Free Republic

California has the highest income tax rate in the country (top tier of 14.4 percent). It has the highest statewide sales tax rate (7.25 percent, plus local sales taxes). It has the highest gas tax rate ($0.78 per gallon). Yet, it ranks third to last in the country in terms of road quality.The old joke is that California would tax the air we breathe if it could. Well, California’s latest tax proposal comes close. The state is recruiting drivers for a pilot program to track and tax the miles they drive.The plan is borne from the fact that Californians have...

25 refrigerators. That’s how much the additional electricity consumption per household would be if the average US home adopted electric vehicles (EVs). Congressman Thomas Massie—an electrical engineer—revealed this information while discussing with Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, President Biden’s plan to have 50% of cars sold in the US be electric by 2030. The current and future grid in most places will not be able to support each home running 25 refrigerators—not even close. Just look at California, where the grid is already buckling under the existing load. Massie claims, correctly, in my view, that the notion of widespread...

The world of climate science is in shock following extraordinary findings from a team of high-powered NASA scientists that suggest most of the recent global temperature increases are due to the introduction of draconian fuel shipping regulations designed to help prevent global warming. The fantasy world of Net Zero is of course full of unintended consequences, but it is claimed that the abrupt 80% cut in sulphur dioxide emissions from international shipping in 2020 has accounted for 80% of global warming since the turn of the decade. Although the extra heat is described as “transient”, the warming is extraordinary and...

Leftist outlets like The Atlantic seem to have a bad habit of yanking the most insane political ideas out of the ether to make them sound less nutty than they are. Its recent treatment of “degrowth communism” to fight climate change is no exception. “Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism,’” read the magazine’s head-turning May 28 article. The author, Atlantic writing fellow Christopher Beam, tried to soften the expected blowback from such an off-the-wall idea being popularized by leftist Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito. Saito “knows he sounds like a madman,” Beam wrote. “That’s kind of the point,” he continued. “The...

A climate activist affixed an adhesive poster to a Monet painting at the Musée d’Orsay Saturday. The woman, who said she intended to raise awareness for climate change, was arrested. The stunt was carried out by a member of Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response), a group of environmental activists and defenders of sustainable food production in response to the climate crisis. The group has been targeting museums across Europe for years, including most recently a protest at the Louvre last month. A video on X showed the activist sticking an adhesive barren red landscape on top of Claude Monet’s 1873 painting...

Human activities affect the Earth’s climate through modifying the composition of the atmosphere, which then creates radiative forcing that drives climate change. The warming effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases has been partially balanced by the cooling effect of anthropogenic aerosols. In 2020, fuel regulations abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact. Here we estimate the regulation leads to a radiative forcing of Wm−2 averaged over the global ocean. The amount of radiative forcing could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate...

The solar project is destroying the Joshua trees…to save the Joshua Trees from “climate change.” There are a lot of essential lessons real environmentalists can learn from this post. I have offered post after post proving that the Earth’s climate has continually changed. Any temperature rise observed from reliable temperature stations is likely cyclic and part of the world’s warming after an intense period of glaciation. I have noted repeatedly that carbon dioxide is a life-essential gas in trace amounts, and data shows it has no significant role in global warming. I have highlighted that fossil fuels and nuclear energy...

Most people by now are familiar with the narrative that our planet faces a dire crisis due to rising temperatures.In January 2023, former Vice President Al Gore provided a graphic depiction during a World Economic Forum summit, informing attendees that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are “now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth.“That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice, and raising the sea level,...

You know climate change is really bad. I bumped into a wall, not too heavily, but it was climate change that was responsible. It caused the air to be more active as it got warmer, and it helped push me into the wall. I suppose the readers here are looking at this skeptically, especially those who are familiar with my writing. BUT keep reading. I want to repeat an article here related to the recent air incident with Singapore Airlines, where a plane experienced severe air turbulence and plunged 2,000 meters (over 6,000 feet) in a matter of seconds –...

For all the money the Biden administration has been frantically shoveling into the wind sector - I'm praying this is a last-minute, panicked gambit on their part because November looks dicey - it's all coming to late to help out some of the biggest names in wind turbine development. Siemens Gamesa, the Spanish renewable spin-off of German parent Siemens Energy (and one of my favorite villains in the wind farm wars, although no one tops Ørsted) says it's going to lay off up to 4100 people in their turbine divisions across three countries in part of a "restructuring" move.Siemens Gamesa...

