Free Republic

At the Extinction Rebellion protests in London this week, a bedwetting greenie grabbed my shoulder, pushed me and told me he hoped I’d never have ****ing kids and that if I ever did they’d ****ing hate me forever. Obviously I loved this, a) because being physically assaulted by a pasty-faced soy boy is always comedy gold. And b) because it confirmed what I’ve long suspected: there’s really nothing peaceful or ‘nice’ about these posturing, deluded, ‘planet-saving’ pests. I’ve put the ‘planet-saving’ in inverted commas because the only place these soap-shunning losers are saving the planet is in their warped imaginations....

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is telling staff to quickly finish up the last round of regulations before President-elect Donald Trump enters the Oval Office next year. "As I've mentioned to you before, we're running — not walking — through the finish line of President Obama's presidency," EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a staff memo obtained by the Washington Examiner after Trump was declared the winner of Tuesday's election. The agency is currently working on regulations for the oil and gas sector, and is finalizing new annual regulations for the nation's ethanol mandate and renewable fuel blending...

Eric Worrall writes: The imminent climate summit in New York is rapidly turning into an utter embarrassment for President Obama and UN Secretary General Bank Ki-Moon, in addition to becoming a bit of a punishment round for national deputy leaders.Aussie PM Tony Abbott today defended his decision not to hop on an earlier flight to America, so he could attend the UN climate conference in New York, because he has more important matters to attend to, such as running the country.http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/tony-abbott-defends-skipping-un-climate-change-summit-in-new-york/story-fni0xqrb-1227060005413Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have also indicated they likely won’t attend the summit.http://thediplomat.com/2014/09/top-leaders-from-china-india-to-skip-un-climate-change-summit/Canadian Prime...

For proponents of renewable energy, it seems like every time a technology is primed to save the world, it gets dogged by some ironic bit of environmental unpleasantness. Wind turbines can be dangerous to birds and bats. Biofuels require so much land, fertilizer, and water that they may use more energy to produce than they provide. Hydropower dams screw up a whole lot of river habitat and stop fish from spawning. The latest on this list of “dark green” technologies is thermal solar power, which is coming into vogue in the southern California desert. [snip]U.S. Fish and Wildlife employees and...

SAN DIEGO -- A lawsuit has been filed demanding the city eradicate the "foul, noxious and sickening odors" left by birds and sea lions defecating on the rocks next to La Jolla Cove. The stink offends the patrons of some of La Jolla's best known restaurants overlooking the cove and visitors to the famed La Valencia Hotel, according to the lawsuit filed by a group calling itself Citizens for Odor Nuisance Abatement. [snip] While the stinky guano is the product of the cormorants and the sea lions, the real culprits are officials at City Hall who approved a fence keeping...

A Greenpeace campaigner claims he was forced to live on bread and water while being held in a Russian prison because it didn't offer a vegetarian alternative. Antony Perrett arrived home yesterday after spending two months in prisons in Murmansk and St Petersburg for trying to hang a climate change banner on an oil rig. The former town councillor is one a group of environmental activists known as the Arctic 30 who were being held in Russia on hooliganism charges. Since being released under a new amnesty law, the 33-year-old has revealed he refused to eat some of the food...

THIS urgent message from the North Pole is courtesy of Downton Abbey star Jim Carter, playing the part of a very dark-looking Santa in the latest global warming propaganda video finding its way around the internet: "Dear children, regrettably I bring bad tidings. "For some time now, melting ice here in the North Pole has made our operations and our day to day life intolerable and impossible. And there may be no alternative but to cancel Christmas." Santa can no longer function. His warehouse is flooded. The presents are ruined. This is the work of Greenpeace. Merry Christmas, now let's...

Natural gas may be plentiful, cheap and inviting at the moment. But the fracking process to get it still fans the flames of environmental policy clashes.At the Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference outside Santa Barbara, Calif., drillers and environmentalists debated over whether fracking posed a danger to the communities they serve. Drillers said that the amount of natural gas available –4,000 trillion cubic feet — can’t be ignored.“There is so much there, which is shown by what prices are,” said Edward Cohen, chief executive of Atlas Energy .But Paul Gallay, president of the environmental group Riverkeeper, challenged Cohen and Aubrey...

These pointless monstrosities will continue to proliferate until the Government sees sense. Three separate news items on the same day last week reflected three different aspects of what is fast becoming a full-scale disaster bearing down on Britain. The first item was a picture in The Daily Telegraph showing two little children forlornly holding a banner reading “E.On Hands Off Winwick”. This concerned a battle to prevent a tiny Northamptonshire village from being dwarfed by seven 410-foot wind turbines, each higher than Salisbury Cathedral, to be built nearby by a giant German-owned electricity firm. The 40 residents, it was reported,...

