Free Republic

President Joe Biden’s climate change-obsessed Department of Energy (DOE) was wrong when it reversed Trump-era rules making dishwashers and laundry machines more efficient for Americans, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday. A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the agency acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner when it repealed laundry machine and dishwasher rules designed to cut down on wash times. The order, penned by Judge Andrew Oldham, also notes that “it is unclear that the DOE has any statutory authority to regulate water use in dishwashers and clothes washers.”

The Biden administration’s War on Modernity is death by a thousand regulations. It’s no secret that the Biden admin wants to ditch gas stoves as well as impose harsh regulations on washing machines, dishwashers, water heaters, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, and anything else they can think of under the guise of “saving the planet” from climate change. These regulations make things more expensive and people either shell out more of their hard-earned dollars for a basic necessity or do without because the appliance has been priced out of reach. It’s also a direct attack on the freedom of the consumer...

Proterra, the electric bus company at the center of an apparent conflict of interest involving Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, has filed for bankruptcy, Reuters reported Monday evening. Granholm drew immense scrutiny when it was revealed that she maintained her financial positions in the firm, for which she used to sit on the board of directors, after she assumed her post as the leader of the Department of Energy (DOE) and began to direct policies which could have favored her own financial interests. Granholm eventually closed her position in the firm late in May 2021, and netted capital gains amounting to...

The Department of Energy has fired a top nuclear waste official who happens to be non-binary and has been accused in a string of luggage thefts, according to reports. “Sam Brinton is no longer a DOE employee. By law, the Department of Energy cannot comment further on personnel matters,” a spokesperson for the DOE told the Daily Beast on Monday. The Post has reached out to the agency for comment. The 35-year-old Biden administration deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition at the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy was reportedly canned after being charged with stealing a woman’s...

A recent, high-level hire at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy is a drag queen, LGBTQ+ activist who has “lectured” on kink at college campuses and participated in interviews about fetish roleplay. In one interview, Sam Brinton – now a top Biden official – even discusses having sex with animals.Brinton – who has written in opposition to “gay conversion therapy” – was recently tapped to serve as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy. He also goes by “Sister Ray Dee O’Active” – his...

Climate Change. Officials from the former Obama White House are starting to speak out against the corrupt administration now that it is safe to come forward. It’s about time! The most recent official to come forward is Steven Koonin, the former Undersecretary of the Department of Energy. He is accusing President Obama of fabricating scientific evidence proving “climate change”. “What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin told the Wall Street Journal. According to Koonin, multiple departments responsible for environmental science either misrepresented data or completely...

When the Department of Energy was asked by the Agency Review Team to identify employees who work on climate change — one of the critical challenges of our time — our workforce rightly worried that the incoming team would judge them on ideology rather than merit. When the House voted to bring back the Holman Rule — allowing Members of Congress to selectively target individual federal workers or departments — our workforce became vulnerable to judgment based on ideology. When possible federal hiring freezes are mentioned casually, our workforce is concerned about its capacity to support our critical responsibilities. And...

Mission change This will be portrayed in the media as a “flip-flop,” or as some sort of inherent contradiction. How can a man lead a department he once advocated eliminating entirely? But there’s no contradiction at all. If you believe the federal government doesn’t need to be dictating energy policy to the rest of the nation, but the Energy Department is still going to exist, why not have someone in charge of it who believes in the inherent limits of its usefulness, and runs it accordingly?

The Department of Energy recently turned over more than 1,200 pages of heavily redacted documents in response to a records request about a subsidized biofuels company from The Daily Caller News Foundation. In October, TheDCNF filed a FOIA request with the Energy Department, asking for email records from government officials regarding federal loan guarantees given to Abengoa, a Spanish-based green energy company. The request came on the heels of reports Abengoa was running into big financial problems, despite being given generous taxpayer-backed loans. The DOE gave TheDCNF the records it requested Dec. 18, and after spending time reviewing the documents,...

Celebrities are now upset about fracking, the injection of chemicals into the ground to crack rocks to release oil and gas. With everyone saying they want alternatives to foreign oil, I'd think celebrities would love fracking.I'd be wrong. Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono and their group, Artists Against Fracking, don't feel the love. Yoko sang, "Don't frack me!" on TV. Stopping fracking is the latest cause of the silly people. They succeeded in getting scientifically ignorant politicians to ban fracking in New York, Maryland and Vermont.Hollywood gave an Oscar to Gasland, a documentary that suggests fracking will shove gas into...

