Free Republic

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, held hearings yesterday to look into fraudulent letters which were sent on behalf of the coal industry to several members of congress. The original hearing was to take place on October 15, but was postponed until yesterday morning. The committee lined up the following witnesses: Rep. Tom Periello (D-Va.) Mr. Jack Bonner, Bonner & Associates Mr. Steve Miller, President and CEO, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity Ms. Lisa M. Maatz, Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, American Association of University Women Mr. Hilary...

Denying Global Warming Allie Winegar Duzett, October 29, 2009 CNN and ABC would have you believe the debate on global warming is over; Dr. Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees. However, while the mainstream media shouts from the rooftop that global warming is manmade, Dr. Lindzen takes the opposite point of view: the debate is over, he says, but anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmists lost the argument. The science is here and it shows that humans do not affect climate in any meaningful way. When Dr. Lindzen is asked if he is a global warming skeptic,...

On November 20th, Environmental Policy Expert Chris Horner will discuss climate change at University of California, Merced. The event will start at 6pm and be located at the school's Lakireddy Auditorium. ***THIS EVENT IS FREE AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND. PARKING IS FREE IN THE LAKE LOTS AFTER 6PM*** For more information visit http://tinyurl.com/ChrisHornerUCM or send an e-mail to collegerepublicans@ucmerced.edu. Here is Mr. Horner's Bio: Christopher C. Horner serves as a Senior Fellow at CEI. As an attorney in Washington, DC Horner has represented CEI as well as scientists and Members of the U.S. House and Senate on...

Public Discourse: Our energy secretary applauds and encourages companies to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its position on climate change. Should any Cabinet secretary, with the powers of government behind him, be threatening U.S. companies? Part of the climate-change mantra is that the debate is over and the science is settled. Just to make sure, environmental groups have sought to pressure businesses to go green or at least keep silent. Now it would appear the whole weight of the federal government is being thrown behind this campaign to coerce and silence real and potential opposition. On Thursday, Steven...

Govt-Funded Research Unit Destroyed Original Climate Data CEI Petitions EPA to Reopen Global Warming Rulemaking Washington, D.C., October 6, 2009―In the wake of a revelation by a key research institution that it destroyed its original climate data, the Competitive Enterprise Institute petitioned EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding. In mid-August the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature data set because of an alleged lack of storage space. The CRU data have been the basis for several of the major international studies that claim...

Well, the admissions just keep on coming. In the UK, lead canary for all things “climate change” — for example, polls show a majority of their public now see the agenda as just a new excuse for the state to extract more wealth from its citizens — we have a paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research saying the agenda demands “reducing the size of the economy through a ‘planned recession’”, in the words of the Daily Telegraph. Tyndall is an activist consortium of British academic institutions known for carrying the banner on the “climate” agenda. The Telegraph...

A libertarian non-profit organization in Washington today announced it was filing suit against the Obama administration for failing to adequately disclose global warming documents. As we reported two weeks ago the Competitive Enterprise Institute deemed inadequate the Treasury Department's response to a Freedom of Information Act request for documents on cap-and-trade. Months after the FOIA request, Treasury responded by giving CEI five documents and emails, when the group had expected 50. "Your response fails any reasonable test for compliance with FOIA and constitutes an effective denial of our request," CEI's Christopher Horner stated in the notice of appeal filed with...

Supporters of the administration’s plans for cap-and-trade have argued that the costs would be minimal for American households, as low as $175 per household per year, as the White House proclaimed an incomplete analysis from the CBO. A new study shows that the actual costs per household are ten times that number, almost $150 per month, once cap-and-trade gets implemented. What right-wing organization created that analysis? The Treasury Department: The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about...

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent. A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 Make 'em Feel the Heat   [Iain Murray] President Reagan said, "When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat." Washington is now completely in the dark — so a new group called Freedom Action is here to help you put the heat on.  Believing in nothing more than individual rights, free markets and limited government, Freedom Action is a new grassroots activist social network aimed at putting government back inside its constitutional limits.Every group has to start somewhere, and Freedom Action's first campaign is about Carbongate — the EPA's internal suppression...

