Free Republic

Global warming/obesity crises unite! — New theory: CO2 making us fat By Caroline May - The Daily Caller 1:06 PM 03/14/2012 ADVERTISEMENT A Danish researcher claims he has discovered yet another reason to combat the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere: it is making us fat. According to the researcher, orexins, neuropeptide hormones in the brain that regulate energy, are negatively affected by CO2 — making us more tired and hungry, Science Nordic reports. Lars-Georg Hersoug of the Research Centre for Prevention and Health at Glostrup University Hospital tracked obesity over a 22-year span. He found that both thin and...

As I’ve written before, I was a very uninformed young person for the first half of my life. I remember watching a movie in the Florida State student union about how Campbell’s Soup treated workers unfairly. I quickly decided to start my own boycott. Inexplicably, they somehow survived my boycott. I once went to the Tallahassee airport to try and meet Gary Hart before his presidential campaign imploded and I also sat on the stage when Jessie Jackson gave a speech during his 1984 race for the White House. As a Political Science undergraduate one of my professors, a self...

Wow. Just wow. Just when you thought Rush Limbaugh couldn’t possibly be any stupider (as most of you know, his vile, disgusting and misogynistic comments on Sandra Fluke have worked out so well for him),  he decided to double down on the dumb. On his March 5 program, Limbaugh said the following about the wind and solar energy markets (emphasis added): The problem with the Chevy Volt [the reason Limbaugh started his alternative energy rant in the first place] is just like all of Obama’s green energy, there’s no business there yet. There’s no solar energy business yet. There’s no...

George Soros, T. Boone Pickens, Kevin G. Douglas and companies under their control stand to reap the rewards of billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies contained in a Democratic-sponsored measure set for a vote this week. The legislation, authored by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), would amend the much-ballyhooed highway bill to include the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions act, or NATGAS act. The act would provide subsidies for individuals, corporations and public entities that purchase natural gas vehicles or build natural gas distribution facilities. The act would subsidize three different enterprises controlled by Soros, Pickens and Douglas, who...

The United States can meet President Barack Obama's goal of producing 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022, but it better get moving. That's according to Tom Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. According to a 2010 Agriculture Department report, the agency plans for the U.S. to produce 13.4 billion gallons of biofuels from grasses and sugars. The rest would come from oil seeds, crop residues and wood waste. The EPA is exploring other sources, such as animal fats, municipal solid waste and algae. The push for more biofuels comes as other industries, such as commercial power companies,...

General Electric has brushed aside the doubts leading Republican presidential contenders have raised about climate science. The US industrial and financial conglomerate said it had long seen climate change as a valid concern after an internal evaluation of the scientific case in 2005. (Snip) Observers have attributed the party’s shift since the last election to a range of factors, including the rise of the anti-regulatory Tea Party and fears about unemployment. Others suggest the change is due to fossil fuel interests using so-called super PACs – the new generation of political action committees empowered by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling...

WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama's job approval rating, weighed down by soaring gas prices, has plunged below 50 per cent, giving his political opponents what appears to be an opening in the November election, a new opinion poll showed. The survey by ABC News and The Washington Post indicated that only 46 per cent of Americans now approved of the way Obama is handling his job and 50 per cent disapproved. The situation was a reversal from early February when 50 per cent approved of the president's performance and 46 per cent disapproved. According to the survey, the drop...

The Obama administration created a $10 million L Prize to award the manufacturer who came up with an affordable and efficient light bulb. One would think the marketplace would take care of that but our federal government no more believes in free enterprise than I believe in global warming. This program began under President Bush. Ah yes, who knows more about efficiency than the federal government? In August, Philips announced: “The U.S. Department of Energy today announced that Philips Lighting North America has won the 60-watt replacement bulb category of the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L Prize) competition. The Department...

The Chevrolet Volt is everything that is wrong with Washington on four wheels, and investors (that’s you and me) should be furious. Wrong #1 : The Volt should be re-named the Vote. Who can forget that Super Bowl ad, with the pseudo-assembly line of Volts rolling through Hamtramck, Michigan, and the voice overlay that “this isn’t the car we wanted to build; it’s the car America had to build…from the heart of Detroit to the help [sic] of the country.” How true—corporate welfare on wheels, buying votes in a state vital to the President’s re-election. There is simply no...

There’s no escaping Solyndra Syndrome. Here in my home state of Colorado, citizen journalists have uncovered our own gaping government-green-loan sinkhole. The stench of Chicago-on-the-Potomac is fouling the fresh Rocky Mountain air. Meet Loveland-based Abound Solar, the lucky winner of a $400 million federal loan guarantee from the Obama administration. Earlier this month, the thin-film cadmium-telluride solar-module maker announced layoffs of nearly 300 employees (70 percent of its work force). In addition, the firm froze plans to build a new factory in Indiana. Abound says it will ride out bad market conditions and “hopefully” survive until the market recovers. But...

