Free Republic

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

FLESH OF YOUR FLESH

Warming: After stifling a report questioning the science behind climate change, the EPA is censoring two of its lawyers for saying the proposed solutions are also problematical. The debate isn't over. It's being suppressed. In the proud tradition of EPA whistle-blower Alan Carlin, whose leaked study blew the lid off the EPA's hyped and flawed science behind climate change, two EPA lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, have produced a Web video titled "A Huge Mistake." In it they say cap-and-trade in general and the Waxman-Markey bill in particular are the wrong answers anyway. Williams and Zabel do not deny...

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was the target of an elaborate hoax by the Yes Men leading some major media outlets to believe that it had reversed its opposition to the Kerry-Boxer climate bill pending approval in the Senate. Now it seems the chamber has officially expressed support for legislation that would cut carbon emissions — but still in confusingly vague terms. Apparently, the organization sent a letter to Senators Barbara Boxer and James Inhofe (full text), the party leaders in the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee where the bill is being amended, supporting climate change...

We’ve had it with sexism, racism, religious prejudice – all now considered utterly unacceptable in the workplace. Will employees across UK Plc now have to start watching their tongues in case they are guilty of greenism? After yesterday’s legal landmark ruling, “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief” akin to religion. This judgment means a company must not discriminate against someone because of their deeply-held environmental convictions. So no more jokes about the office hippy at the sustainable water-cooler then. It has all come about because Tim Nicholson, 42, of...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Thanks for killing the planet, dog owners. Well, that's a rough paraphrase of a New Zealand study that claims a medium-size dog leaves a larger ecological footprint than an SUV. In "Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living," authors Robert and Brenda Vale argue that resources required to feed a dog — including the amount of land needed to feed the animals that go into its food — give it about twice the eco-footprint of, say, building and fueling a Toyota Land Cruiser. Noting that a cat's pawprint was roughly equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf's, "New...

Ecology: The administration creates the mother of all protected habitats for a species whose numbers have increased since Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." It's our hopes for energy independence that are drowning. When filmmaker Phelim McAleer, whose documentary "Not Evil Just Wrong" takes apart the myths of global warming, got to ask Gore a question at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, McAleer brought up the nine critical errors in Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." A British court two years ago listed them and said they must be righted before the film could be shown in schools...

Environmentalism: As polls show belief in global warming is dropping, a new study suggests that dogs and cats, like people, are a plague upon the earth. They say people should have edible pets. Here, kitty, kitty. A new Pew Research Center study conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 says the number of Americans who think there's solid evidence the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades has plummeted from 71% in April 2008 to 57% today. Over the same period, there's been a comparable decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising...

Biofuel refineries in the US have set fresh records for grain use every month since May. Almost a third of the US corn harvest will be diverted into ethanol for motors this year, or 12pc of the global crop. The world's grain stocks have dropped from four to 2.6 months cover since 2000, despite two bumper harvests in North America. China's inventories are at a 30-year low. Asian rice stocks are near danger level. Yet farm commodities have largely missed out on Bernanke's reflation rally in metals, oil, and everything else. Dylan Grice from Société Générale sees "bargain basement" prices....

Politics: Move over, John McCain and Olympia Snowe. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is fast becoming the Democrats' favorite Republican as he partners with John Kerry to push cap-and-trade through the Senate. Earlier this year, eight Republican congressmen made it possible for Waxman-Markey, the 1,400-page job- and economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation, to barely pass the House of Representatives. At the time it seemed dead on arrival in the Senate if it was brought up there this year. Once again, as with their medical plan, the Democrats seek to better the odds by putting a GOP hood ornament on a Democratic clunker....

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Activists around the globe are staging thousands of demonstrations Saturday aimed at prodding the world's policymakers to cut carbon concentrations to below their current levels, at a time when many U.S. officials and experts are trying to dampen expectations for international climate talks that culminate in Copenhagen in December.

When Barack Obama promised to deliver "a new kind of politics" to Washington, most folk didn't picture Rahm Emanuel with a baseball bat...What is a little novel is the public and bare-knuckle way in which the Obama team is waging these campaigns...In recent weeks the Windy City gang added a new name to their list of societal offenders: the Chamber of Commerce. For the cheek of disagreeing with Democrats on climate and financial regulation, it was reported the Oval Office will neuter the business lobby. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett warned CEOs they'd be wise to seek better protection. That was...

The media, polls and even scientists suggest the global warming scare is all over but the shouting The great global warming scare is over — it is well past its peak, very much a spent force, sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end. You may not know this yet. Or rather, you may know it but don’t want to acknowledge it until every one else does, and that won’t happen until the press, much of which also knows it, formally acknowledges it.   I know that the global warming scare is over but for the shouting because that’s...