“We’re facing an unfunded, $1 trillion mandate that carries enormous consequences for the American consumer.” At least that’s what Chris Spear, American Trucking Associations President and CEO has to say about one D.C. diktat coming down from on high in particular, and that is the one mandating that the American trucking industry bend to EPA rules requiring all electric fleets and production lines.Here’s the context, from March of this year:On March 29, 2024, Good Friday, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rolled out its new electric truck mandate, which will require that electric semi-trucks make up an increasing share of manufacturer...

Lying is an epidemic even worse than COVID. Our president and his press secretaries seem to lie with every word they say and deny facts that anyone with a pair of eyes can see for himself. Scientists and doctors, formerly among the most trusted members of our society, lie to foster popular environmental theories and get government grants, or to promote Big Pharma and deter people from effective treatments. Our news media no longer report the news; they shape the news as instructed. Here is just a sample of commonly promoted lies starting in 2020. Covid has a 4% death...

The New York Times Bidenomics apologist Paul Krugman took a detour from regurgitating his usual awful economic takes — AGAIN— to throw another fit over climate change “denial.” Krugman decried the “Stench of Climate Change Denial” in his latest May 27 screed. Krugman drummed up scare-porn over an alleged “emerging sewage crisis” along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts and claimed it was due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. “In short, it’s not hard to see some terrible outcomes in the not-too-distant future, even before full global catastrophe arrives. Bad stuff is coming, and we’re already starting...

It's not a laptop in first class or a cheap Chinese scooter smoking ominously in the plane's cargo hold. Nor is it a massive commercial ship packed to the gills with cars being transported across an ocean that has had one of the EVs parked onboard light off, and now the whole vessel is hopelessly ablaze. It's not another fiery EV in a driveway or garage or the solar panels on a rooftop, even though I have covered all of those. Comments regular Global Traveler turned me on to an ongoing drama in, of all places, San Diego County that...

Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has claimed that the spate of recent Boeing incidents involving turbulence is due to “climate change.” Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Buttigieg predicted that turbulence is something that will continue to “affect American travelers, whether here or abroad.”

TABASCO, Mexico – Heat-stressed, endangered howler monkeys are dropping out of trees and dying across Tabasco and Chiapas, Mexico, as the third relentless heat wave this season bakes the region. Conservation and rescue groups have made impassioned pleas for villagers to leave fresh water in the jungle for the heat-sickened primates. One group, COBIUS, reported "massive deaths." COBIUS told Reuters that at least 100 monkeys have died so far. Civil Protection officers said villagers have gathered the bodies in mass graves and covered them with lime for disposal, with few other options.

The massive "doomsday glacier" known for its rapid destabilization is undergoing a "vigorous ice melt" that scientists say could reshape sea level rise projections. In a new study, glaciologists from the University of California, Irvine, found that warm, high-pressure ocean water is seeping beneath West Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, making it more vulnerable to melting than previously thought. The glacier is roughly 80 miles across, the widest on Earth. It packs so much ice that if it were to completely collapse, it could singlehandedly cause global sea levels to rise by more than two feet, according to the International Thwaites Glacier...

Five members of Letzte Generation, Germany’s equivalent to Just Stop Oil, have been charged with “forming a criminal organisation”, a move civil rights campaigners say could in effect criminalise future support for the climate campaign. Mirjam Herrmann, 27, Henning Jeschke, 22, Edmund Schulz, 60, Lukas Popp, 25, and Jakob Beyer, 30, were charged under section 129 of the German criminal code. It is believed to be the first time the law has been applied to a non-violent protest group. According to prosecutors in the state of Brandenburg, the charges relate to more than a dozen “attacks” against oil refineries, the...

Recent reports reveal that the celebrated “all-electric” or “zero emissions” fire trucks, being lauded from San Diego to Portland to Albuquerque, are not as environmentally friendly as advertised. Each of these new fire trucks, purchased with the assistance of federal funding, is equipped with a diesel engine to ensure functionality when the electric battery is depleted. This revelation highlights a significant discrepancy between the marketed image of these trucks and their actual operational design. The report indicates that each of these supposedly zero-emission trucks includes a diesel engine to guarantee that it can still pump water or drive if the...

Alabama is spearheading a coalition of 12 Republican-led states in a federal lawsuit against five Democrat-run states, alleging the latter are trying to coerce the former into complying with strict climate-conscious policies that could imperil their residents' access to affordable energy. The filing was made at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday as the plaintiffs argued that Democrat-led states California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island are essentially forcing residents of politically opposed states to feel repercussions of their restrictions and, therefore, are dictating national energy policy. "California and New Jersey and the defendant states are trying to make...