Free Republic

Berkeley’s latest tree-sit ended almost before it began when the lone remaining branch-percher descended to earth Tuesday morning, followed by two acacias a few hours later. Campus community relations director Irene Hegarty said that only one of the two tree-sitters who took to the branches was still aloft when community members talked him down. “He walked away, though he was cited and released for trespassing by university police a couple of blocks away,” she said. Arborists made short work of the trees, leaving five or six five-foot logs and a pile of wood chips for use at the park. “They...

I usually post videos in the DUmmie FUnnies on weekends or late at night. However, for this VIDEO I have to make an exception because it is probably the FUnniest video I have ever seen on YouTube. It shows a bunch of tree huggers who belong to the Earth First eco group in the North Carolina forest (most likely these are hippies who live in Asheville) mourning over trees. And they don't just shed a few tears. They are flat out bawling. Their Drama Queen antics are absolutely hilarious! And that hippie chick waxing poetic over a rock is...

Four tree-sitters began climbing down from an 80-foot-tall redwood tree near Memorial Stadium this afternoon after UC Berkeley officials agreed to create a committee that will oversee future campus development, a spokesman for the protesters said. UC officials declined to comment on the reported deal, saying they will speak after the nearly 2-year-long standoff ends. But protesters atop the tree pumped their fists in a show of victory. Before climbing down, one of the protesters, nicknamed Huck, shouted, "We love you" to cheering supporters below. The protesters' deal with the university does not include amnesty from criminal charges, said their...

BERKELEY - Crews began cutting down trees next to Memorial Stadium at UC Berkeley late Friday, 21 months after activists climbed into the trees to protest the university's plan to raze them to build a $140 million sports training center center. Work crews with chainsaws and bulldozers arrived at the university grove Friday and by 4 p.m. six trees had been chopped down. Clad in black ski masks, the four remaining tree protesters who were driven into a single redwood several months ago, remained in the tree Friday and at times sparred with arborists, tossing a bottle and branches toward...

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - A federal judge has overturned a decision by the U.S. Forest Service to allow oil and gas drilling near a forest and a river in Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula. ADVERTISEMENT U.S. District Judge David Lawson of Detroit ruled Thursday the agency had acted "arbitrarily and capriciously" in 2005 by giving Savoy Energy LP of Traverse City a permit to drill an exploratory well near the Au Sable River's south branch. (cont...)

About 25 University of California, Berkeley, police officers and a cherry-picker have converged at the Berkeley Oak Grove, where five climbers are being threatened and may have to come down today, according to Save the Oaks spokesman Doug Buckwald. Buckwald said he began receiving calls on an emergency phone network from climbers who "have sent word by cell phone their belief that this is it - they are coming in to get them right now." Protesters have been in the trees since UC regents voted in December 2006 to approve a plan to build a sports training center and other...

Carbon Cult sickos are under fire for an interactive website that tells children they should die because they emit CO2. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Planet Slayer" site invites young children to take a "greenhouse gas quiz", asking them "how big a pig are you?". At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC tells children at "what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!" It's one of a number of interactive features that "Get the dirt on greenhouse without the guilt trips. No lectures. No multinational-bashing (well, maybe...

How did your Earth Hour go? My husband and I enjoyed it so much, we want to try to do it weekly.

Sen. John McCain and his staff have been adamant for days that his upcoming overseas trip to Britain, France and Israel is not political. /snip ...Apparently, though, there will still be room for fundraising. McCain's campaign has sent out an invitation for a March 20 luncheon at Spencer House -- the neo-classical home built for an ancestor of Diana, the late Princess of Wales -- "by kind permission of Lord Rothschild OM GBE and the Hon. Nathaniel Rothschild." The price to attend is $1000 to $2,300. And the dress code for the event? "Lounge suits" -- British for business...

BERKELEY - Two men climbed into trees at the University of California, Berkeley oak grove this morning and tossed down supplies used by tree sitters, a grove spokesman said early Tuesday. The tree sitters themselves had not been removed by 8 a.m. Doug Buckwald, who has been involved with the tree sit since it started in December 2006, said two men climbed into an oak tree and a redwood tree and tossed food, water and other supplies used by tree sitters onto the ground. It was not immediately clear if ropes and pullies were being cut as well. The tree...