Book Review: The environmental movement has cultivated a warm and fuzzy public image, but behind the smiley-face rhetoric of "sustainability" and "conservation" lies a dark agenda. The Greens aim to regulate your behavior, downsize your lifestyle, and invade the most intimate aspects of your personal life. In this stunning exposé, Steve Milloy unveils the authoritarian impulse underlying the Green crusade. Whether they're demanding that you turn down your thermostat, stop driving your car, or engage in some other senseless act of self-denial, the Greens are envisioning a grim future for you marked by endless privation. Steve Milloy is the founder...

Junk Science: The EPA may be considering closing the watchdog office that exposed the flimsy evidence of man-caused warming. So much for the administration's promise to "restore science to its rightful place."Recently we commented on the plight of Dr. Allen Carlin, the EPA senior research analyst at the National Center for Environmental Economics who dared to say, in essence, that emperor Al Gore and his environmental sycophants at the Environmental Protection Agency wore no clothes. The EPA had been working on an "endangerment finding" that would say carbon dioxide, rather than being the basis for all life on earth, was...

American idealism is infectious. I’m as cynical about my own country’s political system as the next world-weary Brit. But, whenever I go to Washington, I give in to that guileless enthusiasm which foreigners so often dismiss as naïveté. Like the James Stewart character in Mr Smith goes to Washington, I goggle reverently at the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the Battle Hymn of the Republic swelling in my mind. As regular readers will know, Thomas Jefferson is one of my heroes: he kept alive in North America a strain of British liberty that has all but perished from the mother country....

How many times have you been told that the debate on the science of climate change is “over”? Probably almost as many times as Al Gore has traveled in private jets and limousines to urge audiences to repent of their fuelish ways. Although tirelessly intoned by politicians, major media, advocacy groups, academics, and even some Kyoto critics, the “debate is over” mantra is just plain false. The core issues of climate-change attribution, climate sensitivity, and even anthropogenic detection remain very much in play.DetectionThe world has warmed overall during the past 130 years, as evidenced by melting glaciers, longer growing seasons, and both proxy and instrumental data. However, the main era of “anthropogenic” global...

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute told an audience of coal industry members that Waxman-Markey will wreck their industry and the economy.The health care reform bill and the cap-and-trade bill now working their way through the Congress are the most dangerous legislative measures in memory. Alone, either of them spells big trouble, together, they spell catastrophe. Read the rest at Annuit Coeptis

The media portrays climate scientists as having delivered a final verdict on global warming... They haven't... There remain some holdouts who say this consensus is little more than conformity to a politically correct idea. Perhaps even more surprising is that a few of these global-warming skeptics are actually respected... No matter where you stand on this debate, you should know who the major skeptics are and what they think.

Requests US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to Do More Honest Job Than EPA In Assessing New Climate Research

On June 28, 2009, the House of Representatives, by a narrow margin (219-212), passed the Waxman-Markey bill. The so-called “cap and trade” bill has been sold as a system for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the struggle against global warming. There’s a full-court press on the U.S. Senate to pass its version of “cap and trade”...The Obama administration’s EPA sees the increasing evidence against global warming as a threat to their agenda and has taken desperate measures. About a week before the House vote on “cap and trade,” the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released some EPA e-mails, demonstrating...

Here's what I wrote in last year's column titled "Global Warming Rope-a-Dope" (12/24/2008): "Once laws are written, they are very difficult, if not impossible, to repeal. If a time would ever come when the permafrost returns to northern U.S., as far south as New Jersey as it once did, it's not inconceivable that Congress, caught in the grip of the global warming zealots, would keep all the laws on the books they wrote in the name of fighting global warming. Personally, I would not put it past them to write more." On June 28, 2009, the House of Representatives, by...