Free Republic

Labor union quits alliance with greens over Keystone pipelineBy Andrew Restuccia - 01/20/12 02:35 PM ET The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) left the BlueGreen Alliance on Friday, citing a disagreement with the group’s members over the Keystone XL pipeline. LIUNA, a vocal Keystone supporter, took aim at other unions for opposing the project. “We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women,” LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan said in a statement. The...

Congressional negotiators struck a deal Thursday that overturns the new rules that were to have banned sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs beginning next year.That agreement is tucked inside the massive 1,200-page spending bill that funds the government through the rest of this fiscal year, and which both houses of Congress will vote on Friday. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill, which heads off a looming government shutdown.Congressional Republicans dropped almost all of the policy restrictions they tried to attach to the bill, but won inclusion of the light bulb provision, which prevents the Obama administration from carrying...

DURBAN, South Africa (AP) -- The president of a U.N. climate conference has announced agreement on a program mapping out a new course by all nations to fight climate change over the coming decades. The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all countries under the same legal regime to enforce their commitments to control greenhouse gases. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest. Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for another five years...

The National Climate Ethics Campaign is pleased to announce that the "Statement of Our Nation’s Moral Obligation to Address Climate Change" will be released Wednesday, November 30 from 1:00-2:30 p.m. in Room 406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building (The Environment and Public Works Hearing Room). There are now over 1200 signers on the climate ethics statement. Please send the message pasted below to organizations, listservs, and people that might endorse it.

(NaturalNews) Literal beacons of the "green" energy movement, giant wind turbines have been one of the renewable energy sources of choice for the US government, which has spent billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing their construction and use across the country. But high maintenance costs, high rates of failure, and fluctuating weather conditions that affect energy production render wind turbines expensive and inefficient, which is why more than 14,000 of them have since been abandoned. Before government subsidies for the giant metals were cut or eliminated in many areas, wind farms were an energy boom business. But in the post-tax subsidy...

The White House’s green technology revolution is sitting in an auto lot in Butler, Pa., and nobody is buying. “Nobody comes in to ask, nobody comes in to look … The American people are smarter than the government — they’re not buying that car,” said Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who owns the auto lot where one of General Motors’ combined electric-and-gasoline powered Volt autos sits unwanted, unsold and unused. The Chevy Volt would cost its buyer almost $40,000 — even after a $7,500 federal check — and that’s more than twice the price of a comparable Chevy Cruze, Kelly told...

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident...

I want to welcome this groundbreaking scientific expedition to the savage lands of the Left Coast. You are here in California to answer an important theoretical question and now you have your answer. Yes, this is what Barack Obama’s second term would look like. Study it. Fear it. And then go home and make sure that it never happens to the rest of the country. Of course, in spite of all of its problems, California is still one of the best places in the country to build a successful small business. All you have to do is start with a...

<p>As liberal protesters watched forlornly from across the street, a loud, rowdy crowd of about 300 in downtown Washington, D.C., demonstrated in favor of a major oil industry pipeline project.</p> <p>“There are those who oppose the pipeline. They say the oil is dirty,” said one of the speakers. “Let me be as kind and as gentle as I can be: F**k them!”</p>

President Obama’s war on fossil fuels is adding to instability in a world already racked by international debt, demographic pressures and unpredictable, galloping technological advances. The domestic implications of his policies are increasingly apparent: The closing off of prospecting and drilling is costing tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of jobs. The attempt to choose winners and losers through “green energy” subsidies is producing market distortions, huge losses of taxpayers’ funds and corruption rarely seen since the Soviet Union’s Gosplan. Using executive fiat for arbitrary environmental rulings after Mr. Obama’s “cap and trade” climate plan quietly died in Congress is eroding...

[snip] ....What's going on? "The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton. He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democrat gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign. From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades,...

An investigation by the Energy and Commerce Committee has revealed that, for political reasons, the White House rushed a $528 billion federal loan to solar firm Solyndra, which went bankrupt two weeks ago. Taxpayers should be outraged. Not just about Solyndra, but about the inherent corruption of government's entire push to pick winners and losers in the energy sector, and micromanage the economy in general. In case anyone has missed it, here's a refresher on what happened with Solyndra. After the Department of Energy had tentatively approved Solyndra’s loan, White House officials unduly pressured the Office of Management and Budget...

