Free Republic

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday issued a mixed ruling on a challenge to part of President Barack Obama’s initial wave of greenhouse gas regulations by exempting a small proportion of facilities from a federal air pollution program while allowing most major pollution sources, including power plants, to be included. In what was a relatively narrow case concerning a challenge by industry groups and Republican-leaning states the court, divided in several different ways, held that a small proportion of industrial facilities are exempted from the single regulation in question. Most major facilities, including power plants and refineries, will still be...

HOUSTON (AP) — Mayors from the GOP-dominated states of Texas and Arizona are calling on cities to use nature to fight the impacts of climate change, even while Republican governors and lawmakers repeatedly question the science that shows human-caused pollution contributes to global warming. As conservative governors criticize the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's new rules designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the mayors — many from cities already struggling with climate-change effects — are taking steps and spending money to stem the damage. Attendees of the U.S. Conference of Mayors will vote Monday on a resolution that...

The Lois Lerner email flap isn't the only problem the administration has with record keeping. Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed a lawsuit against the NSA in response to the agency's refusal to comply with two FOIA requests concerning EPA correspondence. Horner is seeking  “metadata” from EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s "phone communications, email and text messages," according to this article in Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal: In advance of her Senate confirmation, McCarthy told lawmakers she was uncomfortable with instant messaging and thus did not use EPA’s “IM” system. But text messaging, Horner said, is something her phone bills...

Various statements and events defy the claim of a ‘universal consensus’ on ‘harmful’ climate change. “Have you noticed that the nature of the crisis du jour may change, but the solutions always involve higher taxes and more power for the political class?” ... There’s a reason some global warming enthusiasts demand that the media refuse to print or broadcast skeptical views. Polls show Americans continually rank “climate change” near the bottom of lists of important issues. Apparently, “global warming is harmful because shut up” is the only argument many activists have left. And there’s a reason the Environmental Protection Agency...

Lawmakers are up in arms over an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal that they fear could give federal officials expansive new powers over private property and farmland. The EPA is seeking to redefine what bodies of water fall under the agency’s jurisdiction for controlling pollution. The scope of the final Clean Water Act (CWA) rule is of critical importance, as any area covered would require a federal permit for certain activities. The rule is facing a groundswell of opposition from lawmakers, who fear the EPA is engaged in a “land grab” that could stop farmers and others from building fences,...

The federal government’s decision to ban energy development across a wide swath of Colorado and eastern Utah to protect the Gunnison sage grouse habitat has raised concerns the action would inflict economic damage. Although the Obama administration was not expected to make its decision as to whether the bird warrants the endangered listing until November, the Bureau of Land Management’s decision this week effectively puts an oil, gas and coal moratorium on 400,000 acres – roughly 90 acres per bird. The final decision was “pushed back until after the election, because when people understand the impact on jobs, people get...

Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray says he is scared to death for this country, for poor people, those who live on fixed incomes and for people who are retiring. Murray says Obama is illegally using the EPA and the Clean Air Act to take over the US Electric Power Grid and in the process he’s destroying low-cost energy. Murray points out that coal is only 4 cents per kilowatt-hour and Obama wants to replace it with renewable energy sources, wind and solar, that cost 22 cents per kilowatt-hour. By 2030, according to Murray, we will be down from 40% coal-fired...

It's often said in the journalism business that there's no news when a dog bites a man but lots of it when the man sinks his choppers in the dog. But what happens when the dog named "EPA" finds itself on the wrong end of the man named "Facts" concerning the alleged benefits of President Obama's proposed climate change regulations? Nothing, at least as far as the national media is concerned. Facts about EPA, as presented by the Brookings Institution, simply aren't news. EPA word games That's curious because Brookings is not the first place one would go to find...

One of the nation’s largest coal companies on Wednesday sued President Barack Obama’s administration seeking to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s new carbon emissions rules for power plants. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by Murray Energy Corp. EPA rules announced this month seek to reduce global warming by forcing a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. […] “This is clearly an illegal attempt by the Obama EPA to impose irrational and destructive cap-and-tax mandates, which Congress and the American people have consistently rejected,”...