Open borders + campaign finance hypocrisy + eco-radicalism = McCain’s billionaire national finance co-chair Jerry Perenchio By Michelle Malkin • January 28, 2008 09:50 AM Scroll down for updates…meanwhile: “Romney, McCain call each other ‘liberal’… 1peren003.jpg Meet Jerry Perenchio. He’s a National Finance Co-Chair of the McCain 2008 campaign and the billionaire founder of Spanish-language media conglomerate, Univision. He also heads up a charitable foundation that has showered gobs of money on extremist green lobbying groups. Take open-borders zeal, add campaign finance hypocrisy, mix with eco-radicalism, and presto: The perfect, multiculti-profiteering McCain money buddy. Here’s his official bio on the...

The overriding environmental issue of these times is the warming of the planet. The Democratic hopefuls in the 2008 campaign are fully engaged, calling for large — if still unquantified — national sacrifices and for a transformation in the way the country produces and uses energy. The Republicans do not go much further than conceding that climate change could be a problem and, with the notable exception of John McCain, offer no comprehensive solutions. In 2000, when Al Gore could have made warming a signature issue in his presidential campaign, his advisers persuaded him that it was too complicated and...

Critics have long believed environmentalists were planning global domination. The problem with making a credible case against such an ambitious plan was simple: no environmental leader had published one. Yet conflicts over global warming, world trade, multinational corporations, population control, sustainable futures, and transnational government left little doubt that environmentalists in fact shared the unspoken aim of wielding supreme power over a green future. But there was no proof. For years, critics, lacking hard evidence, were reduced to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of suspicious environmentalist actions - funding from huge charitable trusts, ties to the broader "progressive" community, and...

A cold, abrupt end to a honeymoon By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer Encinitas couple that fled Witch Creek fire returns home after cruise ship sinks off Antarctica ENCINITAS -- Three times since marrying June 11 in a beachside ceremony at La Jolla Cove, Trevor Takayama and Torrey Trust have dodged disaster. In August, the Encinitas couple fled an approaching hurricane while camping in a Costa Rican rain forest, on a summerlong honeymoon tour of Central and South America. In October, the Witch Creek fire forced the newlyweds to evacuate the hilltop three-bedroom home she grew up in, near Manchester...

Cannot be posted due to copyright issues: http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/11/who-is-the-gree.html

BERKELEY, Calif. -- On Sunday evening a Memorial Oak Grove tree-sitter fell from the supply-line that is used to ferry food, water and people into and out of the tree-sit protest. The traverse-line was created after the university erected a fence around the tree-sitters and spans from a tree inside the fenced in area to a tree outside the fence. Nathaniel Hill, the fallen tree-sitter, was moving on the traverse line to meet his father, Carl Hill, who had come from the east coast to visit his son. Hill was taken to Highland Hospital where he was treated for a...

The growth in human population and rising consumption have exceeded the planet's ability to support us, argues John Feeney. In this week's Green Room, he says it is time to ring the alarm bells and take radical action in order to avert unspeakable consequences. We humans face two problems of desperate importance. The first is our global ecological plight. The second is our difficulty acknowledging the first. Despite increasing climate change coverage, environmental writers remain reluctant to discuss the full scope and severity of the global dilemma we've created. Many fear sounding alarmist, but there is an alarm to sound...

# BERKELEY: Anyone who won't come down from perch faces fine and five days in jailAnyone living in a tree outside Memorial Stadium must come down from his perch or face a $1,000 fine and five days in jail, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled Monday. Judge Richard Keller has broadened an earlier preliminary injunction that evicted David Galloway, 36 -- the only tree sitter previously known to UC Berkeley officials by name -- to include "all other persons acting in concert or participating with (the tree sitters)," according to his ruling. "This latest ruling makes it all but...

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors. For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus." I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere...

I am occasionally asked why it is that so many Europeans display reflexive anti-Americanism, and I force myself to choose from a salad of possible answers. One of these is the resentment that I can remember feeling myself when I lived in England in the 1970s: the sheer brute fact that American voters who knew nothing about Europe (and cared less) could pick a president who had more clout than any of our elected prime ministers could exert. America could change our economic climate by means of the Federal Reserve, could use bases in Britain to forward its policies in...