Free Republic

Credit to The Australian for printing both points of view. Published as an Op-Ed today.Carbon credits market is neither free nor worth anything by: Joanne NovaFrom: The Australian July 31, 2013 12:00AM THE paradox du jour: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream. A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At...

For the past several years, those seeking to strangle the world economy by denying it access to carbon have tried to gain support for their initiatives by inventing a concept called “the social cost of carbon.” According to this notion, the use of carbon imposes a cost on society through global warming, and therefore regulations to restrict the use of carbon create benefits that can be measured in dollar terms. Pursuant to this strategy, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 hired a crowd of consultants to generate estimates that would be useful for the cause. This they dutifully did, producing...

First, a grainy image of a hose on fire; next, a slow shot of verdant, rain-drenched woods. That’s how Josh Fox’s documentary film Gasland II opens, and it encapsulates his vision of the two sides of the fracking debate: those who seek to destroy nature, and those who defend it. What follows is more than two hours of disturbing footage of the dangers of fracking.As the title suggests, the film is a sequel, and Fox ominously, smugly narrates that “in sequels, the empire strikes back.” The empire, in this case, is the oil and gas industry. And in a way,...

Having grown up on a farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley, I have seen firsthand how environmental extremists smashed a flourishing agricultural region. Citing the need to protect a three-inch baitfish called the Delta smelt, green activists succeeded in getting farmers’ water supplies drastically cut. As some of the world’s most productive soil degenerated into a drought-stricken landscape, farmers — some of whose families had worked these lands for generations — packed up and left. The local economy sank, with unemployment in the Valley now doubling the national average. President Obama’s recent speech unveiling his “new national climate action plan”...

Africans can burn coal. Americans can’t. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from the Obama administration’s most recent forays into energy policy. On June 25, President Obama was at Georgetown University decrying “carbon pollution” and making it clear that he will prohibit any new coal-fired power plants from being built in the U.S. Five days later, while Obama was in Africa, the White House released a fact sheet on its “Power Africa” initiative that aims to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa by helping finance some 10,000 megawatts of new generation capacity in that region. During his Georgetown speech,...

It’s a bad week for poor people around the planet. First, and with great fanfare, our President unleashed his patented climate plan, affectionately known as Obama’s War on Coal™. He hasn’t said yet how much Obama’s War on Coal™ will cost, but we can be sure that it will not be cheap. And as in any war, it is guaranteed that the poor will suffer the most. Sadly, this was followed by even worse news. The World Bank has decided it wants to keep the developing world from having inexpensive electricity. They will not make any more loans for coal-fired...

So much for the denials. An administration that throughout its 2012 election campaign denied it was waging a War on Coal has now come out and publicly declared its intention to shut down coal-fired power plants – putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work and sending electricity prices skyrocketing. This is not what the American people voted for. Responding to a White House petition to end the War on Coal, the administration said: “The President has made clear that he understands that coal has played a critical role in our country’s energy portfolio for decades and will continue...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Taking climate change efforts into his own hands, President Barack Obama is proposing sweeping steps to limit heat-trapping pollution from coal-fired power plants and to boost renewable energy production on federal property. Obama, in a speech Tuesday at Georgetown University, was to announce he's issuing a presidential memorandum to launch the first-ever federal regulations on carbon dioxide emitted by existing power plants, moving to curb the gases blamed for global warming despite adamant opposition from Republicans and some energy producers.

Never underestimate the sneakiness when you’re dealing with The Most Transparent Administration, Evah‘s tortured internal conflict between pretending to heed the voices calling for pragmatic economic growth and appeasing the vociferous green interests nipping at their heels. The Obama administration just threw a major bone to said interests with a reevaluation that’s going to come in particularly handy in producing very official- and serious-sounding studies and reports, but it was carried out in a very quiet maneuver that I’m sure they’re hoping will pass by the public eye generally unnoticed. The Obama administration uses their “social cost of carbon” estimate...

IIn history studies of the Great Global Warming Scare, people will ask, is this the bargaining stage or the start of acceptance? Adapting to _ not just fighting _ climate change is taking the heat out of global warming talk Seth Borenstein for The Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise.The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It’s becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet’s wild weather. — Newsdaily On the five stages of  grief, this...

Learn more about Thorium reactors and the potential. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY (5 minute overview) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI (36 minutes...more "techie") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8 (about 1 hour....symposium like discussion)

As part of a routine test of a new refrigerant being used in the Mercedes-Benz B Class, engineers simulated a pinhole leak in a coolant line. When the refrigerant (now mixed with A/C compressor oil) sprayed on a hot engine, the results were dramatic. The vaporized mixture reportedly ignited on contact with the hot surface, creating what Reuters (via Yahoo News) described as a “ball of fire,” followed by a cloud of dangerous hydrogen fluoride gas. The corrosive gas then attacked the windshield, etching the glass and raising even more potential concerns about the safety of the new HFO-1234yf refrigerant....

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,...

A new paper that recently replaced the old paper that settled the science of global warming is now out - and not a moment too soon, either. Because the new paper essentially says: “Um, guys? Never mind.” :/). Ok, they don't really say that, but actually they really do.  “Sea level rise is one of the big issues of global warming. It could potentially swamp coastal cities or make them far more vulnerable to storms, such as Hurricane Katrina,” says Science World Report, apparently a wholly owned division of Wayne’s World Publishing, operating under the motto “It Certainly Does Suck.”...

Plenty has been written about concerns over elevated levels of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, but a Kansas State University researcher has found an upside to the higher CO2 levels. And it's been particularly relevant in light of drought that overspread the area in recent months.

President Obama’s Energy secretary nominee regards a carbon tax as one of the simplest ways to move the energy industry towards clean technologies, though he notes that government would have to come up with a plan to mitigate the burden this tax places on poor people, who would pay the most. “Ultimately, it has to be cheaper to capture and store it than to release it and pay a price,” MIT professor and Energy nominee Ernest Moniz told the Switch Energy Project in an interview last year. “If we start really squeezing down on carbon dioxide over the next few...

**SNIP** Mr. Waxman, joined by Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii, both Democrats, distributed a relatively simple proposal to impose a fee on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories, refineries and other major sources. The idea of a carbon tax, long favored by many economists as the most straightforward way of deterring pollution, has been kicking around the Capitol for years, but has never gained a broad following. The plan contains three potential per-ton prices for carbon pollution, $15, $25 or $30, and a range of annual...

Hyperia | Credit WikimediaDespite the fuss about CO2 emissions, on a global scale no one is quite sure where a lot of it ends up. Those mystery “sinks” draw in a large proportion of CO2. Here’s a big sink that just got twice as big.Science Daily  Mar. 17, 2013 — Models of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans need to be revised, according to new work by UC Irvine and other scientists published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Trillions of plankton near the surface of warm waters are far more carbon-rich than has long been thought, they found. Global...

When you buy a car, there are various ratings outfits in the business of calculating the true cost of owning that particular vehicle, inc. insurance, depreciation, maintenance, cost of repairs, etc. Such a comprehensive model is surely more realistic than just looking at the monthly payment or sticker price, and the customer knows if they're actually making a cost-effective, bottom-line decision. But even if you buy-into the now imploding globaloney scam, wouldn't it make sense to apply similar logic to calculate the entire environmental impact of electric vs. internal combustion cars over the full service life... esp since the actual...

Tune in Tuesday night to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. As the president speaks, he will be alert to the chorus of Hollywood stars, environmental activists, editorial writers and industry leaders who are pushing for him to make the biggest climate-change decision he can possibly make: Impose a carbon tax.