Free Republic

When Sacramento officials proposed putting solar panels on an old city landfill two years ago, they did so with the intention of providing clean energy to thousands of homes. However, in a twist that surprised many at City Hall, the people who might be expected to celebrate such a green venture ended up being the plan's loudest critics. Environmentalists and wildlife advocates argued that the field in Sutter's Landing Park – sitting atop a mound of buried trash that boasts majestic views of the downtown skyline – is a key feeding ground for the threatened Swainson's hawk. The hawks, a...

The Environmental Protection Agency held 12 hours of stacked hearings in Washington, D.C. and Chicago on Thursday in favor of a regulation that analysts have concluded would kill the building of new conventional coal plants in the U.S. Among the participants scheduled to testify in consecutive five minute blocks throughout the day were multiple representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and environmental activists from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace. The proposed rule, reported by The Washington Post in March, limits the amount of greenhouse gases emitted...

The stunning repudiation of Sen. Richard Lugar's, R-Ind., bid for a seventh term has sent shock waves through Washington's internationalist lobby. A former Rhodes Scholar, Lugar has spent his career promoting a globalist agenda, since he succeeded the late Jesse Helms as the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One day after Indiana Republicans handed Lugar his walking papers, an outfit called the Atlantic Council held a forum to promote the discredited Law of the Sea Treaty. As former Republican U.S. Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Warner beamed their approval, Obama's Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared that...

A sharp-eyed Power Line reader directed us to this C-SPAN video featuring Van Jones, President Obama’s short-lived “green jobs” czar, admitting around the 19:14 mark what is plain to anyone who pays attention, namely, that the environmental movement is basically an adjunct of the Democratic Party:

Deep-pocketed environmental groups are collecting millions of dollars from the federal agencies they regularly sue under a little-known federal law, and the government is not even keeping track of the payouts, according to two new studies. Under the Equal Access to Justice Act, or EAJA — which was signed into law by President Carter in 1980 to help the little guy stand up to federal agencies — litigants with modest means who successfully show government agencies wronged them can get their legal fees back from the taxpayer. But the act also covers 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including environmental groups that aggressively sue...

My apologies to the memories of the late Richard Llewellyn and late John Ford; but I just had to borrow their title for this post. This paragraph from a 2010 Telegraph article really says it all… Its 500,000 photovoltaic panels will generate 30 megawatts of electricity, enough, in the popular measurement, to power 9,000 homes. It is costing about $250 million to build, significantly less than a gas, coal or nuclear power station, which can easily exceed $1 billion. And it represents a sea-change in America’s energy business.America has been notoriously devoted to hydrocarbon fuels. Big Oil, Big Coal and...

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted. More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well. Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the...

Cove Point in Southern Maryland has become the latest flash point in the fight between the fossil fuels industry and its longtime foes in the environmental movement. Citing a unique Carter-era agreement, the Sierra Club says it will veto plans by energy giant Dominion to build the first natural gas liquefaction and export facility on the East Coast, a site that would handle booming supplies from the Marcellus Shale and other vast deposits for shipment to Asia and elsewhere. The 1970s legal settlement, the Sierra Club argues, gives it the authority to halt any project that would “change the footprint”...

When Concord’s Town Meeting voted to ban the sale of bottled water Wednesday night, one of the ban’s supporters told her fellow Condordians, “We’re not gonna solve all the problems of the world, but this is our one chance to make a really huge statement to the world.” And she’s right, they made a huge statement: “Hello, World! If you’re looking for the dumbest voters in the United States of America, you found us!” The town of Concord — not state, county or even city — is waging war on the evil of convenient, easily-portable water by outlawing something many...

