Free Republic

As the Biden administration and governments worldwide make massive commitments to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, the persistent effort to silence climate change skeptics is intensifying – and the critics keep pushing back. This summer the International Monetary Fund summarily canceled a presentation by John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who publicly disavows the existence of a climate “crisis.” The head of the nonprofit with which Clauser is affiliated, the CO2 Coalition, has said he and other members have been delisted from LinkedIn for their dissident views. Meanwhile, a top academic journal retracted published research doubting a climate emergency after...

With or without Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidates have much to talk about during their first debate Wednesday night. One key topic that should not be omitted but normally receives short shrift in these debates is energy, and what steps related to energy any new Republican president should take upon assuming office in January 2025. Joe Biden felt energy policy so important that he had his Day 1 promise to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline despite the operator, TC Energy, not being found in violation of any U.S. law or regulation related to it, and he carried it out....

Hammering K-12 school children nonstop about the dangers of climate change in every class, even math, art and gym, is child abuse. Barely one-third of fourth graders can read or do math at grade level, according to the latest national scores, but climate activists are demanding kids hear about global warming in every class. New Jersey mandates it, and now Connecticut is following suit as the school year opens. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams is requiring every public school participate in Climate Action Day. The climate push is nakedly political, spearheaded in New Jersey by the governor's wife,...

It’s hot out there. Yeah, it’s summer and summer is typically hot, but it has been hotter than usual this summer across much of the globe. Hundreds, if not thousands, of local daily temperature records around the world have been set during the present heatwave, which, in some locations, has persisted for an extended period of time. The heatwaves are real. I say heatwaves because it is not a single global heatwave but a series of regional ones. For progressive bloviating politicians and alarmed reporters in mainstream media the cause of the present hot weather is simple: climate change. As...

Talk about being sold a bill of duds. Michael Shellenberger (that wonderful, courageous man) had a series of tweets this afternoon and I could not believe my eyes. "People say solar panels don't produce carbon emissions, but they do. And now, a major new investigation by Environmental Progress, drawing on the research of @enricomariutti, finds that solar panels made in China produce at least 3x more carbon emissions than IPCC claims." The report from Environmental Progress points out a fatal flaw in the solar panel data all of this frenzied switch to renewables is based on: it’s either industry sourced,...

Located just about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, Desert Center, California, was once bustling with business. In the ’20s, the local Desert Center Cafe was open 24-7 with customers filtering in and out as they made their way back and forth between the two iconic cities. According to The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, the cafe’s motto was “We lost our keys, we can’t close!” Today, the Desert Center Cafe — along with the rest of the buildings on the dingy Desert Center main street — is abandoned and dilapidated. Other than the small ghost town at its center,...

Renewable energy is the alternative that Democrats and other environmental nuts want to replace reliable oil, gas and coal. But time and time again, people who rely on wind and solar power have had to learn the tough lesson that such alternatives are both undependable and susceptible to the same elements they are supposed to harness. Nowhere was that more true than in Nebraska, where a thunderstorm dumped baseball-sized hail on a solar farm on Friday at a speed of 150 mph — destroying the facility in just a few minutes. Cowboy State Daily reported a storm moved east out...

"Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather hazard," is the first claim in this Washington Post piece warning about the deadly summer heat – and it is almost certainly false. Similar warnings about the deadly weather appear in virtually every mainstream media outlet. First off, the only reason "extreme" temperature kills more people than other weather hazards is that deaths from weather have plummeted over the century – even as doomsday climate warnings about heat, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts have spiked. All extreme weather accounts for only about 0.1 death for every 100,000...

No aspect of the vaunted “energy transition” screams out the word “fantasy” quite so starkly as projections that the U.S. will have to install 47,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission lines by 2035. That’s the assessment not by renewable energy skeptics, but by the enthusiastic promoters of renewables at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As part of an assessment published in early March, the DOE stated that much new transmission will be required, assuming moderate load and massive expansion of “green” energy “in line with the future power sector enabled by all currently enacted laws.” In other words, this...

Back in 2019, I caught an essay by a British journalist named Annie Lord entitled "I Tried to Be Completely Sustainable for a Week." Her logic for this experiment was "If climate change responsibility is going to be foisted onto individuals rather than governments, I thought I should see how doable it is." I am always grateful when climate activists actually try living by the standards they demand the rest of us embrace, so I read her piece with interest. She was, in a word, miserable. "It's lunchtime and I'm frying potatoes over a burning bin," she begins. "My bones...

