Free Republic

Eric Worrall writes: The European Union has just committed economic suicide, by agreement a landmark deal, to cut CO2 emissions by 40% by 2030.

“You are responsible for President Obama’s re-election,” I told 150 folks from the oil and gas industry—most of whom were conservative Republicans. I spoke to them on October 15 in San Angelo, TX. A reporter covering the event wrote that I “stunned the crowd by telling them they were largely responsible for getting the president re-elected, and asking them if they knew how they had helped.” He continued: “The room was very quiet for several moments as Noon waited to see if anyone would volunteer an answer.” We know President Obama has been waging a war on coal—with tens of...

....National Socialism’s fixation with nature and the environment bears a striking resemblance to modern environmentalism. The similarities between Nazi yesteryear and today’s environmental movement are “troubling,” said Musser. (p. 26) The Nazis created corporate welfare between the state and big business, state sponsored corporatism, squeezing out the middle class as bourgeois, and forcing consumers into rationing in order to build the war machine. Hitler himself believed that Germans would run out of food, and thus needed more Lebensraum, space to live. The Greens have adopted the Malthusian overpopulation theory (which was proven incorrect) when evaluating scarce natural resources such as...

The deep ocean may not be hiding heat after all, raising new questions about why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years, said the US space agency Monday. Scientists have noticed that while greenhouse gases have continued to mount in the first part of the 21st century, global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising along with them, said NASA.

Scientists are to challenge the climate-change sceptics by vastly improving the speed with which they can prove links between a heatwave or other extreme weather event and man-made changes to the atmosphere.

..."Climate change is compromising the very livability of our planet," the actor, sporting a long, scraggly beard and long hair pulled back into a bun, said as he accepted the Clinton Global Citizen Award for philanthropy. That reducing carbon emissions might compromise the very livability of millions, denying them electricity, clean water, adequate food, heat and other luxuries -- or else making them very expensive -- seems to be irrelevant to DiCaprio, Kennedy, and their acolytes who will not suffer the consequences of their policies.

Shawn Donovan, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on Friday that if you don’t believe in climate change and support federal spending to fight it, you believe the earth is flat. “The failure to invest in climate solutions and climate preparedness doesn’t get you membership in a fiscal conservatives caucus,” Donovan said at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “It makes you a member of the Flat Earth Society.”

The United Nations, eager to grab money and power as the global regulator (and taxer) of carbon emissions, is sponsoring a “climate summit” on September 21 in hopes of capturing the attention of heads of state coming to New York for the UN General Assembly. Unfortunately for the scare-mongers, President Barack Obama will be fairly lonely when it comes to heads of state of world powers.

For climate change activists and those hoping for an energy future dominated by renewables or even less-polluting natural gas, the death of coal cannot come quickly enough. But with coal still the dominant form of cheap electricity throughout the world, it is unlikely the bogeyman of climate change will disappear anytime soon. That's because the price of coal, compared to other fuels, is just too good to refuse. Just look at China, where the country's double-digit economic growth has largely been fueled by coal, which fulfills 60 percent of its energy mix.

People like to say that the Do Nothing Congress generally lives up to its name, but this week the House of Representatives actually managed to get together and pass something. H.R. 5078, the Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Protection Act, somehow got to the floor for a vote and even garnered the support of 35 Democrats in addition to nearly all the Republicans. The subject at hand is the perennial thorn in the side of regulatory hawks, the Clean Water Act (CWA).

European Union leaders announced they will be consolidating energy and environmental goals under a new commissioner, effectively axing the intergovernmental groups’ climate arm as green policies are making it harder for citizens to pay their power bills. Former Spanish agriculture and environment minister Miguel Arias Canete was tapped by the EU Commission to take over a consolidated energy and climate office. Canete will be replacing Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard and Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger in what is seen as a huge blow to Europe’s global warming efforts.

On September 10, an article written by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press trumpeted a claim of good news with the headline: “Scientists say the ozone layer is recovering.” The basis for Borenstein’s headline is a statistical analysis: For the first time in 35 years, scientists were able to confirm a statistically significant and sustained increase in stratospheric ozone, which shields the planet from solar radiation that causes skin cancer, crop damage and other problems.

Modern climate fear-mongering is the latest example of the prostitution of science in the service of liberal ideology. Were polymath Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman alive today I suspect he’d be condemning the whole climate conspiracy as a gross abuse of the good name of science. Here’s how Feynman described real science:

For two years, Pascal Husting’s employer chartered a jet to shuttle him most weeks between his home in Luxembourg and his office in Amsterdam. Such trips are common for executives at major international corporations in Western Europe. But Mr. Husting isn’t working for a corporation. He is the international program director for Greenpeace, the nonprofit that is arguably the world’s most high-profile environmental advocacy organization.

Last week I said the Environmental Protection Agency has become a monster that does more harm than good. But logical people say, "What else we got?" It's natural to assume greedy capitalists will run amok and destroy the Earth unless stopped by regulation. These critics don't understand the real power of private ownership, says Terry Anderson of the Property and Environment Research Center. "Long before the EPA was a glint in anyone's eye," said Anderson on my TV show, "property rights were dealing with pollution issues."

Regardless, essential power-generation jobs in the U.S. will be lost over the Administration's obsessive actions based on the dubious climate claim. And, so will relief for those in desperate need of low-cost abundant fossil-fuel energy worldwide. Right now, there’s a billion-dollar bonanza in government funding for climate-change research, education and reeducation, engineering and reengineering, and state and local government programs. Heaps of public dollars are ready for the taking for anyone willing to help the feds continue generating and fine-tuning the gloomy “gospel” that preaches “The end is near for low-cost, home-grown, abundant energy use.” Furthermore, financing is readily available...

“Romantic love is often blind. This is nowhere made more evident than in the environmental infatuation, if not worship, of a natural world which the modern greens will never be able to save no matter how totalitarian the movement becomes.” – R. Mark Musser, author The green infatuation and Gaia worship were prominent in Hitler’s time. Musser talks about “the green Nazi motive of the Holocaust” in his book, Nazi Oaks. “Unbeknownst to many, the highway to modern environmentalism passed through Nazi Germany. By 1935, the Third Reich was the greenest regime on the planet.” Environmentalists: Misinforming the public in...

When Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring”, was published, filled with totally false claims about DDT, the Environmental Protection Agency looked it over and concluded she had used manipulated data. They concluded that DDT should not be banned, but its first administrator, William Ruckleshaus, overruled the agency and imposed a ban. Ruckleshaus was a lawyer, not a scientist. He was also politically connected enough to hold a variety of government positions. He got the nod for the EPA job from John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General who later went to jail for his participation in the Watergate cover-up.

America could literally become energy independent given its vast reserves of energy sources. .....The new EPA standards are expected to be announced in December. We better hope that the November midterm elections put enough new candidates into Congress to reject those standards or the cost of living in America, the capacity to produce electricity, the construction and expansion of our manufacturing sector will all worsen.

Recently, 130 environmentalist groups gathered in an UN-backed event in Venezuela to gather more civilian support to combat climate change, reports the Daily Caller. A number of them signed the Margarita Declaration which calls for an end to the “hegemonic capitalist system” as the only solution to human-caused climate change. The environmentalists argued that measures such as carbon capture and trade and conservation efforts are not sufficient to prevent the environmental disasters they are predicting; instead, they demanded a radical system change. Although they did not spell out what their ideal social system would be, we can assume they want...