Greens to EPA chief: Don’t quit over White House smog reversalBy Ben Geman - 09/09/11 08:28 AM ET A group of environmentalists have launched an online petition drive urging Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson not to resign in the wake of the White House scuttling her plans to toughen Bush-era smog standards. The Earth Day Network created the website americaneedslisajackson.com this week. It calls her the “environmental conscience” of the Obama administration. Supporters include Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil Radford and NASA scientist James Hansen, a longtime advocate of battling climate change. The website cites speculation among “chattering classes”...

GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann on Friday stood by her promise to bring gas prices down to around $2 a gallon if elected. “The price of gasoline the day that Barack Obama took office was $1.79 a gallon. If the price of gasoline was $1.79 a gallon just two and three years ago, certainly we can get it back down to that level again. Why wouldn’t we be able to do that? We’re a ‘can-do’ America,” the Minnesota congresswoman said during an interview on the Washington Times-affiliated “America's Morning News” radio program. The $2 gas promise raised eyebrows around...

SALINAS, Calif.- Green Vehicles is empty and it's doors are locked. The worst part, Salinas lost $540,000 in the closure and now it needs to find something else to hang its economic hat on. $240,000 the city paid and $300,000 came from a one-time grant for new tech jobs. Last year, Salinas mayor Dennis Donohue test drove one of the new green vehicle proto-types. Salinas was beyond excited when start up company "Green Vehicles" wanted to come to their city, but, "This is disappointing as all get out," said economic development director Jeff Weir. As of last week, and this...

A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any cars could run off the assembly line. The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company. All of that money is now gone, according to Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan. The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009 after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant. When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city...

Delingpole Takes On the GreensWhen it comes to global warming, the issue is not about science, but about control. Since London’s Royal Society was established in 1660, its motto has been Nullius in verba, which translates into English as “Take no man’s word for it.� This is an injunction that James Delingpole has clearly taken to heart. In his new book, Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors, nobody — not Ph.D. scientists, not former vice presidents of the United States, not renowned scientific institutions — escapes the skeptic’s eye. For Delingpole, the “appeal to authority� fallacy, on which much of...

Just a year after the BP oil spill, America is on the verge of a new golden era of oil exploration and production -- unless President Obama and his environmentalist friends get their way. This surge in domestic production would leave Iran, Kuwait and the Arab emirates combined in the rear-view mirror. The US drilling boom rests on a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to open shale-oil reserves. It's why wells are springing up in places like North Dakota, California and Pennsylvania, with thousands of new jobs in their wake. Fracking has also opened up supplies of natural gas,...

TOKYO (Reuters) – Vast deposits of rare earth minerals, crucial in making high-tech electronics products, have been found on the floor of the Pacific Ocean and can be readily extracted, Japanese scientists said on Monday.

This Friday will mark the release of the May unemployment report. A report that will reflect the last effects of the Obama trillion-dollar stimulus and of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (QE2). The report is likely to show that job creation is mediocre at best, with unemployment insurance claims continuing well above the 400,000 weekly level, housing in a double-dip recession and the gross domestic product contracting to a paltry 1.8 percent growth rate for the second quarter of 2011. The situation is so dire on the economic growth front that The New York Times has awoken from its slumber...

NEW YORK – Two leading makers of lighting products are showcasing LED bulbs that are bright enough to replace energy-guzzling 100-watt light bulbs set to disappear from stores in January. Their demonstrations at the LightFair trade show in Philadelphia this week mean that brighter LED bulbs will likely go on sale next year, but after a government ban takes effect. The new bulbs will also be expensive — about $50 each — so the development may not prevent consumers from hoarding traditional bulbs. The technology in traditional "incandescent" bulbs is more than a century old. Such bulbs waste most of...

Believing Sept. 11 to have been "hijacked by Republicans," President Obama had a secret plan to "flush 9/11 down the memory hole" in order to benefit Democrats, the author of a brand-new book is claiming. According to "Subversion Inc." by investigative journalist Matthew Vadum, Obama sought to make the environment the prime concern on 9/11 instead of the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history. The president allegedly used his green jobs czar Van Jones and the leftist group ACORN to help orchestrate the transformation. "The leftists at ACORN view September 11 as a 'Republican' day because it focuses the public...

