Free Republic

Environmental groups are ready for a fight with President-elect Donald Trump. Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election was a shock to the green movement, which is now consolidating opposition to a GOP-controlled government bent on undoing President Obama’s environmental agenda. If the initial reaction was depression and despair, environmental activists now sound energized to take on Trump. "Our goal is to channel that sense of outrage into political pressure," said Jamie Henn, the co-founder of climate group 350.org.

Liberals and the environmental left have gone into a tizzy over the selection of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt as Donald Trump's pick to head of the Environmental Protection Agency. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi says the Pruitt nomination must be blocked "for the sake of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the planet we will leave our children." New York AG Eric Schneiderman says Pruitt is a "dangerous and an unqualified choice." Independent socialist senator Bernie Sanders declares the Pruitt pick is not only dangerous but also "sad." The League of Conservation Voters calls Pruitt not...

Meanwhile, it’s high time for a new slogan. Call it, ‘Save the Environment…from ‘environmental’ protesters and the U.S. Army Corps Engineers In yesteryears Hollywood got it right when it portrayed native people as being on to government authorities whom they described as: “two-faced” and wont to “speak with a forked tongue”. The governments of later generations may have fooled the masses with their doublespeak and campaign promises that melt like the snow in spring, but it’s all but impossible to fool a people who routinely faced the elements and followed herds to keep their families fed.

Africa is still battling “transitional periods,” from slavery and colonialism, to neocolonialism and eco-imperialism. Its wars, diseases and suffering will never end until we stop having greedy leaders who only care about their families, cronies and tribal members. The continent has enough natural resources to bring peace, health and prosperity to nearly everyone. And yet 90% of Africans still lack electricity and basic necessities, while corrupt leaders who could help transform our nations embezzle billions and leave parents and children starving and poor. From Rwanda and Liberia to the Sudan and Uganda, we see every day the horrible effects of...

The average person may oppose the left, but he fails to grasp how extreme its agenda is. Every new insane policy is treated as an extreme. It's not an extreme. The extreme is inconceivable. It can only be gathered from histories of successful leftist regimes like Stalin's Soviet Union. What we think of as an extreme is just the next step on the ladder that the left is building. Here's the next step. A group of researchers in Oxford University, England have suggested that imposing a massive tax on carbon intensive foods – specifically protein rich foods like meat and...

Drill, Baby Drill! American Made Energy Makes America Great Again Permian, ANWR, Prudhoe, Bakkan…. and so much more. NOW is the time to shut off the Saudi oil cartel flow valve and develop our own God-given natural resources. The only excuse not to become energy independent is a political excuse. The inherent link between energy and security, and energy and prosperity, is real and recognized by every American except sketchy politicians and deceived faux environmentalists. We have the resources, we have the technology, we have the manpower. America has the highest environmental and worker safety standards in the world… it’s...

As we enter the final stretch of a uniquely contentious U.S. presidential race, many wonder whether violence will erupt after the results are in. After a similarly bitter contest earlier this year in the United Kingdom over European Union membership, some observers found a rise in racial hate crimes. Will the same happen in the United States? Most who’ve worried about this have been focused on supporters of Republican nominee Donald Trump. But this year’s minor-party candidates have (as in previous years) also complained that the system is rigged, railing against their lack of news media coverage, their exclusion from debates and the two-party system in general.

A former U.S. senator in Colorado sees parallels between billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer’s meddling in current Senate elections in the state and his hedge fund’s efforts to drain a small Colorado town’s water supply and sell it to the highest bidder. Former Sen. Wayne Allard (R., Colo.) ... In 1995 Tom Steyer descended on Colorado, standing to make millions by exporting the water under the San Luis Valley and selling it to the highest bidder. Draining this particular aquifer would have had disastrous consequences for farms, wetlands and the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Impact from Steyer’s plan would have...

Environmentalists' desired result: Destruction of food production to the point that food is no longer affordable. How to lessen the "surplus population"...Make sustenance so expensive they die of starvation Increasingly, city-dwellers seeking view lots or large acreage have been fleeing the metropolitan areas to build larger and even luxurious homes in rural America, often opposite agricultural operations. Once they’d invested in constructing homes and settled into their new digs, they were awakened to the realities of country living, including the sights, smells and sounds of working farms… and they didn’t like it. The offshoot was a plethora of nuisance suits...

The Sierra Club has adopted a position that would effectively require all electricity in Michigan to come from renewable sources such as wind and solar. This appears to have caused a rift between the environmentalist organization and Lansing’s public utility over the replacement of a coal-fired power station set to close in 2020. The Sierra Club opposes building a natural-gas powered plant to replace the coal-fired plant, the utility says. “I’ve given up trying to talk to them,” said Dick Peffley, the general manager of Lansing’s Board of Water and Light. The Sierra Club supported a natural-gas plant the utility...

