Free Republic

Churches in a Maryland county are being offered tax breaks for incorporating environmentalism into their sermons. In Prince George’s County, 30 pastors have started preaching ‘green’ ministries to avoid extra taxes, the Washington Post reports. The taxes depend on the acreage for all property owners, including churches, as part of Maryland’s “storm water remediation fee.” Reverend Nathaniel B. Thomas of Forestville New Redeemer Baptist Church said he attempted to challenge the fee and said: "Once Uncle Sam finds a way to take your money, he doesn’t stop.”Thomas acknowledged the people of his congregation have higher priorities than the environment, such...

George Soros, the radical, far-left billionaire, with a long history of antipathy toward American interests, now sits on a United Nations (UN) panel charged with organizing a $100 billion wealth transfer from the developed world to the underdeveloped world in the name of environmentalism. News of his involvement here is buried away in a New York Times report but it should be the lead sentence. Developing countries must help combat the many challenges associated with global warming, according to a UN panel. That is assuming all concerned parties accept the premise of catastrophic human induced climate change and the New...

Government: While it destroys jobs with its regulations, the EPA has an opening for an "environmental protection specialist" whose job it is to help the agency meet its "environmental justice goals." Meet its what? If socialism and environmentalism had a child, it would be called the Environmental Protection Agency. Established under President Nixon to ensure the quality of our air and water, it has become a tool of social engineering to implement President Obama's promised fundamental transformation of America The EPA is looking for someone with "knowledge of the theories and principles of environmental protection, especially as they relate to...

Eco-Extremism: A light bulb factory closes in Virginia as mandated fluorescents are made in China. It's now a crime to make or ship for sale 75-watt incandescent bulbs in the European Union. Welcome to green hell. Thomas Alva Edison was a genius credited with the invention of many things — the phonograph, the motion picture, the incandescent light bulb, global warming. That last credit was given by those who rank light bulbs right up there with the internal combustion engine as ravagers of the planet. The General Electric light bulb factory in Winchester, Va., closed this month, a victim, along...

There's no way the AGW hoax could have gone on for so long unless its shills, etc. had use of some potent mind games. I'm starting this as a kind of voter-protection thread, to help figure out how they pulled the wool over so many eyes and how to spot the next attempt much earlier. Let me start with this one: "deniers." It means skeptics, or doubters. The users of it managed to outrage normally gentle skeptics - in the sense of outraged innocence - which confused people who use emotionality to tell who the dogmatist is. From that ploy,...

Energy Policy: President Obama says the oil disaster proves the need to get off fossil fuels. But before we save the planet, let's save the Gulf and stop exploiting crises to deny America the energy it needs. Saving the planet is nice, but just how do we plug the hole again? With an abundance of hand gestures, the president didn't really say in his speech Tuesday night. He did say fossil fuels were bad and green energy is good, but the people of the Gulf states don't need wind turbines right now. Contrary to Obama's assertions, our "addiction" to foreign...

Politics: The Senate just claimed the title of the world's most delusional body by refusing to strip unelected EPA bureaucrats of the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. This was the day freedom died. One wonders why we have a Congress at all. The 53 profiles in cowardice that could not get a cap-and-tax bill through the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to let the Environmental Protection Agency keep the unprecedented power Congress did not expressly give it. It is power that the EPA arrogated to itself through regulation to control every aspect of the American economy and our...

Overregulation: The Senate votes on blocking a government bureaucracy from usurping power never delegated to it by Congress. This administration may put Copenhagen above the Constitution, but we the people have other plans. The GOP's 1994 "Contract with America," a gift that keeps on giving, hopefully will rescue us once again from the clutches of an unelected bureaucracy, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been allowed by the Supreme Court to regulate every breath we take and every machine we operate. When cap-and-tax legislation was introduced in Congress, the Obama administration threatened that if Congress failed to act, the EPA...

Energy Policy: To save the environment, a senator from Pennsylvania wants to shut off a major source of natural gas. Weren't the roads to the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters paved with equally good intentions? Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989's Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment. The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the...

Climate Science: Noted scientists at a Chicago climate conference declare that global warming is not only dead, but that the planet faces a big chill for decades to come. What about those frozen wind turbines? It's not exactly Copenhagen or Kyoto, but the 700 scientists attending the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, had some chilling news of their own in the most liberal sense. "Global warming is over — at least for a few decades," Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the gathering. "However, the bad news is that...

A coalition of 31 green groups issued a joint letter to the Senate today urging the lawmakers “not to squander” political momentum and slow-walk the climate change bill. The letter comes in response to efforts by the Democratic leadership to shelve the climate bill and work on an immigration reform bill first. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., co-author of both pieces of legislation, has said that going with the unfinished immigration bill before the climate bill, which has been finished, “dooms everything” because there isn’t enough time left on the Senate calendar for that approach. The letter suggests green groups are...

