Free Republic

With his estimated wealth exceeding $200 million, Albert Arnold Gore has come a long way from the time he began a career in government politics. But it hasn’t all been a green path. He can thank some earlier events for paving over muddy ground, a time when his father, Al Gore Sr. met Occidental Petroleum’s CEO Armand Hammer at a cattle auction in the 1940s. When zinc was discovered on some of Gore’s land,

Barely a day after the Washington State Senate voted to fund a study that would explore ways to enforce tougher greenhouse gas emission standards, a respected academic spent nearly two hours presenting scientific evidence suggesting the assumptions on which that legislation was based were wrong. Dr. Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University, on Tuesday told the Senate’s Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee he was relying on an old maxim in science: “In God we trust; everyone else bring data.” “Well, I’m bringing data,” he said. “You’ll hear very few opinions from me. When I’m finished,...

Big Brother: The government we entrust our medical records to under ObamaCare has its EPA sharing confidential data on farmers with green groups and the IRS reading your email. Smile and wave at the EPA drone. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, violating their privacy rights and acting in collusion with private groups with private political agendas. In Nixonian fashion, the EPA has provided these environmental groups with the dossiers of farmers it has gathered to help them create an enemies list of potential polluters....

In his 2013 State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama called on Congress to pursue a solution to climate change, or else he would do it on his own. The same week, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D–CA) and committee member Bernie Sanders (I–VT) introduced the first major bill that would institute a carbon tax, the Climate Protection Act of 2013 (Boxer–Sanders). One glaring problem with the bill is that it would not preempt regulation of greenhouse gases by federal agencies. Even worse, the bill effectively turns the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator into a...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Last week on this program a young man of 13 years old called. A young boy called from Wilmington, Indiana. He was a very, very bright, articulate guy who called here to tell me that he finally had proven to himself that global warming was a hoax. He'd gone to his local library. He'd researched it and he had found it, and he told me why he thought the left and liberals don't recognize it as a hoax is because they don't want to. So I offered the young man an iPad. I said, "Somebody like you...

Associate Director of College Communications, Unity College claims in a press release this month: “Every college or university that claims to be holding a ‘green’ commencement needs to have divested from investments in fossil fuels, or admit that they cannot truly make that claim.” “As the first college in the United States to adopt sustainability science as its central focus, Unity College ascended to the leading-edge of higher education, training the next generation of environmental leaders to pursue trans-disciplinary solutions to the earth’s most pressing problems including global climate change.” “With a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees in...

A California billionaire is pledging to spend as much of his fortune as necessary to make climate change “the defining issue of our generation.” Tom Steyer, who made his riches as a hedge fund manager, told The Hill on Tuesday that he wants to make climate change a campaign issue for years to come and Democratic support for environmental protections as widespread as support for gay marriage and immigration reform. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people. We want a smashing victory,” Steyer said of candidates he judges to be on the...

The Economist has been fairly consistent in its stand that carbon dioxide emissions from man-made sources are the chief cause of global warming. But in an editorial this week, it sounds less certain. Global warming predictions haven’t panned out as predicted in the past decade, but the why is a bit fuzzy, the magazine admits. Greenhouse gas emissions have soared during the past 15 years, the magazine notes, with 100 billion tons of carbon having been added to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. Still, both air and ground temperatures during that time have remained virtually unchanged. In fact, the...

NYT's Krugman: Skeptics 'punished in the afterlife' --- McKibben: 'White America' has failed

This DOE project explores a variety of strategies designed to curb America’s greenhouse gas emissions up to 80 percent by about 2050. Arguably the most controversial of those reports covers the “effects of the built environment on transportation.” To put it plainly, the “built environment” report lays out strategies the federal government can use to force development away from suburbs and into cities, supposedly for the sake of reducing carbon dioxide emissions given off by all those suburban commuters. The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of...