Seemingly every day some politician or another, usually from the left of the political spectrum, calls for more infrastructure investment. In North Dakota there is a $3.7 billion infrastructure project under construction. This project received all the necessary federal permits and is 60% complete. But now the Obama administration, bowing to radical left wing protestors, has thrown the project into doubt with its unprecedented decision last Friday to halt construction on one section of the project. Apparently infrastructure investment is not the priority we were led to believe. The project in question is known as the Dakota Access Pipeline. It...

Klamath Basin Agreement proponents have lost not only their grip on reality, but also their traditional American common sense neighborly values Klamath Basin groups claiming to represent the majority of Klamath Basin residents, such as the Klamath Water Users Association (“KWUA”) and the Family Farm Alliance (“FFA”), have long perpetuated the lie that the Klamath Basin Agreements will benefit ALL Basin residents. The first two of these agreements had been initially proposed during the Bush administration in an effort assist Klamath irrigators resolve longstanding science and water delivery disputes with environmentalists and tribal communities. Now, these and several additional new...

A dream born by the environmental watermelon religion, green on the outside, red on the inside I saw the once verdant wheat fields of Eastern Europe covered with ugly wind turbines, slowly spinning their huge blades into the wind. A few funnel dust swirls were blowing the topsoil into the air. They did not appear to be connected to any storage station that would distribute the electrical power generated. I searched and found out that they were really not connected to any network, were not generating usable electricity, they were all for show to placate the “green growth” European bureaucrats...

As Corn Devours U.S. Prairies, Greens Reconsider Biofuel Mandate Bloomberg reports “As Corn Devours U.S. Prairies, Greens Reconsider Biofuel Mandate”. I can only say “What took you so long?” To wit: “Environmentalists who once championed biofuels as a way to cut pollution are now turning against a U.S. program that puts renewable fuels in cars, citing higher-than-expected carbon dioxide emissions and reduced wildlife habitat.”

A London-based advocacy group said Monday it documented 185 killings of environmental activists around the world last year, nearly 60 percent more than in 2014 and the highest since it began collecting data dating back to 2002. In a newly released report, Global Witness said Brazil topped the 16-country list with 50 environmental defenders slain in 2015, followed by the Philippines with 33 and Colombia with 26. The group says 116 were slain worldwide in 2014. Last year “was the deadliest year on record for killings of land and environmental defenders — people struggling to protect their land, forests and...

Two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, labor and environmentalists, are clashing over an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars for an ambitious voter turnout operation aimed at defeating Donald J. Trump in the November election. The rift developed after some in the labor movement, whose cash flow has dwindled and whose political clout has been increasingly imperiled, announced a partnership last week with a wealthy environmentalist, Tom Steyer, to help bankroll a new fund dedicated to electing Democrats. That joint initiative enraged members of the nation’s biggest construction unions, already on edge about the rising influence...

Long before he became one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate — and the target of Congressman Pat Toomey's GOP primary challenge — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania demonstrated a knack for notoriety. In 1964, as a member of the Warren Commission, he invented the "single-bullet theory" to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. Conspiracy junkies have obsessed over him ever since. (In Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Kevin Costner's character labels Specter "an ambitious junior counselor" behind "one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people.") Between serving on the Warren Commission and becoming a...

Never Trust The Doom-Mongers: Earth Day Predictions That Were All WrongEnvironmentalists truly believed and predicted that the planet was doomed during the first Earth Day in 1970, unless drastic actions were taken to save it. Humanity never quite got around to that drastic action, but environmentalists still recall the first Earth Day fondly and hold many of the predictions in high regard. So this Earth Day, The Daily Caller News Foundation takes a look at predictions made by environmentalists around the original Earth Day in 1970 to see how they’ve held up. 1: (1970) “Civilization Will End Within 15 or...

Energy: The benefits of “fracking” have never been greater. Prices are lower and the country is emitting less CO2. Yet most people now oppose fracking. What gives?

What is an environmentalist to do these days? You can support windmills, so long as they don’t disrupt ridgelines, where the wind happens to blow. You have to approve of solar power, except when a solar power plant might disrupt efforts to restore migration routes for 100 sheep in the Mohave Desert. And you once were supposed to support natural gas as a “bridge fuel” between coal and something else, until you weren’t. Now the requirement appears to be that you must oppose fracking at all costs, even though it will likely mean increasing emissions of greenhouse gases.