Free Republic

I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth. I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and the lack of interest in ideas that go with the type. This week, Anschutz and McKibben murdered The...

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part 3 of a three-part series. Click to read part 1 and part 2.The fossil-fuel divestment campaign now sweeping America’s college campuses is a window onto much that is wrong with our culture and our politics. The fate of America’s free-enterprise system — long the engine of our prosperity and security — now hangs on a generation increasingly skeptical of the system’s premises.Surely doubts about capitalism held by America’s 20-somethings have been greatly magnified by climate change. Yet it is not changing global weather patterns but the deteriorating climate of intellectual interchange in the nation’s academy — and the...

The target is fossil fuels, but the goal is an end to economic growth.Horse-drawn plow at the Mother Earth Farm in Orting, Wash. You may not have heard of the fossil-fuel divestment movement yet, but you will soon. While the campaign to have universities sell off any stock they may hold in large fossil-fuel companies is still in its infancy, the effort has spread to hundreds of campuses in just the past few months. This ambitious crusade to save the planet from global warming by crushing the world’s fossil-fuel producers is the brainchild of Bill McKibben, arguably America’s foremost environmentalist,...

Our free-enterprise system is facing a legitimacy crisis, especially among the young.Activist Bill McKibben Slowly but surely, America’s free-enterprise system has been bleeding cultural support. To be sure, Occupy Wall Street’s open anti-capitalism flamed out, and direct challenges to the system are few. Yet appearances are deceiving. Just prior to the 2012 election, a series of polls showed the millennial generation (ages 18–30) about evenly split between positive attitudes toward capitalism and socialism. We needn’t take that support for socialism literally in order to recognize that America’s free-enterprise system is facing a legitimacy crisis, especially among the young. The manner...

Bill McKibben '82 has founded 350.org, a worldwide action group that this weekend (Oct. 23-25) will promote demonstrations on every continent. McKibben was at Harvard's Memorial Church for a 90-minute "climate convocation" sponsored by 17 groups. Author and climate activist Bill McKibben '82 ascended into the pulpit of the Memorial Church at Harvard University on Oct. 18, a stage so grand that legend puts it "10 feet above contradiction." McKibben's message is that the Earth is warming rapidly, that climate change is too late to stop, but that it is not too late to act. Acting means getting humankind, with...

If there were a Society of Global Warming Alarmists, Bill McKibben might get kicked out for being too much of a worry wart . . . You've probably seen those phone-message forms with boxes to be checked in ascending order of urgency ranging from "FYI—no need to return call" all the way up to "the future of Western civilization hangs in the balance." We might see that last category as light-hearted exaggeration, but it's no laughing matter to McKibben. In his jeremiad in today's LA Times literally entitled "Civilization's last chance," McKibben solemnly declares that "the world looks a little...

Civilization's last chance The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast. By Bill McKibben May 11, 2008 Even for Americans -- who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now. It's not just the economy: We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the...

Cpl. Kendall D. McKibben was prepared to sacrifice his life for the Army. He says he almost did repeatedly over a year of patrols dodging bullets in Baghdad and dealing with a grape-size brain tumor. So the 33-year-old says he can't understand why the military is refusing a routine subpoena that he believes could help him avoid a 13-year prison sentence. -snip- McKibben feels doubly wronged because he believes the tumor itself was caused by exposure to depleted uranium in Iraq. Depleted uranium is a heavy metal that is slightly radioactive and is used in some armor-piercing munitions. In Baghdad,...

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story—the United States safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world—then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our politics in the coming decades of this century: America befuddled about how to cope with a planet suddenly turned unstable and unpredictable.

Just read Enough by leftist environmentalist Bill McKibben. The book delves into germline genetic therapy, wherein a zygote's DNA can be altered. McKibben posits that within 50 years, the technology will exist for parents to select the eye color, hair color, and even personality of their kids (assuming that personality is about 50% nature and 50% nurture). He bemoans the fact that parents will be able to "stack the deck" by making a child more patient or pious. For example, McKibben notes that parents may be able to give a child the charitable outlook of Mother Theresa. Then, however, he...