Four former Environmental Protection Agency administrators who served under Republican presidents on Wednesday said climate change should not be a partisan issue. The former EPA chiefs told reporters that Republican lawmakers who believe the climate is changing should speak out because voters will be on their side. "This should not be a partisan issue," said William Ruckelshaus, the nation's first EPA administrator under President Richard Nixon and again under President Ronald Reagan. "And public demand for doing something may be able to break it apart." The problem, the four former EPA administrators said, is looking at climate change through a...

Top environmental officials for four Republican presidents are telling Congress what many Republican lawmakers won’t: Action is needed on global warming. EPA administrators for Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan said Wednesday they hoped to inject reason into a debate that is increasingly colored by politics. …

Another New Mexico county has joined a lawsuit to fight the listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species. Lea County in southeastern New Mexico joined three other counties in the state last week in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Interior and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ... U.S. Rep., Steve Pearce, R-N.M., .. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to cater to environmental groups and disregard science will devastate New Mexico’s way of life,” he said. “New Mexicans will pay the price in lost jobs, industry, ranching and oil and gas production.”

Federal authorities have issued a moratorium blocking oil, gas and coal leasing on 800,000 acres of public land in southwestern Colorado and eastern Utah that is habitat for the imperiled Gunnison sage grouse. ... restrictive measures that will impact jobs and economic development

The Hill reports the Environmental Agency (EPA) has delayed its Renewable Fuel Standard compliance deadline for a second time and noted that its 2014 rulemaking “has been more time consuming than originally anticipated, involving over 300,000 comments”: Petroleum companies will get a breather from latest round of renewable fuel standard, as the Environmental Protection Agnecy (EPA) is once again delaying the deadline for compliance with the 2013 standards. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is a program started under the Bush administration that requires that increasing amounts of renewable fuels that emit lower levels of greenhouse gases be mixed with gas...

A former EPA official tied to a controversy over allegations of federal overreach at an Alaska mine project has mysteriously gone off the grid, sources tell FoxNews.com, complicating lawmakers' efforts to question him. Emails from Phillip North, a now-retired Environmental Protection Agency employee, recently surfaced that seem to show the Alaska-based biologist tried to get the Pebble Mine project killed as far back as 2008. Those emails -- and memos indicating government officials worked early on with tribal leaders and environmental groups to oppose the venture -- raised questions about the agency's claims that when it ultimately vetoed the gold-and-copper...

It’s a tough sell trying to push a domestic agenda that will cripple your country. The last things you need getting in the way are facts which don’t support your made-up claims. In more legitimate administrations, the proponents might have had to give up, or scale back on their dubious goals, but not now. Obama does as Obama wants. They’ll just make up more supportive “facts” they like as they go along. It’s too bad for the talking yard gnome, EPA Secretary Gina McCarthy, that someoneinvestigated the veracity and accuracy of her claims. What they discovered is an absence of any...

For people who use the word “science” as a bludgeon and trumpet their strict commitment to fact and reason, the Obama administration and its supporters are strangely incapable of rational analysis of new climate-change regulations. President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency released draft rules last week to create a vast new regulatory apparatus with no input from Congress — in other words, to govern in its accustomed highhanded, undemocratic manner. The goal is to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants, in particular coal-fired plants, to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The rhetoric around the rules has involved...

Approximately thirty miles from my front door is a West Virginia, coal-fired power plant that was recently shut-down by the last round of Obama-imposed EPA mandates. Now the word comes down from Washington that Obama has ordered the EPA to institute another batch of non-congressionally-approved regulations, which are certain to place other West Virginia power plants in jeopardy. In another glaring lie mined by the administration, Obama says these decisions will help the environment.

There is possibly no other issue of our age that is filled with as much confusion, rhetoric and hyperbole as the subject of global warming, climate, weather, or whatever this weeks designated term may be. And while there is evidence to suggest that human beings have impact on the earths atmosphere at some level, as does nearly every living things, it is the level and danger posed to humanity which is at dispute and the demagoguery employed by the left for political and financial gain. The most egregious of lies on the subject of man-made climate change is that their...

One might think that when a President is reeling from a scandal (VA) that has all sides of the political spectrum screaming for heads to roll and for criminal charges against government employees, that his Administration would take a break and wait for the air to clear. But no, not when you are a true believer, and that is what Barack Obama has finally shown himself to all to be. In one very short period, the President has tossed the Israeli government over the side, pushed for radical environmental rules that will by the EPA’s own estimates lower the earth’s...