Free Republic

We need to sell more rhino horns, quickly. That may be the only way to save rhinos from extinction. Today, rhinos vanish because poachers kill them for their horns. Businesses turn their horns into ornaments or quack health potions. Some horns sell for $300,000. No wonder poachers risk their lives for one. How do you fight an incentive that strong? Flood the market! That's a solution suggested by Matthew Markus. Markus's biotech company can make artificial rhino horn in a laboratory that's virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Put enough of that lab-grown horn on the market and supply and...

As a senior archivist for the KGB’s foreign-intelligence directorate, Vasili Mitrokhin had access to a treasure trove of information. He unveiled those secrets after defecting to Britain in 1992. One such secret concerned the “active measures” — the lies – the KGB had used against the West during the Cold War. In the 1980s, for example, the KGB spread a couple of particularly pernicious rumors. It claimed the United States had manufactured the AIDS virus and that rich Americans were murdering children in the Third World for organ-harvesting purposes. Framed by faux science and ideologically screened “experts,” and harnessing anti-American...

House lawmakers want the Trump administration to investigate reports that a wealthy foundation used an offshore shell company to give millions of dollars to environmental activists opposed to U.S. energy development. “If you connect the dots, it is clear that Russia is funding U.S. environmental groups in an effort to suppress our domestic oil and gas industry, specifically hydraulic fracking,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday. Smith and Texas Republican Rep. Randy Weber asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to investigate whether or not environmentalists were funneling money to U.S. environmental groups through a Bermuda-based shell company. Republicans are pitching...

Democrat super-lobbyist Tony Podesta was paid $170,000 over a six-month period last year to represent Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, seeking to end one of the Obama administration’s economic sanctions against that country, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned. Podesta, founder and chairman of the Podesta Group, is listed as a key lobbyist on behalf of Sberbank, according to Senate lobbying disclosure forms. His firm received more than $24 million in fees in 2016, much of it coming from foreign governments, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Today is the 47th annual Earth Day. On this day, it is worth reflecting on how completely, totally wrong environmental alarmists often are. Few things tell us more about the environmental movement—where it’s been and, more importantly, where it is now—than its dismal track record in the predictive department.Case in point: Paul Ehrlich, who is as close to a rock star as you’re apt to find among environmentalists. Ehrlich is most famous for his 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” in which he famously predicted that, during the 1970s and 1980s, humanity would suffer mass famine and starvation due to overpopulation....

There is no practical rationale behind any federal agency having a private army to bully, extort and ultimately endanger American citizens. When it comes to disparate groups of protesters who claim to value the land, the line is drawn definitively between the raucous, violent rabble that descended upon the Cannonball River in North Dakota and the orderly numbers that arrived at Malheur Wildlife Refuge and the Bundy Ranch in Nevada. Let’s list the differences, shall we?

SANTA FE — Opposition to the shale oil extraction process known as fracking is growing, particularly among minorities, threatening the political viability of the oil industry in New Mexico, an oil and gas industry expert told state lawmakers Thursday. Claire Chase, the government affairs director for Mack Energy of Artesia, said while state government is heavily reliant on oil revenues, New Mexico is the most vulnerable state in the nation to increasing opposition to fracking and fossil fuels in general. She said a new culture of protests and activism has the oil and gas industry in its sights. Chase said...

It has been consistently evident that left-wing environmentalists and their professionally unemployed protesters are the most hypocritical bunch of moonbats around the drum circle of social and economic stupidity.

A cleanup to prevent an "environmental disaster" is underway at a protest camp near the Dakota Access Pipeline. The camp had been occupied by thousands of environmentalists and Native Americans who were demonstrating against the pipeline project. It was the Native Americans who requested help with the cleanup, as massive amounts of garbage, human waste, teepees, and abandoned vehicles must be removed before the spring thaw when flooding is expected.

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...