It has been said by almost every conservative candidate running for office this year that they would like to abolish the Jimmy Carter government legacy, the Department of Energy (DOE). Back in the 1970s when the Department of Energy was created the Carter Administration claimed that 20% of the nation's energy needs would be supplied by solar energy by the year 2000. Needless to say that didn't happen. So today we have a Department of Energy that provides energy to no one. The question is how can we get rid of the DOE? The answer lies in the history of...

When Steven Chu, a Nobel physicist who had lately devoted his career to climate change and clean-energy research, was nominated by President Obama for Energy secretary in December 2008, it seemed like a perfect match. Until then, the Energy Department had actually played very little role in energy policy. Despite its name, the agency's chief mandate is to guard the nation's nuclear arsenal, and to clean up Cold War-era defense nuclear waste. In most years, about two-thirds of its budget goes to nuclear weapons and waste cleanup, while roughly 10 percent to 15 percent goes to energy research. The idea...

Energy czar Carol Browner needs to go the way of disgraced green-jobs czar Van Jones: under the bus and stripped of her unbridled power to destroy jobs and lives in the name of saving the planet. ASAP. One of the Beltway’s most influential, entrenched, and unaccountable left-wing radicals, Browner has now been called out twice by President Obama’s own federal BP-oil-spill commission and Interior Department inspector general. How many strikes should a woman who circumvented the Senate confirmation process and boasts a sordid history of abusing public office get? Pushing the question — and shining a bright, hot spotlight on...

Using a nuclear explosion to try to plug the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico might sound like overkill, but a Russian newspaper has suggested just that based on past Soviet successes. Even so, there are crucial differences between the lessons of the past and the current disaster unfolding. .The Russians previously used nukes at least five times to seal off gas well fires. A targeted nuclear explosion might similarly help seal off the oil well channel that has leaked oil unchecked since the sinking of a BP oil rig on April 22, according to a translation of...

, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings. The geothermal drill in Switzerland was shut down after it caused 100...

The government is upgrading the X-ray technology that detects flaws in its nuclear weapons stockpile. The new machine, called the Confined Large Optical Scintillator Screen and Imaging System, or CoLOSSIS, uses thousands of 2D X-ray images to produce one 3D image depicting the inside of a nuclear weapon — the same way CT scanners generate 3D images of the inside of a human body. Developers say the new system will pick up more defects in the nuclear stockpile than the current 2D sensors and will eliminate the need to disassemble weapons to search for problems, which is a process that...

Atom smashers at a U.S. national lab have produced temperatures not seen since the Big Bang — 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior — in work re-creating the universe's first microseconds. The results come from the 2.4-mile-wide Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory. Since 2000, scientists there have hurtled gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light. These smash-ups heat bubbles smaller than the center of an atom to about 40 times hotter than the center of an imploding supernova. Scientists say the results have given them...

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced that it recently completed the installation and successful startup of a new surveillance diagnostic tool that is capable of detecting aging defects on critical components in the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. In response to NNSA's need to implement cost effective, optimized inspection of nuclear components (also known as "surveillance transformation"), scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) teamed with NNSA's Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, to develop a new X-ray computed tomography (CT) system to image nuclear weapon components. The new CT scan will enhance NNSA's surveillance program...

U.S. Department of Energy scientists say they've created a computer algorithm that allows a substantially enhanced view of nuclear fission. The Argonne National Laboratory scientists said the algorithm, known as the neutron transport code, enables researchers for the first time to obtain a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core. "The code could prove crucial in the development of nuclear reactors that are safe, affordable and environmentally friendly," laboratory officials said in a statement. To model the complex geometry of a reactor core currently requires billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles and thousands of energy groups -- all...

Russia has reneged on an agreement to deliver a total of 10 kilograms of plutonium-238 to the United States in 2010 and 2011 and is insisting on a new deal for the costly material vital to NASA’s deep space exploration plans. The move follows the U.S. Congress’ denial of President Barack Obama’s request for $30 million in 2010 to permit the Department of Energy to begin the painstaking process of restarting domestic production of plutonium-238. Bringing U.S. nuclear laboratories back on line to produce the isotope is expected to cost at least $150 million and take six years to seven...