Sea,...

The government mandated blend of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline is a full-fledged disaster and neither Congress, nor the Environmental Protection Agency shows any indication of either repealing or abandoning it. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said, “A strong candidate for the most expensive policy blunder of recent years would have to be the mandate to blend corn ethanol and other biofuels into the nation’s gasoline supply. Last month even the Environmental Protection Agency essentially acknowledged that the program is increasingly unworkable and costly to consumers. The EPA just won’t do much to fix it.” Some future historian...

As much as electric car builders hail their vehicles as the future of transportation, one question they couldn't answer fully was just how well their vehicles would withstand a crash. Automakers have spent decades finessing their chassis; what happened when an engine-less vehicle went head-on into a barrier wasn't clear, and as the post crash-test smoldering of a Chevy Volt demonstrated, the batteries posed new challenges. Leave it to Tesla to provide the first hard evidence — with data from U.S. government tests showing the Model S sedan may be the most crash-proof passenger vehicle on the road today. Normally,...

Nineteen firefighters died fighting a forest fire in Arizona earlier this summer. Curiously, almost no one is talking about why it happened, only that it was a tragedy. Arizona Deputy State Forestry Director Jerry Payne has been the only one to speak out about the cause, and he backtracked immediately afterwards, apologizing for what he said. He claimed that the superintendent of the Granite Mountain Hotshots violated wildlife safety protocols while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30th, 2013, 60 miles north of Phoenix. According to Payne, the superintendent’s violations allegedly included not knowing the location of the fire,...

Something’s amiss at the Department of Interior. Eight government scientists were recently fired or reassigned after voicing concerns to their superiors about faulty environmental science used for policy decisions. Which begs the question, “Are some government agencies manipulating science to advance political agendas?” Fictional book authors operate in a convenient world, unconstrained by facts and experiences of the real world. The antithesis of works of fiction are scientific findings solely based on provable facts and experience. For agenda-driven environmental science, facts can sometime prove inconvenient. It’s far easier to advance an agenda with agreeable science, even if that means creating...

There is a "growing radicalized environmentalist faction" in Canada that is opposed to the country's energy sector policies, warns a newly declassified intelligence report. The RCMP criminal intelligence assessment, focusing on Canadian waters, cites potential dangers from environmental activists to offshore oil platforms and hazardous marine shipments, representing perhaps the starkest assessment of such threats by the Canadian security community to date. The report drew a sharp dismissal from Greenpeace — a prominent environmental group singled out in the document

"The communists have gotten themselves entrenched and have been working with tremendous dedication for their Marxist ideology. What we are about to face is truly a socialist abyss" - says Marielena Stuart is a candidate for the U.S. Senate in the state of Florida. Marielena Stuart is a candidate for the U.S. Senate in the state of Florida. She has an interesting message about the economy and what ails it. I had an opportunity to speak with Marielena at length about today’s economic crisis. “When [people] speak about the economy and jobs,” Stuart told me, “they don’t understand … that...