Free Republic

Not too long ago, a co-worker asked me a question about doing something in the environmental/recycling arena. I looked at her and said, “I’ll do it because it’s there and when it’s easy, but I’m not going to make a religion out of it.” This particular person fell away from the Church, as we say, due to a situation over which a member of the clergy does owe her an apology. Since then, or maybe before that happened, this person became consumed with veganism, environmentalism and various other isms that manifest as a person changes life-style. In a country founded...

Dr David Evans’ address to the Anti-Carbon-Tax rally, Perth Australia, 23 March 2011.Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen.The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence,  was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools and liars out of our politicians.Let’s set a few things straight. The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global...

Sitting in on a March 1 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) press conference regarding global warming and heavy snowfalls, I couldn’t help feeling like the chairman of the Senate committee questioning mafia capo Frank Pentangeli in Godfather II. The chairman, listening incredulously as Pentangeli contradicts a sworn written statement he had earlier given to the committee, waves the written statement in the air and protests, “We have a sworn affidavit — we have it — your sworn affidavit…. Do you deny that confession, and do you realize what will happen as a result of your denial?” The UN Intergovernmental Panel...

Under the rule of the former speaker Nancy Pelosi, a number of steps were taken to reduce the carbon footprint of Congress. A bit like the Republican party, they are white, seemingly indestructible and bad for the environment. But after an absence of four years, foam plastic coffee cups have made a comeback in the basement coffee shop of the United States Congress building after Republicans began reversing a series of in-house green initiatives undertaken by Democrats. The about-turn was announced by a press aide to John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, who tweeted on Monday morning:...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - General Motors Co's mostly electric Chevy Volt turned in a lackluster performance for efficiency in its first series of road tests by product raters at Consumer Reports. "We would have really liked to have loved it," David Champion, director of Consumer Reports auto test center told Reuters on Monday after announcing the organization's top picks for 2011. "It was fun to drive and the ride quality was pretty good. But when you look at the finances, for us it doesn't make any sense," Champion said. He said consumers seeking value and top fuel efficiency would be better...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2011-46 Washington, D.C., Feb. 18, 2011 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a group of seven individuals who perpetrated a fraudulent pump-and-dump scheme in the stock of a sham company that purported to provide products and services to fight global warming. The SEC alleges that the group included stock promoters, traders, and a lawyer who wrote a fraudulent opinion letter. The scheme resulted in more than $7 million in illicit profits from sales of stock in CO2 Tech Ltd. at artificially inflated prices. Despite touting impressive business relationships and anti-global warming technology innovations, CO2 Tech...

Florida Governor Rick Scott avoided a costly train wreck this week by hitting the brakes on his state's high-speed rail project. Alas, the White House continues to charge full-speed ahead. Mr. Scott rejected $2.4 billion of federal money for an 84-mile line from Tampa to Orlando, saying that it would likely end up costing state taxpayers an additional $3 billion when the state's budget deficit this year is $3.6 billion. Then there's the half a billion dollars in operating subsidies that the train would need every decade, which could be more depending on how much the state has inflated ridership...

Broadcast news emphasizes industry accidents nearly 80 percent of the time; ignore EPA and Obama attacks on U.S. industry. -The coal industry not only gets attacked by the media for being a "dirty" fossil fuel, it rarely gets positive coverage because the networks focus on disasters. Since Jan. 1, 2010, nearly 80 percent of the broadcast network stories about coal were related to tragic mining accidents. Only 14 percent of stories mentioned coal in any context other than a mine disaster or natural disaster that affected mining. -On Jan. 13, 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency took the unprecedented step of...

CO2Science and 68 signatories To the Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate: February 8, 2011 In reply to “The Importance of Science in Addressing Climate Change” On 28 January 2011, eighteen scientists sent a letter to members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate urging them to “take a fresh look at climate change.” Their intent, apparently, was to disparage the views of scientists who disagree with their contention that continued business-as-usual increases in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced from the burning of coal, gas, and oil will lead to a host...