Have you noticed a white film on your dishes in recent months? As we first reported earlier this year, the reason is a new environmental law. Most manufacturers have reformulated their dishwasher detergents after laws limiting phosphates went into effect last year. Julie Schimpf of Ft Thomas, Kentucky showed me how bad her dishes looked. Julie said "there's this frosty, filmy look on the top and bottom and it won't go away. I'm finding the same film here on the edges of my plates." Complaints Nationwide Our partners at Consumer Reports Magazine have heard many of the same complaints, from...

WASHINGTON — A yearlong experiment with America's electric grid could mess up traffic lights, security systems and some computers — and make plug-in clocks and appliances like programmable coffeemakers run up to 20 minutes fast. The group that oversees the U.S. power grid is proposing an experiment that would allow more frequency variation than it does now without corrections, according to a company presentation obtained by The Associated Press. Officials say they want to try this to make the power supply more reliable, save money and reduce what may be needless efforts. The test is tentatively set to start in...

America's largest coal mine fire is the marquee for government ineffectiveness and environmental activism's false pretense. Centralia, PA is home to America's largest coal mine fire -- still burning today since May of 1962. Forty-nine years of government folly, environmentalist demonization, and media sensationalism have managed to fan the flames under Centralia, escalating the costs to end this ecological disaster from under $100,000 in the early sixties to over $600 million today. Bureaucratic half-measures started in the 60's with a planned town dump in an old mine pit.  Regulations required that any openings to the mine be properly sealed with...

Former Al Gore senior aide Leslie Dach dared to dream: In July 2006, Dach was installed as the public relations chief for Wal-Mart. He drafted a number of other progressives into the company, seeking to change the company’s way of doing business: its culture, its politics, and most importantly its products. Out went drab, inexpensive merchandise so dear to low-income Americans. In came upscale organic foods, “green” products, trendy jeans, and political correctness. In other words, Dach sought to expose poor working Americans to the “good life” of the wealthy, environmentally conscious Prius driver. How did that all work out?

"Sustainable Development" (SD) is basically a slogan without a specific meaning.  Linked to Earth Day (April 22), it masquerades as a call for clean air, green energy, and suggests a pristine bucolic existence for us and our progeny -- forever.  But in reality,  it has become immensely useful to many groups who use the slogan to advance their own special agenda, whatever they may be. The term itself was invented by Gro Harlem Bruntlandt, a Norwegian socialist politician and former prime minister.  After her term there, she landed in Paris and, together with Club of Rome veteran Alexander King,...

The original moonbat, GeorgeMonbiot, columnist for the left wing UK Guardian, now admits that he was bamboozled by fearmongers whipping up anti-nuclear fears. Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice. I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott. Dr Caldicott is the...

Inspired by Cord's thought-provoking post on the per gallon prices of various liquids, and by Sarah Palin's ill-informed Facebook rant on the "$4-Per-Gallon President," I decided to take a closer look at gasoline prices around the world. Mrs. Palin might be interested to learn, that the world already has quite a few $4-Per-Gallon Presidents. In fact, the world already has $6-Per-Gallon Parliaments, $7-Per-Gallon Prime Ministers, and $8-Per-Gallon Presidents! We've collected a broad sample of gas prices from throughout the industrialized Western world in the chart below. Important to note: this chart includes only official data from throughout the European Union...

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, Wash. – The lack sales for Byron Holcomb's new business hasn't clouded his vision. "This is the future right here," he said, leaning against a four-wheel drive battery-powered buggy. "The electric car is coming and it's going to be the dominant means of transportation in the U.S." Holcomb, a retired attorney, opened Go Green, Bainbridge Island's one-and-only car dealership, in October. And in true Bainbridge style, all the cars are electric, and the showroom is a slick little Winslow storefront that could have just as easily been an art gallery. Actually, it's that too. Abstract originals adorn the...

On January 6, 2010, Captain Hiroyuki Komura of the illegal Japanese whaling vessel the Shonan Maru #2 deliberately rammed and destroyed Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s vessel, the Ady Gil. Captain Komura almost killed six Sea Shepherd volunteer crewmembers and did not respond to the Ady Gil’s mayday distress signal. Japanese authorities refused to cooperate in investigations and declined requests by Australian and New Zealand maritime authorities to question Captain Komura. Instead, Captain Peter Bethune, the man who Captain Komura almost killed and whose ship was destroyed, was taken back to Japan literally as a prisoner of war abducted from the...

Here's my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place? Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land,...