Vandals are responsible for at least $300,000 in damage at a property owned by Chesapeake Energy in Bradford County, according to state police. Troopers said someone sliced cuts in a polyethylene liner of a water holding tank sometime over the weekend at a Chesapeake facility near Towanda. There was no water in the holding tank at the time. Anyone with information about the vandalism is asked to call state police at Towanda at 570-265-2186

........."If you believe that freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then theWarmists and what they stand for are instinctively repulsive to you. On the other hand, if you believe that human society must be organized into a moral collective for the betterment of all, then theWarmist idea provides a wake up call compelling us to form into ranks and goose step in recycled rubber boots into the green future. It’s an exaggeration, but that’s what debates over the proper role of man tend to become. We don’t fight wars over temperature gradients. The passions...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says new rules to manage nearly 200 million acres of national forests will protect watersheds and wildlife while promoting uses ranging from recreation to logging. The new rules, to replace guidelines thrown out by a federal court in 2009, are set to take effect in early March. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the rule change on Thursday. Vilsack said in an interview that the rules reflect more than 300,000 comments received since a draft plan was released last year. The new rules strengthen a requirement that decisions be based on the best available science...

It’s been a few days since our last Global Warming Quote of the Day, and because our readers probably have yearned for another, we bring you without further ado, today’s Global Warming Quote of the Day. “I don’t pursue the electrification of the automobile out of any fear I might have of planetary meltdown. . .

The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) left the BlueGreen Alliance on Friday, citing a disagreement with the group’s members over the Keystone XL pipeline. LIUNA, a vocal Keystone supporter, took aim at other unions for opposing the project. “We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women,” LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan said in a statement. The BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups and labor unions, confirmed LIUNA’s exit Friday afternoon. “The...

A review of Love Your Monsters, a collection of essays on a new kind of environmentalism. Environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus famously proclaimed The Death of Environmentalism in 2004. Now they're back with an ambitious new collection of essays titled Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Their goal is to dismantle the neo-Malthusian environmentalism of sacrifice and collapse and replace it with a new environmentalism that celebrates human creativity and technological abundance. Hooray! In their introductory essay, Shellenberger and Nordhaus make the case that technological progress and economic growth is the road to salvation, not the highway to...

I confess I am not a zealous football fan, and until a month ago, I hoped Tim Tebow would don a Colorado Rockies uniform so I could get really excited about him. But like the other five million residents of Colorado, I have come to love the amazing Broncos quarterback who does not hide his evangelical Christian faith. According to a poll by a national sports magazine, Tebow is today the most popular American athlete, ahead of Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning, and (no surprise here) Tom Brady. Tim Tebow has made believers out of millions in more ways...

Sir Fred Hoyle Vindicated (Via Dr. Benny Peiser of the GWPF) According to new research to be published in Nature Geoscience  (embargoed until 1800 GMT/10AM PST, Sunday 8 January 2012), the next ice age could set in any time this millennium where it not for increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions that are preventing such a global disaster from occurring. The new research confirms the theory developed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe in the 1990s that without increased levels of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere ‘the drift into new ice-age conditions would be inevitable.’Hoyle and Wickramasinghe...

The recent killing of an aggressive Mexican gray wolf by federal agents at a ranch near Winston could lead to a reassessment of the already struggling recovery effort for that species. The wolf was reportedly shot by agents with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division on Dec. 14, after it paced across the porch and gazed through the window of John and Crystal Diamond’s Beaverhead Ranch home. The Diamond residence is located in Catron County, although near enough to Sierra County to be in the Winston mailing area. The wolf was killed just weeks after the Arizona Game...

Houston-based Pelican Refining Co. has been fined $12 million for felony violations of the Clean Air Act at its Louisiana refinery. A federal judge in Lafayette, La., imposed the fine - the largest ever in Louisiana for violations of the act - after the company pleaded guilty in October. The violations were ...

The Nature Conservancy — a tax-exempt corporation — is a pretty aggressive purchaser of land in the Third World in the name of environmentalism. One of its mottoes is “Donate to The Nature Conservancy and give back to nature.” In Kenya, a gift may have gone a little to far back to nature — all the way to the law of the jungle. From the Guardian: Members of the Samburu people in Kenya have been abused, beaten and raped by police after the land they lived on for two decades was sold to two US-based wildlife charities, a rights group...