This is some sick stuff. Far left teachers are now teaching first graders the “Boycott Big Business” song for

California dry cleaners will have to find alternative chemicals to remove sweat and grit from garments and other dry-clean items, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved the state’s proposal to ban the use of the perchloroethylene (PERC), a liquid solvent commonly used in the dry cleaning industry. EPA’s decision means California will have more stringent restrictions than those laid down by the EPA nationwide. PERC has been on the chopping block in California since 2007 when the California Air Resources Board (ARB) adopted the Airborne Toxic Control Measure that will gradually phase out the use of PERC by...

Chef's tip: don't overcook the bacon. It should be barely brown around the edges and still somewhat raw-looking in the middle. Ingredients 4 strips thick-sliced bacon, sliced crosswise into 1/2-inch pieces 1 small yellow onion, chopped 2 garlic cloves, minced 2 Tbsp sugar 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper Several dashes hot sauce 1/4 cup apple-cider vinegar 2 pounds collard greens, stems removed, sliced into 3-inch-wide strips (can substitute kale or chard) 1 cup chicken broth (or water) Method 1 Heat a large cast-iron skillet on medium heat. Cook the bacon in the skillet until it...

Adolf Hitler once proclaimed, “we will not only create a Germany of power, but also a Germany of beauty.” Much earlier, and spoken at a time when Germany had been financially suffering for many years from what they deemed to be the international crisis of capitalism foisted upon them by the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler once simplified the purpose of the National Socialist movement, “I have the ambition to make the German people rich and Germany beautiful.” While scholar after scholar has spilled a lot of ink describing Nazi Germany’s political power and the Third Reich’s economy, relatively few have...

If Washington won't, California will. In Congress, political paralysis is stalling energy and climate change policy, but Sacramento last week adopted a far-reaching plan to wean the state off fossil fuels and push for more clean-and-green sources of power. For several years, the Legislature has debated a requirement that energy producers such as major utilities increase the amount of wind, solar and other renewable sources from 20 to 33 percent of their output. Part of the problem was practical: How can a huge, industrial state depend on infant technologies and untried ideas? Other objections circled around finances, consumer protections, deadlines...

I humbly suggest the following neologism: Progluddite (pronounced like troglodyte). Definition: a misinformed, misguided political ideologue who believes that technological regression will force humanity to build a New Age Utopia. On its face, the word Progluddite seems nonsensical. It is an oxymoronic pairing of Progressive (one who is interested in new ideas) and Luddite (one who rejects new technology). However, the word is merely a reflection of the self-contradictory nature of progressive notions.

Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudo-scientific fraud I have seen in my long life. ~ Dr. Harold Lewis Ten days ago, Harold Lewis, Ph.D., emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tendered his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr., Princeton University, president of the American Physical Society, because Dr. Lewis finally realized that he could no longer support what he called the "successful pseudo-scientific fraud" of global warming. Remember, to the Democratic Party and RINO Republicans, truth doesn't matter, because to them truth is relative. All that matters to liberals and...

Nine bishops from the state of New South Wales have joined Sydney Cardinal George Pell to warn Catholics about voting in the state election for the Greens, who have gained “significant” influence. In a statement last week, the bishops said the Greens’ plans to “attack” freedom of religion and conscience and promote abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage “give rise to grave concerns for the protection of human rights and human dignity”. The Greens could exercise “significant power over governments with only a few seats”, the bishops said in the statement called “The Green Agenda”. Two New South Wales bishops refused...

Germany has long been the titular and emotional leader of the "Green Movement" in Europe. No country has adopted more so-called environmental friendly policies. The German population has obediently gone along with environmental measures; in fact they have been the model people when it comes to green living. So it is doubly startling when Der Spiegel, the leading left-wing publication in Germany publishes an article entitled: "Is Environmentalism Really Working?" openly questioning the viability and cost of a myriad of green initiatives. Some highlights: Regarding biofuels: Many haven't yet fully realized that E10 [gasoline with 10% biofuel content] is...