In a speech before the Daimler Trucks North America manufacturing plant in Charlotte, N.C. today, the president delivered his answer to rising gas prices: He wants to increase the $7,500 tax credit for alternative-energy vehicles to $10,000, earmark $1 billion to reward cities that provide infrastructure for such vehicles, earmark an additional $650 million for a research program to increase the range and decrease the price of the vehicles, and repeal $4 billion of tax incentives for oil and gas companies.Why? Here is a telltale paragraph from The New York Times: The creditÂ’s enhanced value would bring the purchase price...

A rush to green energy by spending billions covering much of the countryside with wind turbines would be an expensive blunder, a damning study has found. Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University said the massive programme will cost consumers £120billion by 2020 through higher bills. This is almost ten times more than the £13billion it would cost to generate the same amount of electricity from efficient gas-fired power stations, according to the leading energy and environment economist. Professor Hughes said families are being forced to subsidise wind farms through their bills. Meanwhile business energy costs are also being driven up,...

President Barack Obama on Wednesday dismissed oil as "the fuel of the past" as he made an unapologetic election-year pitch for his alternative energy industry policies and sniped at Republicans over painfully high gasoline prices. "They get out on the campaign trail—and you and I both know there are no quick fixes to this problem—but listening to them, you'd think there were," he said at a Daimler Truck manufacturing plant in the battleground state of North Carolina. Obama said that because the United States accounts for 20 percent of the world's consumption of oil but has only 2 percent of...

President Obama boasted at a United Auto Workers conference last week that General Motors was back in business, producing cutting-edge vehicles like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. He even promised to buy one when his time in office ends “five years from now.” Whoops! Just three days later, GM announced that it would suspend Volt production for five weeks this spring, idling 1,300 workers at a Hamtramck, Mich., factory. Alas, Obama’s endorsements notwithstanding, there’s not much of a market for this little bitty car, at least not at the price of almost $32,000 — after a $7,500 federal tax rebate....

State-level conservative blogs and think tanks are doing the work the rest of the “mainstream media” won’t do on government big green boondoggles. Last week, Doug mentioned the Abound Solar debacle here in my home state of Colorado. It’s thanks to the intrepid investigative work of Colorado’s Todd Shepherd and Amy Oliver at Complete Colorado and the Independence Institute and Michael Sandoval at People’s Press Collective that this latest Department of Energy loan scandal has been exposed. Paul Chesser at the NLPC summarized: Yet another solar company that received loan guarantees from the Department of Energy has dismissed factory workers,...

In another clip from the same January 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in which Barack Obama promised to bankrupt anyone foolish enough to build coal-burning power plants, he also made an interesting admission about his entire energy plan. Obama told the editors that his policies would make energy prices “skyrocket” as the energy industry passed along the exorbitant costs of his cap-and-trade policy: The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and...

I'm referring, of course, to the new Las Vegas City Hall. City officials, led by Mayor Carolyn Goodman, have been putting out a ridiculous talking point, bragging that the new city hall will save Las Vegas $400,000 a year in energy costs. "This is an incredible night for us all," the mayor [Carolyn Goodman] said. She said the energy efficient building, which features 33 "solar trees" in the front that generate electricity, will reduce the energy costs by more than $400,000 a year. The same talking point has also been in the RJ multiple times.* Now, we at NPRI are...

In administrating its stimulus-fed loan and grants programs, the Department of Energy has been accused of incompetence, carelessness, recklessness, and cronyism. Now it can add inconsistency to those distinguishing characteristics. Last week Bright Automotive, an electric vehicle start-up company thatGeneral Motors helped two years ago with an investment of at least $5 million from its venture capital arm, gave up hope on winning a $450 million loan from DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program. As the company announced the withdrawal of its loan application and that it would end operations, CEO Reuben Munger and COO Mike Donoughe sent (and...

The solar shakeout continues as Abound Solar, a Colorado startup that aimed to take on industry leader First Solar with a $400 million federal loan guarantee to build photovoltaic panel factories, halts production and lays off 180 workers. In addition to the $400 million loan guarantee, Abound, which was founded in 2007, has raised $260 million in venture funding from investors that include Invus Group, Bohemian Companies, DCM, GLG Partners, Technology Partners, BP Alternative Energy and West Hill Investors. Whether Abound can compete in an increasingly tough solar market remains in question.

A number of states have joined with industry organizations to challenge new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds that they run contrary to the Clean Air Act. Oral arguments began on February 28 before D.C.’s Court of Appeals.Previous cases have not gone so well. In 2007, in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court affirmed the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. And last year, the Court unanimously threw out a lawsuit, American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, that was brought by eight states. In its decision, the court held...