The 20th century will be remembered for the totalitarian monsters of various stripes who conceived, planned and executed programs of selective mass extermination of humans. I think that all Leftists, without exception, including the meekest of democratic socialists, have been implicated - knowingly or in consciously cultivated ignorance – as apologists for, or accomplices and abettors to the crimes of the totalitarians. I am stating this categorical proposition so bluntly rather late in life, although I have been convinced of its verity for as long as I can remember being able to recognize the evidence, i.e. since my teens. I...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has settled with Lafarge North America Inc., a large construction materials supplier in the United States and Canada, as well as four of its U.S. subsidiaries, to resolve alleged Clean Water Act violations. The settlement includes a fine and the creation, within the company, of the positions of environmental vice president and ...

Animal rights groups suffered a setback as the Appellate Division of the New Jersey state Superior Court....

What we instead need are more free markets and more liberty – for history has shown that this is the way for our country’s restored greatness – both as a nation but also for the general populace. To that end, we will be rallying on December 3rd at 11:30 a.m. on the West Steps of the Colorado State Capitol to show support for free market capitalism. Additionally, we will be having a charity drive for a charity to be determined to help show that voluntary contributions – not forced altruism at the hand of the government – is the most...

Like a good neighbor, Canada is there—offering America tens of thousands of jobs, protection against soaring gas prices and up to 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day for Oklahoma and Gulf Coast refineries to process—if America accepts TransCanada’s proposal to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast. Let’s say your neighbor invites you over to her holiday party and you respond: “No way, you’re an animal killer. Last year, you served meatballs at your party and I’m against animal cruelty.” Don’t expect your neighbor to ever talk to you again. Likewise, Canada has...

H.L. Mencken, I think it was, who uttered the immortal phrase "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." No one is a greater admirer of the dynamic and generous society that is America, and when I consider all the nations we could have had living next door I often think we won the neighbourhood lotto. But for some reason Mencken's phrase kept echoing in my head when I heard the news about Washington's plan to delay their decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. Folly is too kind a word for this decision. It is the crassest...

Obama delays Keystone decision until after 2012 reelection bidBy Ben Geman - 11/10/11 05:54 PM ET The Obama administration announced Thursday it would delay a politically explosive decision on the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline until after the 2012 elections. The pipeline is especially treacherous waters for President Obama because it splits key elements of his base. While green groups oppose it, several major unions are pushing for approval. Keystone had become a serious thorn in Obama’a side, with environmental groups warning they’d feel betrayed if the pipeline moved forward. Business groups and unions had heralded the thousands of...

We’ve made a bit of a mistake as a conservative movement fixating so much on the race for the White House. There’s a behind the scenes fight happening in Washington right now. Congressional Republicans are not just selling us out, they are hell bent — and I really do mean hell bent — on destroying the conservative groups raising red flags about what they are doing.For so long the GOP in Washington could hide behind surveys like the American Conservative Union survey, which shows just how much more someone is Republican than Democrat. No one actually did a survey that...

Barack Obama is busy, busy, scattering largesse to the populace. Whatever he can say to win votes — he’ll say it. His address in Denver yesterday included not only the announcement of his highly impactful student loan program reforms, but also a testy reassurance that he’s taking into consideration concerns about a proposed pipeline — the Keystone XL — that would run from Canada to Texas: During an event with young people in Denver, one activist interrupted Obama’s remarks, urging the president to reject the project.“We’re looking at it right now, all right?� Obama replied. “No decision’s been made and...

Occupy Wall Street may be "leaderless," but it's far from directionless. In the time since the protest movement began on Sept. 17, its "We Are the 99 Percent" (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/) message has exploded into a national rallying cry, inspiring not only a bustling mini-city in New York's financial district, but also an overnight network of sympathizers from Seattle to Miami. According to the unofficial umbrella group Occupy Together, some 1,500 cities worldwide will see "Occupy" events this week. And while the nebulous campaign is focused mainly on economic issues, it has also strived for inclusiveness, winning the support of diverse groups...

WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - There are some who say all forms of asbestos are unsafe and to be exposed to any amount is hazardous, while others say that one form of asbestos can be handled safely. Then there are some who are not sure. Some of the leading scientific researchers, experts in the field of mesothelioma research and occupational medicine, have divergent opinions on the nature of the hazards caused by asbestos. Four scientists were asked four questions about asbestos. Each one of them has distinguished ...

A prime complaint against Rick Perry is that some have attributed to him that he doesn't support the building of a border fence. This is not true. Perry is for a more comprehensive border security system that includes strategic fencing, better surveillance, and "boots on the ground." If you have ever visited the border regions of Texas, you will agree with me that constructing a fence along the entire 1,200 mile border is not only horribly expensive, but very disruptive to the environment, private property, and the Rio Grande.

John Rossomando Follow John on Twitter The Solyndra scandal along with subsequent revelations that politically connected yet financially troubled solar manufacturers may have traded political influence in return for billions worth of loan guarantees makes the need to ban pay-to-play in federal contracting loom larger than ever. When I first looked into Solyndra last winter, I thought it was peculiar that the president, the vice president and the secretary of energy decided to show up at a random solar company to showcase a particular loan guarantee. That immediately smelled of a political rat to me. But lone behold there stood...

President Obama’s war on fossil fuels is adding to instability in a world already racked by international debt, demographic pressures and unpredictable, galloping technological advances. The domestic implications of his policies are increasingly apparent: The closing off of prospecting and drilling is costing tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of jobs. The attempt to choose winners and losers through “green energy” subsidies is producing market distortions, huge losses of taxpayers’ funds and corruption rarely seen since the Soviet Union’s Gosplan. Using executive fiat for arbitrary environmental rulings after Mr. Obama’s “cap and trade” climate plan quietly died in Congress is eroding...

Municipal bonds have always been synonymous with tax-free income. That would end if President Obama gets his way. Under the jobs bill the President sent to Congress Monday, high-income individuals and families would no longer receive interest from state and municipal bonds free completely from federal income taxes, beginning in 2013. The legislation would also reduce the value of tax deductions for taxpayers in the highest bracket. Specifically, individuals earning over $200,000 and families earning over $250,000 would effectively have the value of tax breaks against the top 35% bracket lowered to the 28% bracket.

Barack Obama is losing his grip on the White House - and climate sceptic Rick Perry is favourite to succeed him A year or so ago, the very idea that the most powerful person on the planet could, within just a couple of years, be someone who refuses to accept the science that underpins our knowledge of anthropogenic climate change was almost laughable. [snip] But everything has changed now. The US economy continues to wade through treacle and, as a result, there seems to be growing talk that Obama is destined to be a one-term president. And currently leading the...

More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term. The smog decision is...

t may have taken the largest wildfire in Arizona history, but for the first time in decades, environmentalists and government officials agree on a key element of future forest management. The U.S. Forest Service said in a report this month that “intense thinning treatments” can ease future wildfires, by removing trees between six and 18 inches in diameter to allow for additional space between trees. “Everyone agrees that a lot of the dry forest types need to be treated in terms of removing the vegetation,” said Morris Johnson, a research ecologist with the Forest Service and co-author of the report....

As late as April of 2011, the Water Management Chief for the Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, expressed an opinion in an e-mail to a concerned citizen that the mountain snow melt this year would "be nothing to write home about." This internal e-mail, among many others recently released through a Freedom of Information Act request by Gannett's Washington Bureau, exposes that assertion as a gross misstatement of known facts. The e-mails reveal that a cadre of hydrologists, engineers, and National Weather Service (NWS) officials had repeatedly warned the chief, Ms. Jody Farhat, beginning in January about the danger posed...

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann claims the U.S. has more energy resources than any other country but isn't exploiting them because of radical environmentalists. ... As president, Bachmann said she would unlock those resources and eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

Before Hurricane Irene made landfall, environmental extremists were spouting off three certainties about the storm: It is catastrophic; it was caused by global warming; and it is all President Obama’s fault. On Thursday, climate alarmist Bill McKibben wrote, “Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.” ... [snip] The past few years have seen significant body blows to the global warming theory, including major revelations of altered, misused or just plain fraudulent data, undue financial interests and appearances of impropriety among climate scientists, and contrived “carbon markets” closely tied to global warming alarmists who stood to make millions of...