At a conference for environmental journalists in Wisconsin, Al Gore dodged questions on the many identified errors in his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "We're very close to that political tipping point," Gore said. "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions." While the audience of environmental journalists were largely in agreement with Mr. Gore's presentation and his positions, one Irish journalist and filmmaker asked Gore about the many scientific errors that were found in Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "A judge in the British High Court,...

A libertarian non-profit organization in Washington today announced it was filing suit against the Obama administration for failing to adequately disclose global warming documents. As we reported two weeks ago the Competitive Enterprise Institute deemed inadequate the Treasury Department's response to a Freedom of Information Act request for documents on cap-and-trade. Months after the FOIA request, Treasury responded by giving CEI five documents and emails, when the group had expected 50. "Your response fails any reasonable test for compliance with FOIA and constitutes an effective denial of our request," CEI's Christopher Horner stated in the notice of appeal filed with...

Just how many communists are there holed up in the Obama White House anyway? John Holdren, Obama's biggest radical and Science Czar, slammed the idea of American exceptionalism and explicitly said that we need to redistribute energy and material resources during the Bali Conference on global warming on July 12, 2007. John Holdren says the US should redistribute the wealth with green policies:

WE'VE seen mass hysteria before, but we weren't then mad enough to make it government policy. ..... But that's nothing when compared with today's galloping paranoia over invisible gases, which threatens to shut not just one airport, but entire industries and power stations. This is the mass hysteria over global warming - a hysteria caught by millions of Australians who can no more explain why they're sure the world is heating to hell than they can explain why it's now cooling instead. All this would be frightening enough - another sign of our retreat from reason - but what makes...

About 100 people turned out this morning to protest at the National Clean Energy Summit. They waved flags and carried homemade signs denouncing everything from carbon cap and trade proposals to reform for the nation's health care policy to the presidency of Barack Obama in general. The anti-Obama and Reid protesters remained in force on the corner of Swenson Street and Tropicana Avenue near the Thomas & Mack Center on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus, site of the summit. "How can you help the environment if you bankrupt the economy that has to do it?" asked protester Greg...

The L.A.Times' Dan Neil is confused. He thinks that the so-called progressive movement is right on all the issues, but he just cannot understand why they can't win the public debate. Neil laments that they have all the "English majors" on their side but cannot win "any war of words." Just what is going on here, he wants to know? He's so frustrated that he took to his keyboard to ask these questions in a Pittsburgh Gazette article from August 9. In his piece, Neil wonders, for instance, why the "progressives" are so inept at debate and cannot convince the...

"One cause of the blunders that have made the Met Office a laughing stock is less widely appreciated, however. It is that the multi-million pound computer it uses to assist its short-term forecasting for Britain is also one of the four main official sources of data used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict global warming. In this respect the IPCC's computer models have proved just as wrong in predicting global temperatures as the Met Office has been in forecasting those mild winters and heatwave summers." "In recent months, in fact, a curious little drama has...

Professor William Calvin Unhinged! Calls on scientists to use 'interventional activism' to combat global warming! 'Climate will change our ways of doing science' - Claims 'long term thinking can be dangerous' Monday, August 03, 2009- By Marc Morano – Climate Depot [Climate Depot Editorial Note: Dr. Calvin should consider heeding the wisdom of Dr. Richard Lindzen. See: MIT Climate Scientist Lindzen: 'Ordinary people see through man-made climate fears -- but educated people are very vulnerable' - July 6, 2009 ] By William Calvin, Neuroscientist at the University of Washington School of Medicine; Author of “A Brain for All Seasons: Human...

The staggered phase out of energy-wasting light bulbs begins on Sept. 1 in Germany. The unpopularity of the energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs that will replace them is leading consumers and retailers to start hoarding the traditional bulbs. As the Sept. 1 deadline for the implementation of the first phase of the EU's ban on incandescent light bulbs approaches, shoppers, retailers and even museums are hoarding the precious wares -- and helping the manufacturers make a bundle. The EU ban, adopted in March, calls for the gradual replacement of traditional light bulbs with supposedly more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL). The...

Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver SunJuly 28, 2009 Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him. Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic. Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental...

Congress Considering Legislation that Could Help [Insert State Name Here] and the Rest of the Nation Avoid Worst Effects [multi-state press release] CHICAGO (July 28, 2009) — If the United States does not significantly curb heat-trapping emissions, global warming will seriously harm [Insert State Name Here] climate and economy, according to a new peer-reviewed report released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report also found that a combination of clean energy policies—such as those currently under consideration by the U.S. Senate—would help blunt the extent and severity of global warming in [Insert State Name Here] and nationally....