The manipulation behind Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link by Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 1, 2013 A NY Times science story (by Justin Gillis, March 1) illustrates some interesting points about science journalism - esp. in the contentious and politically charged issue of climate change. A scientific journal, in this case the renowned Science magazine, wants to gain publicity for its journal among the non-scientific readers of the NY Times. So it sends out a press release about a scientific paper it plans to publish. Of course, it has been 'peer-reviewed' to the satisfaction of...

Environmental activists make money telling us all how terrible things are; climate scientists appreciate the help promoting their data, we do have a bit of a train wreck coming at us emissions-wise, but climate scientists also know there is a risk of backlash if there are too many hyperbolic claims, and that 'green fatigue' will set in if every change in temperature and every storm is attributed to global warming. That's why even the IPCC, no wallflower when it comes to using media talking points, wishes media would not attribute local weather to climate change(PDF). And then there is the...

A large global warming protest with a very Canadian connection is scheduled for Sunday February 17th at the White House. The protest, organized by the Sierra Club and 350.org, is being dubbed as the biggest climate rally in U.S. history and is meant to encourage President Obama to veto the construction of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from northern Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. In a telephone interview with Yahoo! Canada News, 350.org's Daniel Kessler said that he is expecting tens of thousands of people including "several groups" from Canada. Obama is expected to...

A recent article in the Washington Post exposes once again what climate change skeptics already know: the green movement is designed to lower living standards, not just make living more carbon efficient. “One of President Obama’s goals in his State of the Union address was to make American homes twice as energy-efficient by 2030,” writes Brad Plumer for the Washington Post today. “But would that actually curtail overall energy use and reduce U.S. carbon emissions? That’s a trickier question.” “A second way to look at this is that as Americans get richer, we’re inevitably going to want bigger homes and...

President Obama has put salvation from dreaded climate catastrophes on his action agenda hot list. During his inaugural address he said: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” He went on to shame anyone who disagrees with this assessment, saying, “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and powerful storms.”

Hybrid car pioneer and “father of the Prius” Takeshi Uchiyamada says the billions poured into developing battery electric vehicles have ultimately been in vain. "Because of its shortcomings--driving range, cost and recharging time--the electric vehicle is not a viable replacement for most conventional cars," said Uchiyamada. "We need something entirely new." Uchiyamada’s comments come as the U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday that the government is backing off President Barack Obama’s promise to put one million electric cars on American roads by 2015. As Breitbart News reported last September, there are just 30,000 electric cars on American roads.

As he begins his second term, President Obama is barreling toward what one Bay Area activist predicts could be "all out warfare" with environmentalists who want him to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline, the transcontinental conduit for tar sands fuel from Canada that many scientists say could expedite climate change. Obama's political dilemma lies in the pipeline's potential upside: The State Department projects that it could deliver 6,000 temporary jobs to the U.S., where 12.2 million people are unemployed. Bay Area liberals leading the Keystone opposition say Obama has only one choice. "If he doesn't reject it," said Piedmont attorney...

Having heard it straight from President Obama last Monday, the “devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms” looming in our immediate future are all imminent catastrophes fueled by rapid climate change about which we simply must do something right away — but this is exactly the type of alarmist rhetoric that ensures we pursue the types of ineffective, top-down, big-government, expensive, and internationalist solutions that will actually have very little net effectiveness in sincerely addressing the issue.One of environmentalists’ favorite past-times includes whipping up a certain amount of global-warming frenzy as an excuse to implement...

Friday, October 5, 2012 US Temperatures Have Been Falsely Adjusted According to the Level of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Steven Goddard in recent months has been presenting evidence on his real-science site of fraudulent manipulation, by NASA and other renowned federal scientific institutions, of the temperature data used by climate scientists to promulgate global warming hysteria. Goddard has presented the following graph, showing that adjustments made to the US temperature records have systematically lowered past temperatures and raised more recent ones, to give a false indication of warming over the past century and more: The indicated adjustments looked familiar...

“Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk,” Jim Lakely writes ... The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. ... Al Gore has just declared Mission Accomplished for environmentalism? He’s got his $100 payout, and the rest of the world is left wondering why we should care about a religion when its chief practitioner has just signed his non-aggression pact with Big Oil. At...

A new video game featuring a black alien female superhero delivered to Earth to fight global warming is about to hit the market thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Obama administration. The National Endowment for the Arts is funding the Spelman College of Atlanta, Ga.'s multi-episode game called "HERadventure." In the grant announcement made last year, the NEA said the story "focuses on a young female superhero sent to Earth to save her own planet from devastation because of climate changes caused by social issues impacting women and girls." The game is set to debut on March 8 on...

Georgia Power asked state regulators for permission to shut down 15 power plants yesterday, claiming new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) make the plants too expensive to run. The 15 coal-, oil- and natural gas-fired power plants currently produce 2,061 megawatts (MW) for Georgia energy consumers. Georgia Power plans to close 11 of the plants on the exact day the EPA’s new mercury regulations are set to take effect, April 16, 2015. Georgia Power will seek waivers from the EPA to keep four of the other plants open for a single year, and then shut those down too...

From the journal Earth System Dynamics billed as “An Interactive Open Access Journal of the European Geosciences Union” comes this paper which suggests that the posited AGW forcing effects simply isn’t statistically significant in the observations, but other natural forcings are. “…We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we...

The residents of California are about to become victims of what Weather Channel founder John Coleman has accurately called "the greatest scam in history". They will be paying higher energy bills to help carbon traders get richer. In the 1990's the corrupt Enron company began paying scientists and purported environmental groups to support the outright lie that slight increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide could increase atmospheric temperatures. Enron also supported politicians who were willing to go along with this scheme. Enron's goal was to get governments to establish a system for trading what the company called "carbon credits". Companies producing...

Legislate in haste ... repent at leisure. In their haste to rid Americans of the unconscionable plague of perfectly safe if somewhat inefficient incandescent lighting, politicians in Washington have forced us to adopt more expensive technology in its place. Compact flourescent lighting (CFLs) are already known to be a considerable disposal risk, thanks to the mercury used in them. A new study reported earlier this week by Miami's CBS affiliate warns of an operational risk as well ... ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancers and even acute burns (via Katie Pavlich): Every time you turn on the lights, you...

Secretary of State nominee John Kerry, with 20 years of concern about climate change, is expected to push the issue to center stage as a slow-motion crisis in need of a global solution. When he sought to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts made a point of challenging the Bush administration's backtracking on the issue and rejection of climate science. In contrast, he told the nation, he “believes in science.”

The rocketing costs of gasoline and the escalating price of corn are the result of U.S. government mandates requiring the inclusion of ethanol in the gasoline all Americans must use. The time has long since passed to eliminate ethanol from this primary fuel. A recent report by ActionAid USA, “Fueling the Food Crisis: The Cost to Developing Countries of U.S. Corn Ethanol Expansion” is based on work by researchers at Tufts University. ActionAid USA is an anti-poverty group. The study found that the corn-importing countries of Central America and North Africa are at the highest risk from ethanol expansion—the requirement...

In Thursday night’s Vice Presidential debate, the Administration’s green agenda was, once again, part of the verbal sparring. The exchange ended with Congressman Ryan’s unanswered question: “Where are the 5 million green jobs…?” Moderator Martha Raddatz cut him off mid-question, steering the conversation elsewhere: “I want to move on here to Medicare and entitlements. I think we've gone over this quite enough.” Ryan didn’t finish his question. Vice President Biden wasn’t pressed into an uncomfortable answer that would have wiped the smile off his face. Had Ryan not been interrupted and been allowed to finished the question, he likely would...

