Free Republic

I think most Democrats in Congress went to college, though there is seldom any outward sign of it. While there, they undoubtedly learned about the law of supply and demand. The demand from China and India is jacking up worldwide oil prices and the federal gas tax increases it further. The Democrats are refusing to do anything about it and are absolute sitting ducks on this issue. They won't allow us to drill our own huge reserves that are located in places where no one has ever been and no one will never go. This week they tried, and failed,...

May 27, 2008 -- The polar bears are doing just fine, thank you very much. So says Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who announced last week that her state would sue to block Washington from listing the animals as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. And it's a good thing, too - because the new bear-population protections mask what may be the most serious threat to American economic might in decades. Yes, polar bears. The polar bear, you see, marks the first species on the "threatened" list whose supposed predicament is linked directly to global warming. The current Alaskan polar-bear population...

In an effort to win over those "moderates" who believe that global warming is about to destroy the planet, Republican presidential candidate John McCain spoke Monday at a Portland, Ore., training facility for Vestas Wind Technology. He claimed, "The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington." There certainly is more "hot air" on this and a lot of other subjects in Washington, but that isn't what he meant. The era of big government is so not over, as Bill Clinton claimed it was in 1996. It is just beginning and increasingly the political contests seem to...

Regulation: The Interior Department ruled Wednesday that the polar bear will be protected as a threatened species. Why special treatment for an animal whose population has more than doubled over the last 50 years?Because it's politically correct. The polar bear has become such a beloved icon that even a pro-development Republican secretary of the Interior can't muster the courage to say no to the forces of environmentalism. The polar bear is more than just a cuddly looking beast that roams the Arctic region. It's a wishbone in the fight between misanthropic activists determined to send the developed world back a...

Two researchers spent months scouring through old expedition logs and reports, and reviewing 70-year-old maps and photos before making a surprising discovery. They found that the effects of the current warming and melting of Greenland 's glaciers that has alarmed the world's climate scientists occurred in the decades following an abrupt warming in the 1920s. Their evidence reinforces the belief that glaciers and other bodies of ice are exquisitely hyper-sensitive to climate change and bolsters the concern that rising temperatures will speed the demise of that island's ice fields, hastening sea level rise. The work, reported at this week's annual...

A trio of University of Victoria students has pulled off a minor public relations coup, convincing climate change crusader Al Gore to speak over the Empress Hotel's famous high tea in late September. "It's going to be a 'green tea' of sorts," chuckled Justin Yorke, 20, who still can't believe their good fortune in securing the former U.S. vice-president for the Sept. 29 event at Victoria's conference centre. He and two pals, Jeff Jacobson and Stefan Krepiakevich, all of them fourth-year students minoring in commerce, worked for months on the deal. Six hundred guests will pay $200 apiece for the...

A new Internet tool to help individuals and communities curb their role in adding global-warming carbon emissions will be announced today at a conference in New York of mayors from around the world, said a person who built the Web technology. Many environmental groups offer simple carbon calculators on the Web, which allow people to figure the carbon dioxide production from daily routines like driving a car or lighting a house. “But this is serious software, serious quantitative methods and social networking technology brought to the green world,” said Ron Dembo, the chief executive of Zerofootprint, a nonprofit group that...

Global warming can be interpreted in a number of ways. Matter-of-factly, it is the environmentalist, save-the-earth, sine qua non of the day. From a political perspective, it is a hot potato, one that astute politicians and corporate chiefs must handle carefully to avoid being tainted as anti-green, and thus viewed in the same light as ax-murderers. Practically and philosophically, however, global warming is really about vast new restrictions on freedom. Global warming is the liberal-socialist God-send, the equivalent of the coming of the Marxist messiah. It is a manufactured problem, the truth of which cannot be tested or doubted, serving...

I just woke up from watching the Democrats' debate last Thursday, and I am rested and ready to report! Someone needs to tell the Democrats to stop talking about their families. I know they're trying to demonstrate their "family values," but using actual, live human beings to illustrate the freakish ideas of the Democratic base just makes normal people uncomfortable. When Chris Dodd was asked about gay marriage, he said he always thinks of his little daughters — aged 2 and 5 — and imagines them turning out to be lesbians, saying he would want them treated equally. To prove...

/AP) Never mind the Easter bonnets. In a large swath of the U.S., you had better remember where you put your winter hat and put it on. Just about everywhere east of the Rockies, it's extremely cold for this time of year – with snow in parts of the Northeast and Midwest, and freezing temperatures elsewhere - and it's going to stay this way right through the weekend. Parts of the upper Northeast are slogging through over a foot of snow which closed schools, tangled traffic and knocked out power to more than 180,000 homes and businesses. Frost and freeze...

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures. In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun. "The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said. Solar Cycles Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's...

Increased snowfall over a large area of Antarctica is thickening the ice sheet and slowing the rise in sea level caused by melting ice. A satellite survey shows that between 1992 and 2003, the East Antarctic ice sheet gained about 45 billion tonnes of ice - enough to reduce the oceans' rise by 0.12 millimetres per year. The ice sheets that cover Antarctica's bedrock are several kilometres thick in places, and contain about 90% of the world's ice. But scientists fear that if they melt in substantial quantities, this will swell the oceans and cause devastation on islands and coastal...

Perhaps you have seen the first installments of the series on the arctic meltdown that the CBS TV network is doing for sweeps month. In the first piece they discussed how the arctic region has warmed dramatically in recent years and showed how the arctic ice has retreated along the edges and grown thinner. They promise to have scientists report on the possible cause in follow-up stories this week. They focused on changes near the Arctic Ocean town of Barrow, Alaska. Ice had retreated from the shoreline near Barrow and temperatures have warmed accordingly. They talked about mosquitos being observed,...