Free Republic

Tired of winning yet? National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd told C-SPAN Monday that the rapid downturn in illegal border crossings is “nothing short of miraculous.” He elaborated that total recorded border crossings in 2017 are just 53% of what they were in 2016, and that percentage continues to drop each week. As we have noted before, this has been achieved without building single foot of wall, without changes to existing statutes, without any new huge budget allocations to the Border Patrol, without the introduction of any new technology. The one and only reason for this fall is the...

The Trump administration said it would not be considering using an international cap-and-trade program to meet former President Barack Obama’s pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris agreement on climate change. The Department of State gave generic, boilerplate responses to questions countries posed regarding aspects of America’s commitment under the Paris agreement. At one point, China asked the Trump administration if it would consider an “international market mechanism” in place of Obama-era policies to cut emissions. The Trump administration said, “No.” “Does the U.S. have any plan or preliminary thoughts on using international market mechanism to...

California is a Failure at Business The inconsistencies of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate change policies, together with his immigration policies, are formidable and deliberately deceptive — one policy is driving taxpayers and businesses out of the state, and the other is driving droves of unskilled, unemployed aliens into the state. Last year, in 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown claimed California has an overpopulation problem, and the ongoing drought was proof that the explosion of population in California has reached the limit of what the states’ resources can provide. “We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument next Tuesday, September 27 on the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan. The centerpiece of resident Obama’s climate policy agenda, the Plan establishes first-ever carbon dioxide (CO2) emission standards for “existing” (already built) coal and natural gas power plants. The Plan will increase consumer energy prices and impede job and GDP growth yet have no discernible effect on global temperatures or sea levels. However, that’s not why the Court should strike it down. The Court should overturn the Plan because it is an unlawful power grab. The Plan will...

The meltdown of California’s cap-and-trade system of reducing carbon emissions has not only thrown its climate change crusade into disarray but caused collateral damage. One victim is Gov. Jerry Brown’s $3.1 billion plan to spend auction proceeds, now on indefinite hold. It not only affects a $500 million allocation for Brown’s bullet train project, but another $500 million for “low carbon transportation and fuels.” The latter is a centerpiece of Brown’s very ambitious drive to reduce petroleum use in auto travel – the largest single source of California’s carbon emissions – by 50 percent by 2030 even though the Legislature...

Jerry Brown’s dream of constructing a high speed rail line connecting the Bay Area with Southern California suffered a major setback this week, but rest assured every effort is being made to spend enough money quickly enough to make pulling the plug seem unreasonable. Construction costs of the project have escalated so rapidly since the times state voters narrowly approved a bond issue that instead of constructing new tracks in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the trains will share existing tracks with conventional freight and commuter trains, drastically increasing travel time, and making the trains half-fast at best. But...

The latest auction in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases fell sharply below expectations, as buyers purchased just 2% of the carbon credits whose sale funds a variety of state programs -- notably, the proposed high-speed rail project. The quarterly auction, conducted May 18 and announced Wednesday, will provide just $10 million for state programs, including $2.5 million for the bullet train. The rail authority had been expecting about $150 million. Whatever prompted the lack of buyers, the auction is a stark example of the uncertainty and risk of relying on actively-traded carbon credits to build the bullet train. The...

The California Legislature's nonpartisan analyst estimates the state's pollution tax has raised gasoline prices by 11 cents per gallon and diesel prices by 13 cents, according to a month-old letter released on Thursday... Consumers may not have noticed much impact at the pump because the pollution tax came at a time when gas prices were plummeting... A large portion of the money is dedicated to California's high-speed rail line...

California Air Resources Board's cap-and-trade program auctions While the state of California is extracting billions of dollars from businesses and utilities through the California Air Resources Board’s cap-and-trade program auctions, the Legislature can’t decide how to spend the billions. Instead, lawmakers have been arguing over how to direct the monies into their own districts on some rather dubious projects, and predictably, on public transit and light rail trains. Gov. Jerry Brown has his own dubious project: He carved out more than $1 billion of cap-and-trade revenue for his unpopular high-speed-train-to-nowhere.

The United Nations body that oversees greenhouse gas reductions is reeling from another cap-and-trade scandal that may have put 600 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere — roughly speaking, the annual CO2 output of Canada or Britain — while the emissions were ostensibly suppressed, according to an independent study. In the process, the fraudsters, largely in Russia and Ukraine, were likely able to transfer credits for more than 400 million tons of their apparently bogus greenhouse savings by April 2015 into Europe's commercial carbon trading system — the largest in the world — thereby undermining that continent's ambitious...