Federal officials on Friday approved a plan that sets aside 445 square miles of public land for thedevelopment of large-scale solar power plants, cementing a new government approach to renewable energy development in the West after years of delays and false starts. At a news conference in Las Vegas, Interior Secretary Ken Salazarcalled the new plan a "roadmap ... that will lead to faster, smarter utility-scale solar development on public lands." The plan replaces the department's previous first-come, first-served system of approving solar projects, which let developers choose where they wanted to build utility-scale solar sites and allowed for land...

Does Obama have radical “green” roots? Bret Baier travels across America, revealing rogue regulators, tracing the truth about the president’s environmental agenda and exposing programs that could devastate our economy! Check out a sneak peek of the special below, and tune in on Sunday at 9p ET to watch the full ‘Fox News Reporting: Behind Obama’s Green Agenda’ on Fox News.

Following up on his 2008 promise that “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal,� President Obama has promised to do something about droughts, which are caused — in his opinion — by the dreaded global warming.Obama gets a lot of his climate information from NASA’s Jim Hansen, an astrophysicist who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. A federal employee, Hansen endorsed John Kerry for president in hotly contested Iowa ten days before the 2004 election. This year, he has been all over the media blaming the...

Efforts to advance climate-change education in schools and communities are getting a boost from a set of six grants awarded this week by the National Science Foundation, totaling nearly $19 million. The grants will support a number of efforts, including a joint project in Maryland and Delaware to help schools deliver effective and regionally relevant instruction in grades 8-12, and pay for work led by the New England Aquarium to enhance climate-change education in zoos, aquariums, and other settings. The four other NSF grants include: -- $5.7 million to Columbia University for a project to help the public understand climate...

In this episode of the Conscience of Kansas radio program I talk about an article by Brian Sussman, author of the book "Climate Gate" about the Big Green environmental push and government mandates. Specifically, we talk about CFL's and a new study that says that CFL's raise the risk of skin cancer.

Al Armendariz's big mouth cost him his job as a regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now that he's working for the Sierra Club, Armendariz appears even more opinionated about the industry he once regulated.In his first comments since resigning from EPA in April, Armendariz unloaded on the coal industry, called President Obama the most environmental president ever, and attacked the state of Texas for fighting the EPA in court. He also addressed the controversy surrounding his comments comparing the EPA's philosophy to the brutal tactics used by the ancient Roman army to intimidate its adversaries.Armendariz's most pointed comments...

Aug 1 (Reuters Point Carbon) - In an effort to dissuade companies in key industries facing new carbon costs from leaving the state, California is considering giving them millions of dollars worth of additional free greenhouse gas allowances, state's air regulator said on Monday. California's cap-and-trade program seeks to emulate tactics used in the European Union and Australia to address emission "leakage" - a term describing the exodus of employers from a state or country in order to sidestep environmental costs. The California Air Resources Board (ARB), the regulator of the forthcoming program, held a workshop in Sacramento on Monday...

grade school-aged children are increasingly appearing as plaintiffs in lawsuits involving global warming. In one Oregon case, an 11 year old filed a lawsuit against the State of Oregon and Gov. John Kitzhaber claiming “failure to protect the public trust and to protect the state’s natural resources from the impacts of climate change.” But before you cheer on the legal chutzpah of these youngsters, note that there are various nonprofit organizations who are largely behind these cases. In fact, these organizations have supported similar cases in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Mary Christina Wood, a professor at the...

The Arabunna people live in the area around Lake Eyre in Southern Australia. It is a hot, hostile desert region, which is no surprise, because … well … it’s in Australia. ------------------------ (Lake Eyre region in South Australia.) ------------------------ A new report from the University of Everybody-Panic is a study of the horrendous future faced by these poor folks: "The first stage of University of Adelaide research released today shows that South Australia’s Arabunna country, which includes Lake Eyre in the far north, is likely to get both drier and hotter in decades to come. “'Temperatures could increase up to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday upheld the first-ever U.S. proposed rules governing heat-trapping greenhouse gases, clearing a path for sweeping regulations affecting vehicles, coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities. Handing a setback to industry and a victory to the Obama administration, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that carbon dioxide is a public danger and the decision to set limits for emissions from cars and light trucks were "neither arbitrary nor capricious." The ruling, which addresses four separate lawsuits, upholds the underpinnings of the...