Each summer, animal activists travel across the country to meet and discuss the latest topics of the animal rights movement. This year, animal agriculture was once again the focus. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) hosted its annual Taking Action for Animals Conference in Washington, D.C. on July 15-18, and Farm Animal Rights Movement’s Animal Rights 2011 Conference (AR 2011) was held two weeks later on July 21-25 in Los Angeles. Both events claimed to have “record-breaking” attendance, attracting a combined total of more than 1,600 activists from around the world, ranging in age from 20-60 years old....

The American Renewable Energy Day conference in Aspen didn't cite Gore by name, but one of the opening speakers on Thursday suggested that audience members adopt aggressive tactics when dealing with climate deniers. Jigar Shah, CEO of an organization called the Carbon War Room, told the audience they must “confront the liars” on climate change issues or they are “part of the problem.” Shah urged them to “make a scene in public” by confronting politicians or speakers who suggest that alternative energy isn't a viable option for handling power needs and reducing carbon emissions. ... Lester Brown...founder and president of...

“They Did It!” The President just concluded a frenzied “jobs” bus tour to explain why unemployment is at 9.1% — after borrowing nearly $5 trillion in stimulus the last three years. You know the usual suspects responsible for our, not his, malaise: George Bush did it; the Republican obstructionists in the Congress who were wary of approving another $2 trillion in debt did it; the Tea Party did it; Standard and Poor’s did it; the Japanese earthquake did it; the Japanese tsunami and nuclear accidents did it; the Middle East unrest did it; the European debt crisis did it; new...

A controversial proposal to build a massive underground pipeline to carry 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas has become the environmental issue of the summer, pitting developers and labor unions desperate for construction jobs against environmentalists and Native American tribes who fear the pipeline will spell environmental disaster. TransCanada Corp.'s proposed Keystone XL project would consist of more than 1,700 miles of 36-inch-diameter pipe, about 327 miles of which would be in Canada while the rest would snake southward through the central United States. Because the pipeline would...

The economic impact of the 1995 Deep Water Royalty Relief Act is huge as are the consequences that would result from its modification or repeal by Congress.

<p>With 9.1% unemployment and gasoline prices in the stratosphere, President Obama must sometimes wish that some big corporation would suddenly show up and offer a shovel-ready, multibillion-dollar project to create 100,000 jobs and reduce U.S. reliance on oil from dictatorships.</p>

The most prolific marine ecosystem on earth is being systematically destroyed on orders of the U.S. Department of the Interior.(snip)Dept. of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last September 15, “We are notifying offshore operators of their legal responsibility to decommission and dismantle their facilities when production is completed.”Dismantling their production platforms could cost oil operators “$6 billion to $18 billion in lost future production,” according to a report by Mark Kaiser and Allan Pulsipher of the Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies. The federal government, however, is unmoved by such projections. Production? Costs? Profits?—come on!

The meatpacking industry causes 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the release of methane from animals. The livestock industry also consumes huge amounts of feed and water in relation to the amount of meat that it yields, and many find the industry to be inhumane and cruel to animals. These factors alone are reason enough for vegetarians to replace their meat intake with vegetable proteins and legumes. But Ikeda, a scientist at the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama, sought to further the field of alternative proteins by recycling a form of protein-rich waste : sewage mud....

"It's not an understatement to say liberalism is lost," Shellenberger said. "It might win some elections, it might have a majority here or there, it might get health care done, but as a governing philosophy, it's really at its end." [snip] ...questions posed at the weekend sessions, dubbed the "Breakthrough Dialogues," will be the kind that liberals don't discuss publicly and certainly not at the start of a presidential campaign, when canned sound bites dominate: What kind of entitlements should liberals fight to preserve in an era of shrinking resources? .."What does poverty mean in a society where the poor...