Reno, Nev. (AP) -- The latest in a string of powerful storms is dropping heavy snow and causing widespread school closures and traffic delays Friday in the Reno-Lake Tahoe area. The Alpine Meadows ski resort just north of Tahoe reports receiving up to 4 feet of snow over a 24-hour period ending Friday morning for a total of as much as 9 feet of snow since the storms began on Monday. Other Sierra resorts are reporting 4 to 7 feet of new snow this week.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has found another disguise for lining the pockets of “alternative energy” producers with consumers’ dollars directed there not by rational economic choices but by government mandate. Once a supporter of cap and trade, Graham now supports a “Clean Energy Standard” that would require utilities to generate increasingly high percentages of electricity from “renewable” sources like wind, solar, and biofuels, from nuclear, and from coal using “carbon capture and sequestration”—catching the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted when coal burns and forcing it, under pressure, into deep geological formations for long-term storage to keep it out of the atmosphere....

The Society of Pius X identifies the measures of Education Minister Klaus Kessler (Grüne) as "politically ideological" and will challenge them legally. Saarbrücken (kath.net) The Education Ministry of Saarland has concluded that with the end of the current half of the school year, two Saarland schools, which are operated by the Society of Pius X, must conclude their operation. It falls upon the grade school in St. Arnual in Fechingen, according to SR-Online. The back ground for this is, according to Education Minister Kessler (Grüne), the long conflct related to the dormitory of the Heart of Jesus Realschule, which the...

-snip- Professor David Shearman, MD, is Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences and Law School. Professor Shearman was an Assessor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report and the Fourth Assessment Report. (1) Shearman has penned several books on global warming, such as ‘Climate Change as a Crisis in World Civilization: Why We Must Totally Transform How We Live’ and ‘The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy’. His argument is that overpopulation and industrialization are causing an ecological disaster which...

San Francisco's last fossil fuel power plant will start the new year by shutting down. The Potrero Hill plant, one of the dirtiest in California, will cease operations on Jan. 1, state officials are expected to announce today. The plant, operated by Houston-based GenOn Energy Inc., formerly Mirant Corp., could be fired up in the event of a dramatic power emergency before being decommissioned permanently on Feb. 28, officials said."Cross your fingers," said Yakout Mansour, president of the California Independent System Operator, which oversees the state power grid. "It would have to be something very significant for us to need...

Everything is grubby in countries run by statist moonbats — even dishes fresh out of the dishwasher. A couple of months ago, Sandra Young from Vernon, Fla., started to notice that something was seriously amiss with her dishes. "The pots and pans were gray, the aluminum was starting to turn black, the glasses had fingerprints and lip prints still on them, and they were starting to get this powdery look to them," Vernon says. "I'm like, oh, my goodness, my dishwasher must be dying, I better get a new dishwasher." But others are having the same problem all across the...

The Obama administration scored a legal victory Friday when a federal appeals court refused to block federal climate regulations slated to kick in next month. State and industry challengers opposing the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate regulations had asked the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to halt the rules while the massive court battle plays out, but the court wasn’t convinced. A host of states, industry groups and free-market groups are suing EPA over its regulations aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from automobiles and large industrial sources like power plants and oil refineries, as well as...

That's what the moonbats at Grist want to know. After a long, long, long recitation of all the evils in Big Sex (you just know they'll have to call it that soon), they come up withIndividuals selling sex to others is, of course, just a small part of the sex economy. Far from being underground or taboo, many aspects are legal, even glorified (think beautifully crafted lingerie). It's a trillion-dollar cross-sector industry spanning live entertainment, pornography, pharmaceutical products, clothes, and accessories.I'd suggest that it is probably a bit higher than a trillion dollars. Regardless, the must become green!Feel like watching...

This week marks the beginning of the end of the long national nightmare known as the 111th Congress.  Republicans were given a second chance—by default—through a national effort to stop the destructive Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda. House Republicans are poised to begin making the same kind of business-as-usual mistakes that relegated the party to minority status in 2006.  The most glaring example is the looming threat of having Rep. Fred Upton (RINO-Mich.) become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, despite his liberal voting record, simply because he’s next in line.  If there is one thing voters made absolutely clear...

(Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans debating Muslim integration to stand up more for Christian values, saying Monday the country suffered not from "too much Islam" but "too little Christianity." Addressing her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, she said she took the current public debate in Germany on Islam and immigration very seriously. As part of this debate, she said last month that multiculturalism there had utterly failed. Some of her conservative allies have gone further, calling for an end to immigration from "foreign cultures" -- a reference to Muslim countries like Turkey -- and more pressure on immigrants...

AUSTRALIA can manage both a critically important economic relationship with China and growing military ties with the US, says Defence Minister Stephen Smith. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and US defence secretary Robert Gates were in Melbourne for the Australia United State Ministerial (AUSMIN) consultations with Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd. The talks focused on the US Force Posture Review, which will examine the US military presence in the Asia-Pacific, and the war in Afghanistan, among other issues. The posture review could see the US make more use of its military bases in Australia and give greater opportunity for joint...

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry is frustrated. He recently spoke to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and complained that we are in "a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don't weigh in. It's all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics." He'd really like to elect a new people. Now, that last bit -- cheap-seat politics -- is the kicker. How truly awful it must be for the Senate's richest man -- wealthier than the Senate's Rockefeller -- to have to put up with those of us in the cheap seats. Brahmins from Boston have...

In January, the documentary Gasland won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The documentary attacked the process of “fracking,” which involves pumping a solution that is 99 percent sand and water, plus a few trace chemicals, underground at high pressure. This creates fractures in the rock formations that allow oil and gas to flow to collection points. The film claimed that the process pollutes groundwater with devastating consequences. (For more on Gasland and fracking, see this article from the Examiner’s “Big Green” series in September.) Multiple EPA studies have shown fracking is safe and effective, but the...

One of the most embarrassing environmental facts of the 1930s was that between 60% and 70% of the German greens were Nazi Party members, compared to only 10% of the population at large. In fact, German greens outperformed even medical doctors and teachers, with Nazi foresters and veterinarians leading the charge. Somehow, the so-called independent German wandervogels (German word for "wandering free spirits") found themselves at the footstool of Der Führer. Their wandervogel attitudes about civilization and the wild forestlands found a political niche in the isolationist biology of the Nazi Party. Furthermore, their strong beliefs in holism found a...

Gay groups and women's group are calling on Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to apologize for comments he made Friday about who should and shouldn't be in classrooms. At a 2004 debate, DeMint declared that openly gay people should not be teaching public school. "We need the folks that are teaching in schools to represent our values," he said. DeMint later added that he "would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman, who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend, should be hired to teach my third grade children." At the time, the Senate candidate apologized: "[S]ometimes...

Conservatives: ‘You’re fired’Mailing makes Sen. Schwartz look like Trump; Schwartz is ‘disgusted’ Peter Marcus, DDN Staff Writer It’s certainly not the most flattering image. Incumbent State Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass, is being portrayed by conservatives as the next Donald Trump. “You’re fired!” states a mailing going out to voters in the Colorado 5th Senate District. The front of the mailing: a photo of Schwartz’s face with the body and trademark hair of Trump Photoshopped into the image. The argument by the conservative Denver-based Western Tradition Partnership, which is responsible for the mailing and has a national arm extending to Washington,...

Green Fascism? Global Warming Mitigation Campaign 10:10 claim this video was just a piece of fun to draw attention to the dangers of global warming and what ordinary people can do about it.

When the government regulates how much water a toilet can flush, or what kind of lightbulbs you can put in your table lamps at home, the Constitution looks pretty small in the rear view mirror. Exactly where in the Constitution does it say that it is the government's business how much water my toilet is flushing or what kind of lightbulb illuminates my household? But the busybodies in the environmental movement have folks convinced of a lot of things that just aren't so. Remember the campaign that passed the lightbulb bill? The holier-than-thou greenies told us that if we only...

Officials of a dozen top Big Green environmental groups contributed more than $14.5 million to congressional and presidential candidates in 2008 and through the second quarter of 2010 with 96 percent of the total going to Democrats Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Loads-of-campaign-cash-make-Big-Green-a-Democratic-powerhouse-1023166-103889313.html#ixzz10pS3cjTJ