As a psychotherapist, I try my best to calm down my anxious clients. But in this case, I inadvertently triggered a panic attack. My twenty-something client Emma, a survivor of the Berkeley public schools, had a coughing fit during our session. I helpfully got up to get her some water. When I handed her a cup, she looked at it, incredulous. Her voice quivering, she asked, "Is this Styrofoam?" I said yes. She stared at the cup, mesmerized by this forbidden fruit. When she finally found her words, she said, "I've never seen Styrofoam before. We learned in school that...

Earth Day is coming up this Sunday, and not to be out done by the racist, right-wing, gun-totting Tea Party nuts, the Earth Day Network has planned a big to-do. Sting, The Roots, John Legend and a few other quasi stars are all playing on the National Mall. From their Web site: On Sunday, April 25, Earth Day Network will organize a massive climate rally on The National Mall to demand Congress pass strong legislation. The Climate Rally will include notable speakers Reverend Jesse Jackson, film director, James Cameron, AFL-CIO President, Richard Trumka, Olympic gold medalist, Billy Demong, producer, Trudie...

<p>A group of 40 auditors -- including scientists and public policy experts from across the globe -- have released a shocking report card on the U.N.'s landmark climate-change research report. And they gave 21 of the report's 44 chapters a grade of "F." The team, recruited by the climate-change skeptics behind the website NoConsensus.org, found that 5,600 of the 18,500 sources in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Nobel Prize-winning 2007 report were not peer reviewed. "We've been told this report is the gold standard," said Canadian global-warming skeptic Donna Laframboise, who runs the NoConsensus.org site and who organized the online effort to examine the U.N.'s references in the report, commonly known as the AR4. We've been told it's 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have been nowhere near a scientific journal." Based on the grading system used in American schools, 21 chapters in the IPCC report received an F for citing peer-reviewed sources less than 60 percent of the time. Four chapters received a D, and six received a C.</p>

Science: An Icelandic scientist says climate change spurs volcanic eruptions such as the one disrupting air traffic in Europe. Rather, the evidence suggests volcanoes cause global cooling and Arctic ice to melt. The stunning eruption of a volcano under Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier has disrupted air traffic over the continent of Europe as vast plumes of steam and ash were spewed into the atmosphere. Once again, we witness the power of nature over man even as man blames himself for nature's acts. Almost every malady on earth has been blamed on global warming, so it wasn't all that surprising when Freysteinn...

Pollution Control: From cars to coal mines, the imposition of economy-killing restrictions is under way. Are the new EPA regulations on auto emissions the precursor to regulating carbon dioxide by executive order? In announcing the Environmental Protection Agency's first regulations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cars, Administrator Lisa Jackson has promised they won't be the last such rules stemming from the EPA's "endangerment finding" that carbon dioxide, six pounds of which every human being exhales every day, is a dangerous pollutant. "These are the first regulations that cover greenhouse gas emissions in the United States," Jackson told reporters in...

Van Jones, President Obama's former "green jobs" czar and newly appointed Princeton lecturer, has teamed up with a coalition of extremists to push an environmental activist agenda to "transform the American economy" and bring about "social change." The groups working with Jones have been described as using the tactics of guerrilla communication, agitation and disruption techniques. One organization working alongside Jones, the radical Earth First! environmentalist group, has a history of violence and sabotage. Jones spoke Monday at a Northern Arizona University event titled "Challenging America: Achieving Sustainability and Justice Through the Green Collar Economy." He spoke with Billy Parish,...

Politics: The water spigots are back on, at least temporarily, in California's Central Valley. Turned off to protect a tiny fish, they happen to be in the districts of two congressmen "undecided" on health care reform. One could chalk it up to good fortune or just good constituent service. But in the middle of a contentious health care debate marked by Cornhusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases, we may be forgiven if we find an announcement by the Department of the Interior regarding California's water supply a tad too coincidental. On Tuesday, the Department of the Interior announced it was increasing...

Regulation: The New York Times says the EPA should use its authority to regulate our very breath if a Democratic Congress isn't "goaded" into action. Whatever happened to government of the people? It's been a pattern of this administration that if the American people are adamantly opposed to it, ram it through anyway. So it's been with the health care overhaul, offshore drilling restrictions and now the Environmental Protection Agency threatening to become the uber-regulator of the air we breathe. (snip) As Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, noted: "Lisa Jackson, Obama's...

Hoaxes: Instead of having his Nobel Prize rescinded for espousing climate fraud, the prophet of doom is set to receive an honorary doctorate of laws and humane letters from the University of Tennessee for his work. (snip) Gore has not changed the planet for the better. He has pushed policies that have stunted economic growth and increased joblessness, poverty and hunger around the world. He's a climate charlatan, the Elmer Gantry of global warming, and it matters not if his latest undeserved award is printed on recycled paper.