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change. The implications were extraordinary. Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist whose Gaia theory — that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory.

Oregon State University chemistry professor Nicholas Drapela was fired without warning three weeks ago and has still been given no reason for the university’s decision to “not renew his contract.” Drapela, an outspoken critic of man-made climate change, worked at the university for 10 years. In the early years of his career, he published a number of textbooks, received a promotion to senior instructor and, in 2004, received a Loyd F. Carter award for outstanding and inspirational teacher. In 2007, Drapela began giving talks on his own climate change skepticism. He often and openly questioned the science behind man-made global...

VIDEO Interview 4:47 minutes NLPC Associate Fellow Paul Chesser was interviewed on Fox Business Network's Willis Report on Thursday. Here's a transcript: Gerri Willis : Joining me now, Paul Chesser, Associate Fellow at the National Legal and Policy Center. Hey Paul, welcome back to the show, always great to have you here. Paul Chesser : Great to be here. Gerri Willis : Let me tell you, this is crazy, is it not? I want to just show folks with some of these companies that got loans from the Department of Energy - the jobs that were promised but never delivered....

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner attended last week's climate conference at The Heartland Institute in Chicago and made it clear: The alarmists will not be setting policy in the US if he has anything to say about it. Watch the video here: http://climateconferences.heartland.org/jim-sensenbrenner-iccc7/

The theme of the 7th International Conference on Climate Change was “Real Science, Real Choices.” We featured approximately 50 scientists and policy experts speaking at plenary sessions and panel discussions exploring what real climate science is telling us about the causes and consequences of climate change, and the real consequences of choices being made based on the current perceptions of the state of climate science.

Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn’t been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago.And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a...

More than 150 people crowded into a room in the City Hall Annex Monday night to weigh in on Bridgeport Harbor Station's request to renew its five-year operating permit, which expired earlier this year. Environmentalists have been trying for years to shut down the coal operations at the station, which is owned by the Newark-based Public Service Electric & Gas. This may be their best chance, said John Calandrelli, program director for the Sierra Club's local chapter. "This is the first, big, major step in what we believe will be, hopefully, a short fight to convince them to not only...

Unable to reach a deal with its lenders, upstart wireless carrier LightSquared will file for bankruptcy Monday, according to two sources with knowledge of the company's plans. The move has been widely expected, since the company's options for appeasing its creditors were running out. LightSquare's lenders claim that it has been in default on its debt since its $9 billion partnership with Sprint Nextel

In obscure, blue-collar towns across Appalachia -- places that most Americans have never seen -- generations of coal miners have toiled away at back-breaking labor to power American homes and industry. Now, as many as 200,000 of them who dig, process, transport and burn America's most abundant fuel are threatened by EPA's latest coal rule. It imposes a standard for emissions that is all but impossible for many plants to meet. It requires coal-fired plants to release no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. The only means for many older plants to attain that standard is...

As many readers are probably aware, there has been an important new posting at Climate Audit about the Yamal affair. This posting is an attempt to set out the whole story of Yamal. It reworks an article I did in 2009 and incorporates new developments since that time. I hope readers find it useful. I have also prepared a Kindle version of the post, for which there is a small charge - click here:Please also consider hitting the tip jar.The story of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known....

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate. [AIEEE! - Ed.] Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source,...

Deep-pocketed environmental groups are collecting millions of dollars from the federal agencies they regularly sue under a little-known federal law, and the government is not even keeping track of the payouts, according to two new studies. Under the Equal Access to Justice Act, or EAJA — which was signed into law by President Carter in 1980 to help the little guy stand up to federal agencies — litigants with modest means who successfully show government agencies wronged them can get their legal fees back from the taxpayer. But the act also covers 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including environmental groups that aggressively sue...