As was discussed on the February 2nd edition of Pratt on Texas, the ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) rolling blackouts across the state could have been prevented with better planning and policy. Electrical engineer, Ross Aten, joined Robert Pratt to talk about how too many coal and natural gas power plants within ERCOT were taken offline for maintenance. Ross also explained that if you, ‘ran the numbers’, the only way ERCOT could have met peak winter demand usage is if wind energy across the state was producing at significant totals. However, because of the ice storm and lack of...

Conservatives have long told anecdotes about the outrageous behavior of some liberal university professors, but now there is video to prove it. After getting a tip from a Louisiana State University student, a web-based organization called Campus Reform sent a cameraman into Professor Bradley E. Schaefer's freshman Astronomy 1101 class. The course description says the class is about "fundamental principles of the solar system," but on this particular day the topic was U.S. policy on global warming. Students were asked to sit in sections according to what they think the U.S. should do about global warming, with choices including do...

"Two hundred years ago, this was prairie covered with six-foot-high switchgrass. Winnebago Indians lived here, and then white settlers … Now 50 wind turbines that were erected over the winter and the (VeraSun) ethanol plant, have brought new energy to a town that long lived off the ground God created with glaciers, and laid down here."

Wind turbines wring energy out of a free-flowing fuel ­supply that may be losing some of its punch. Surface winds appear to be weakening across the Northern Hemisphere, including in the United States, Western Europe, and China—the world's top three markets for wind power. And climate change threatens to weaken them further during this century as faster warming over northern ­latitudes trims the temperature gradients that energize airflows.

After almost two decades of effort to reduce vehicle emissions, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority will retire its last diesel bus Wednesday and become the only major transit agency in the nation with a fleet that is totally equipped with alternative-fuel technologies. In an urban area where diesel buses began operating in 1940, the MTA now has 2,221 buses powered by compressed natural gas, as well as one electric bus and six gasoline-electric hybrids. Transit officials estimate that the elimination of diesel engines has reduced the release of cancer-causing particulates from the bus fleet by 80% and greenhouse...

BOSTON – A solar panel manufacturer that received $58 million in state aid in 2007 to open a factory at a former Massachusetts military base is closing the plant and laying off 800 workers.Evergreen Solar Inc. announced Tuesday it is shutting down the Devens plant by the end of the 2011 first quarter.Gov. Deval Patrick had heralded Evergreen as key to the state's economic future in clean energy. Economic Development Secretary Greg Bialecki said the administration is disappointed and will work to recover any money Evergreen owes the state.

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, Wash. – The lack sales for Byron Holcomb's new business hasn't clouded his vision. "This is the future right here," he said, leaning against a four-wheel drive battery-powered buggy. "The electric car is coming and it's going to be the dominant means of transportation in the U.S." Holcomb, a retired attorney, opened Go Green, Bainbridge Island's one-and-only car dealership, in October. And in true Bainbridge style, all the cars are electric, and the showroom is a slick little Winslow storefront that could have just as easily been an art gallery. Actually, it's that too. Abstract originals adorn the...

John B. Miller, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, doing research for NOAA, has been filmed at a “350″ climate change rally at the Denver statehouse calling for control of population and an end to the “madness” of economic growth.In what was clearly a passionate and deeply heartfelt speech, Miller told the audience, to cheers and applause: I would be remiss, as a scientist who studied this, if I didn’t mention the following two things:The first is that, most importantly, we need to do, as a society, in this country and globally, whatever we can to reduce...

The UN’s IPCC Assessor David Shearman wants you to pay an eco tax of $18,000 for every child you have. This is to compensate the planet for you being a human. Don’t forget the eco elitists in power think you are a disease, a scourge on the planet, a virus that needs to be eliminated so the logical consequence is they want you to pay even more for being a human - that is to them of course. They have taken it upon themselves to represent the earth - no one voted them there - they elevated themselves to that...

Ethanol damages engines and is not a viable alternative to fossil fuels, but farmers and lobbyists don't want you to know that

In 1928, as America lurched towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin revealed his master plan - nature was to be conquered by science, Russia to be made brutally, glitteringly modern and the world transformed by communist endeavour. Into the heart of this vision stepped Trofim Lysenko, a self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden. Today, Lysenko is a byword for fraud but in Stalin’s Russia his outlandish ideas about genetic inheritance and evolution became law. They reveal a world of science distorted by ideology, where ideas were literally a matter of life...