Early last month, French President Emmanuel Macron shocked Europe by urging the European Union to take a break from imposing additional regulations on struggling industries. The EU has already done “more than its neighbors” to save the planet from environmental doom, said Macron. Any further steps would pose risks for European manufacturing and thus prosperity. Perhaps seeking to present himself as the true leader of a united Europe, Macron has been speaking out on a wide variety of topics in recent weeks – apologizing to Eastern Europe for not listening to their warnings about Russian aggression while also suggesting that...

"Greed of the fossil fuel industry" is "destroying our planet," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. Young people agree. Their solution? Socialism. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says socialism creates "an environment that provides for all people, not just the privileged few." "Nonsense," says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network in my new video. Palmer, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and most of us, spent lots of time in socialist countries. He once smuggled books into the Soviet Union. What he's seen convinces him that environmental-movement socialists are wrong about what's "green." "We tried socialism," says Palmer. "We ran the experiment. It was a catastrophe. Worst environmental...

Italy is leading the revolt against European Union plans to tighten emission limits and push drivers into electric vehicles (EVs) with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni vowing to defend automotive industry jobs. Meloni’s coalition gained power last October and immediately tried to thwart E.U. efforts to ban the sale of new cars running on fossil fuels by 2035, which her predecessor Mario Draghi had supported. Italy argued that the E.U. should not mandate a total switch to electric cars but should also allow the sale of vehicles running on biofuels as well as other traditional sources. The pushback failed and the...

Three quarters of U.K. adults say they think the government will not hit its goal of decarbonizing all sectors of the economy by 2050, according to a survey conducted by YouGov. In fact, as Statista's Anna Fleck reports, out of more than 3,200 people, only 10 percent said they thought it was likely the UK would reach its targets. The survey comes in the wake of the U.K.’s announcement of its new energy plan “Powering Up Britain”, by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.The survey comes in the wake of the UK’s announcement of its new energy plan...

Does the radical climate change agenda know no end? Earlier this year, it was gas stoves -- and then lightbulbs. Then, a few weeks ago, President Joe Biden's administration announced much less gas cars after 2032. Even though about half of Americans say they don't want an electric car and only 6% of drivers are buying them. But that was child's play compared to the latest Biden scheme to shut down as many as half our electric power plants across the country. These are the plants that charge those Tesla batteries and cellphones. They also keep the lights on in...

Vice President Kamala Harris gave a stern warning about the "existential threat" of climate change while speaking with farmers in Africa. Harris, visiting Panuka Farm in Zambia on Saturday, thanked the farmers for a tour of their facilities and demonstrations of their work before turning the conversation to the climate. "The impact of the climate crisis is unmistakable, and without any question in my mind, poses an existential threat to the entire planet," the vice president said. Vice President Kamala Harris gave a stern warning about the "existential threat" of climate change while speaking with farmers in Africa. "The relevance...

Think about what's been happening. We're a blink away from world war. There are drugs taking the lives of 100,000 Americans a year – the biggest cause of death of those between 18 and 45. The president of the United States is clearly cognitively challenged. His predecessor, a clear-headed man who was a hero to the nation, was just indicted in New York – unjustly. Crime and lawlessness are reaching astronomical levels. Children are now being "groomed" to receive "gender-affirming care" through mutilation. "Gender dysphoria" seems to be rampant, with perhaps millions of girls thinking they are boys and vice...

It could be argued that the basic arithmetic showing wind power is an economic and societal disaster in the making should be clear to a bright primary school child. Now the Oxford University mathematician and physicist, researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College, Emeritus Professor Wade Allison has done the sums. The U.K. is facing the likelihood of a failure in the electricity supply, he concludes. “Wind power fails on every count,” he says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power, “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”. Professor Allison’s dire warnings...

A federal fisheries council acknowledged that some power cables for offshore wind turbines could harm certain fish, according to a letter seen by the DCNF. Multiple recent studies have demonstrated that a variety of commercially popular fish can be negatively impacted by their exposure to magnetic fields emitted by high voltage direct current cables, which can confuse their ability to navigate and in some cases leave them exposed to predators. “We were previously aware of this study and agree that it has concerning implications for the possible effects of high voltage direct current cabling on larval behavior and resulting predation...

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report. Unsurprisingly alarming, the report aimed to turn up the heat on governments, the business world, and every one of us to do more about the energy transition. Decarbonization, the report said, had to move faster and more dramatically. Yet that wasn’t the only document that made the headlines this week. Shell also released a report in which it detailed two different scenarios for the future to 2050. In those scenarios, the supermajor’s analysts pitted energy security against the energy transition – something the IPCC reports have never done....