Climate Fear Promoters Attempt to Explain Record Cold and Snow: 'Global warming made it less cool' Climate Fear activists switch from predictions of 'climate crisis' to "global warming made it less cool' Monday, July 27, 2009 - By Marc Morano – Climate Depot Climate Depot Editorial The year 2009 is proving to be a yet another very inconvenient year for the promoters of man-made global warming fears. As the “year without a summer” continues, the U.S. in July alone has broken over 3000 cold temperature records, and global temps have fallen .74F since Gore's film “An Inconvenient Truth” was released...

That the press in general is sympathetic to the tenets of global warming and environmental alarmism in general is nearly beyond dispute. But Reuters, the wire service that U.S. news outlets heavily rely on for international news, has taken its environmental bias further and has crossed the line into open advocacy. Consider a few graphics I captured at various Reuters reports during the past week. (GRAPHICS at link)...

Jumbo Humboldt squid wash up minutes after 4.0 earthquake hit off the coast of La Jolla It was an odd start to the morning in La Jolla. First residents were jolted out of bed at 7.34 a.m. by a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that was centered 19 miles out to sea. First residents were jolted out of bed by an earthquake, which is not uncommon in San Diego, but what happened just minutes later was a little fishy. “I was having coffee up on the balcony and I felt it shaking,” Kate Lutkemeier said. She wasn’t the only one. “I heard...

Al Gore on Tuesday compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis. The former vice president said the world lacked the political will to act and invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill by encouraging leaders to unite their nations to fight climate change. He also accused politicians around the world of exploiting ignorance about the dangers of global warming to avoid difficult decisions. Speaking at Britain's Oxford University at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by the Times of London, Gore said, "Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to...

...Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, keen to engineer an encore, saw his opportunity when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were inaugurated as president and vice-president in 1993. To capitalize on Al Gore’s interest in global warming, Enron immediately embarked on a massive lobbying effort to develop a trading system for carbon dioxide, working both the Clinton administration and Congress. Political contributions and Enron-funded analyses flowed freely, all geared to demonstrating a looming global catastrophe if carbon dioxide emissions weren’t curbed. An Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming, meanwhile, was quietly buried...

What will it take to get developing nations to sign up to a global climate agreement? A critical part of the answer, it seems, is cold, hard cash. Wealthy nations are considering just how much poor countries should be paid to help combat global warming. Countries in poorer parts of the world like China and India are demanding that wealthier regions like the European Union and North America fund their efforts at developing clean energy technologies and help them adapt to the effects of climate change caused largely by accumulated emissions from the industrialized West. Money to fund these efforts...

The choice might not be quite that stark, but an energy watchdog is alarmed about the threat to the environment from the soaring electricity needs of gadgets like MP3 players, mobile phones and flat screen TVs. In a report Wednesday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency estimates new electronic gadgets will triple their energy consumption by 2030 to 1,700 terawatt hours, the equivalent of today's home electricity consumption of the United States and Japan combined. The world would have to build around 200 new nuclear power plants just to power all the TVs, iPods, PCs and other home electronics expected to...

Here’s a curious development for you: Brian Rogers, spokesperson for John McCain’s presidential campaign last year, is now working for Al Gore. Rogers sent an email dispatch on Friday announcing his new job as research director for Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. In the email, Rogers said he will be “working on the Repower America campaign to pass comprehensive energy and climate change legislation.” On the campaign trail last year, Rogers’ shining moments included attacking Barack Obama for opposing increased domestic oil and gas production, arguing that Obama lived in “a frickin’ mansion” that was “bought in a shady deal...

RUSH: Now, I got some sound bites here with Chris Matthews and Mike Pence last night.  I want to play these for you because it's very instructive about what the liberal media is attempting to do to Republicans: portray Republicans as anti-science; portray Republicans as not believing in evolution, only believe in creationism; blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  I play this Matthews stuff for you because I don't think it's just Matthews.  Normally I won't give a hoot, but I think this is a template that the left has come up with and that they're going to be...

The Obama administration wants to reduce oil consumption, increase renewable energy supplies and cut carbon dioxide emissions in the most ambitious transformation of energy policy in a generation. But the world’s oil giants are not convinced that it will work. Even as Washington goes into a frenzy over energy, many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made. Royal Dutch Shell said last month that it would freeze its research and investments in wind, solar and hydrogen power, and focus...

Commentary: Only solar energy can give us what we'll needSANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Some of the smartest minds in the world gathered last week at the Aspen Institute in Colorado to discuss the environment. Bottom line: We are wasting a lot of time, money and effort on ineffective ways to address climate change. We need better policies and plans -- now. Everyone agreed, from the chief executive of Duke Energy Corp. and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to the leader of the Evangelical Environmental Network. We're not energy-efficient and the challenges of becoming so are bold and...