(CNN)—NASA's rockets are astounding machines, capable of blasting into space at thousands of miles per hour and withstanding temperatures twice the melting point of steel. But they can't take off underwater. Rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps threaten to disrupt a handful of NASA launch sites along U.S. coastlines, the space agency warns. In the coming years, launch facilities at Florida's Kennedy Space Center and other places may need to be retrofitted or even moved inland, NASA says. "Every NASA center has its own set of vulnerabilities, and some are more at risk than others," NASA climatologist...

GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush says that he believes human activity is contributing to climate change, and that the U.S. is obligated to do something about it. “The climate is changing; I don’t think anybody can argue it’s not. Human activity has contributed to it. I think we have a responsibility to adapt to what the possibilities are without destroying our economy, without hollowing out our industrial core,” Bush said in an interview with Bloomberg BNA published Thursday.

Over the past year and a half, we've seen much in the way of speculation of what Obama is really up to, what his true agenda might be behind all the soothing and meretricious rhetoric. It was quite clear that "Obama" was a construct, a carefully manufactured image, as all politicians are to one extent or another. But Obama was an extreme example -- all image, most of it having little or no connection with any discernable substance. The gap between what he said and what he would then proceed to do was wide and glaring. This obvious and undeniable...

A Washington state senator has survived a campaign by Western Washington University students who demanded their school revoke his master’s degree because he’s not radical enough on global warming. Doug Ericksen, a Republican and chair of Washington’s Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee, has blocked efforts to force businesses and residents to go green, but he supports voluntary compliance. He opposes mandated cap-and-trade programs and low-carbon fuel standards. But the effort to yank Ericksen’s degree — he earned his MA in political science and environmental policy at WWU — met with a stiff rebuke last week from the university’s president....

Thank you for contacting me regarding climate change. I appreciate knowing your thoughts on this issue. Last year, President Obama announced a plan to address climate change. Unfortunately, most of the Administration's proposals would simply impose burdensome regulations on American business that would be harmful to the U.S. economy. While I welcome the opportunity to debate proposals in the Senate, I do not support the use of executive orders to implement policy and place costly new regulations on the American industry. According to extensive international scientific studies, including reports by the National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on...

With California’s growing cap-and-trade program expected to yield a budgetary bonanza, lawmakers and interest groups have ample ideas for how to spend the money. Floating proposals ahead of a pivotal period for budget negotiations, they say they want to fund port improvements, pay for heavy-duty trucks and ferries, nurture urban rivers, sponge up carbon in soil and provide discounted bus passes. They are vying for a surge in new revenue that will be available this budget cycle and could continue pouring in for years to come.

Jeb Bush on Friday in New Hampshire called for the U.S. "to work with the rest of the world to negotiate a way to reduce carbon emissions.” The remarks at a "Politics & Eggs" event brought praise from billionaire Tom Steyer's group NextGen Climate, which has spent millions in recent elections blasting Republicans on climate change. "Jeb Bush demonstrated leadership today on the issue of climate change—distancing himself from the other Republican presidential hopefuls and demonstrating why climate change doesn’t have to be a partisan issue," the group said in an email to reporters. "Today in New Hampshire, Bush expressed...

Every year, Al Gore pauses from his overscheduled itinerary of making a fool of himself at climate change speeches around the world to pause at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where he drops by to make a fool of himself in front of hipsters, activists and a sizable jumble of uninterested partiers. This year, the rhetoric got harsh — as in “punish-the-deniers” harsh. While Gore was talking specifically about politicians who reject the idea that government should divert public funds to combat the effects of a changing climate, his tone toward anyone who thinks the jury’s still...

California is always honing its suicidal skills. In its continuous drive toward the ultimate sunset, the Golden State has made its war on America and what America stands for abundantly clear. It wants to become a territory of Mexico and a haven for illegal aliens supported by the dwindling number of actual American saps it can squeeze every nickel out of… bringing the state inexorably closer to its final demise. Among California’s most glaring self-inflicted wounds is its cap and trade program under which businesses, deemed to be enemies of the socialist utopian dream, must pay a tax above and...

The California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) plan to offer cap and trade offset credits to California rice farmers to change the way they farm is like chumming fish. The government’s upfront offer of cash is a scam to encourage rice farmers to invite bureaucrats into their business. CARB will undoubtedly later change the farming rules by mandating the type of severe regulations that will strangle rural community success. Sacramento Valley rice farming is a $5 billion industry that specializes in premium grains used in risotto, paella, and sushi. California rice commands a high price and is exported to more than...