In 1912 scientists thought they'd discovered the elusive missing link between human and ape. Found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, a set of intriguing skull and jaw fragments were later reconstructed by the British Museum into a human-like head with an ape-like jaw. In 1953 it turned out the find wasn't proof of anything—other than the skill of the still anonymous forger. The skull was a medieval human's. The jaw was an orangutan's. And the teeth were a chimp's.

WASHINGTON — The debate on global warming and energy policy accelerated on Tuesday as two senior House Democrats unveiled a far-reaching bill to cap heat-trapping gases and move the country quickly from dependence on coal and oil. But the bill leaves crucial questions unanswered and as of now has no Republican support. For those reasons, it marks the beginning, not the end, of debate in the current Congress on how to deal with two of President Obama’s top priorities, climate change and energy. The draft measure, written by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts,...

As the climate crisis mounts and Arctic icebergs slip away, polar bears are suffering starvation, population declines, and drowning as they must swim further and further to find food. Seeking to raise awareness for the endangered species' plight, ADDI Concepts has taken wildlife preservation literally by designing a life-vest for displaced polar bears struggling to stay afloat as their homes sink into the sea. Polar bears are facing a bleak future as Arctic icebergs continue to melt and ancient shelves of ice collapse. The species inhabits only the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding areas, and they and can hunt consistently...

Gore to publish follow-up climate book NOBEL Peace Prize winner and former US vice President Al Gore will publish a follow-up to his global warming awareness bestseller "An Inconvenient Truth" on November 3. The book will be called "Our Choice" and will describe solutions to global warming, the environmental crusader and US publisher Rodale said today. "An Inconvenient Truth reached millions of people with the message...," Mr Gore said. "Now that the need for urgent action is even clearer with the alarming new findings of the last three years, it is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves...

RALEIGH -- Home-school groups and conservatives across the country are infuriated by a Wake County judge's declaration that he will make a North Raleigh mother stop teaching her children at home and send them to public schools. As part of a continuing divorce case, Wake District Court Judge Ned Mangum said last Friday that it would be in the "best interests" of Venessa Mills' three children to go to public school this fall. Mangum said at the hearing that while the children are "thriving," they need to be exposed to the "real world." "It will do them a great benefit...

More on this tonight at 5pm on Fox News.. The audio is from the inauguration. Gore was speaking to a group of young children about Global warming and told them not to listen to their parents. AUDIO AT LINK

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday will name Todd D. Stern, a trusted top aide in her husband’s White House, to serve as a special envoy for climate change, Democratic officials said. Climate was largely ignored by President George W. Bush’s State Department, but the officials said Stern’s appointment shows it will be a priority throughout President Barack Obama’s administration. Stern was staff secretary, a sensitive job that makes him the gatekeeper to every piece of paper the President sees and signs. Also for Clinton, he was senior White House negotiator at the Kyoto and Buenos Aires climate negotiations....

Pornography Prep Schools by: Daniel Allen, January 16, 2009 What did your sixth grader learn at school today? There is a good chance that she learned how to use a condom, or learned about homosexual relations from a gay activist. Or maybe it was a more innocent lesson about the importance of jihad, and how to pray to Allah. Tomorrow it might be a lesson about suicide, or a class discussion about “stupid rules at home” and parental incompetence. The unfortunate truth, as documented in From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth about America’s Public Schools, a collection of stories...

Well what do you know? The Marxisant radical and president elect picked a raging socialist to head his global warming/junk science position. Carol M. Browner was listed as one of the leaders of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society which is an international anti-American, anti-West socialist organization:

<p>Filling the atmosphere with Greenhouse gases associated with global warming could push the planet into a new ice age, scientists have warned.</p> <p>Researchers at the University of Birmingham found that 630 million years ago the earth had a warm atmosphere full of carbon dioxide but was completely covered with ice.</p>

If the Tesla Roadster just isn't enough for you...not fast enough, not weird enough, and not expensive enough, then you should probably start looking out for Eliica's. Just two of these Japanese peculio-mobiles currently exist, but the Eliica team is looking to get corporate sponsorship to produce 200 of them. And, if they get that sponsorship, you'll be able to pick one up for the low, low price of $255,000. Now, I know what you're thinking...why eight wheels? Well, very simply, so it can go faster. Traditionally, more rolling resistance would be a bad thing, but not if each of...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The odds of a "white Christmas" in temperate parts of the northern hemisphere have diminished in the last century due to climate change and will likely decline further by 2100, climate and meteorology experts said. Even though heavy snow this year will guarantee a white Christmas in many parts of Asia, Europe and North America, an 0.7-degree Celsius (1.3 Fahrenheit) rise in world temperatures since 1900 and projected bigger rises by 2100 suggest an inexorable trend. "The probability of snow on the ground at Christmas is already lower than it was even 50 years ago but it...