Free Republic

Come over here, she beckoned, Let me whisper in your ear. If you make me first lady and hire me as “clean energy adviser,” I’ll ignore the 20 years between us. Last Friday afternoon, 67-year-old Gov. John Kitzhaber (D-Oregon) announced his resignation. He and his 47-year-old clean energy consultant/lover Cylvia Hayes will no longer be taking romantic strolls through the manicured gardens of Mahonia Hall. Nor will they be engaging in late-night pillow talk sessions on “energy” at the Tudor-style governor’s mansion. Two days before resigning, Kitzhaber distributed a defiant press release to announce that he would not be resigning....

"I'm not going to consider resigning," said Gov. John Kitzhaber at a disastrous press conference held Friday following revelations about the apparently borderless world of public policy and private gain in which he and fiancée Cylvia Hayes exist. "I was elected by the people of this state to do a job, and I intend to do it." No doubt, the governor does intend to do the job Oregonians gave him, which, simply put, is to pursue the interests of his constituents. That intention, however, is no match for an ugly reality of his own making, whose sordid elements keep surfacing...

Craig — Monday is the deadline to submit comments to the Environmental Protection Agency concerning the proposed Clean Energy Plan that aims to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. The next step is for the federal government to review submitted statements made during the past several months in order to make a final ruling on the plan by June. Originally, the deadline was Oct. 15, but it was extended to Monday after the EPA received nearly 750,000 comments before the first deadline, according to the EPA. Northwest Colorado houses two coal-fired power plants, Craig Station in Moffat County and...

When it comes to energy, climate change, justice and transparency, the Obama Administration and its Environmental Protection Agency want it every possible way. Their only consistency is their double standards and their determination to slash hydrocarbon use, ensure that electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket,” expand federal government command and control, and “fundamentally transform” America.The president was thus eager to give away Seal Team secrets in bragging about “he” got Osama bin Laden. But in sharp contrast, there has been no transparency on Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal – or the data and analyses that supposedly support Environmental Protection Agency...

US company World Eco Energy has signed a preliminary agreement to invest $1.175 billion to generate electricity in Iran. The plan is to turn solid waste into power. In April, the US Treasury awarded American-based Boeing and GE a license to sell spare parts to Iran to help the country’s ailing aviation industry. Iran needed new plane parts, as its jets have passed their service life and need proper replacements.

Researchers at a US lab have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion. Harnessing fusion - the process that powers the Sun - could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy. But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive. Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion. NIF, based at Livermore in California, uses 192 beams from the world's most powerful laser to heat and compress a small...

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: shale gas is fracking green. A new study confirms that natural gas helps decrease greenhouse gas emissions by displacing the much dirtier and more carbon intensive coal. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, and it pokes a hole in one of the last gripes greens have about the American shale boom. Prominent greens like Bill McKibben and the misleading documentary filmmaker Josh Fox have criticized fracking for leaking the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, nullifying the fact that burning natural gas emits...

Signs of pride and prosperity were evident all over Williamsport and the gorgeous northern Pennsylvania countryside around it. Friendly, happy people greeted us. New cars, trucks, hotels and restaurants sparkled in a clean, bustling downtown. New roofs topped barns and houses, while late model tractors worked the fields. Former dirt roads are now paved. Men and women again have high-paying jobs, young people are coming back instead of moving away, their salaries are supporting other businesses and jobs, and many are taking college programs in oilfield technical and business specialties, Vince Matteo told me. As president and CEO of the...

Prepare for your electric rates to go up, Chevy Jolt drivers. That's what happens when Obama goes on vacation. Under executive fiat, the EPA will shortly be forcing the shutdown of the rest of the coal fired plants in the United States. Obama closed about 20 percent of them in 2011 when he went on vacation in Martha's Vineyard.  With a bigger vacation budget this year, he probably figured "What the hell? Why not close the rest of them?" Since coal generates about half the electricity demanded in the US, the country will have to find other, more expensive ways...

This stuff could very well revolutionize nuclear power. Thorium-MOX can be formed into rods and used in current generation (Gen II) nuclear reactor with minimal retrofitting. Thor Energy is currently testing the new technology on the small scale. A prototype reactor will power a paper mill in the town of Halden, Norway for the next five years. If the fuel proves to be commercially viable during that test, we could see a sea change in nuclear power by the end of the decade.

A leading venture capital firm gets taken to the clean energy cleaners. The story in the New York Times says Kleiner Perkins has been “humbled” by the past decade’s performance. That seems appropriate. The nation’s most famous venture capital firm had a stunning 35.7 percent annual rate of return in the decade of the 1990s. That was before they met Al Gore. Somewhere around the time Gore had won his Academy Award for warning the world about global warming, the former Vice President was hired on as a senior partner at KPCB. Fortune wrote an article describing Gore sitting in...

Most unwelcome news for the one-track-minded, fossil-fuels-must-die green lobby — and from their usually zealous allies at the EPA, no less — but pretty sweet news for anyone who actually cares about the environment and isn’t especially interested in scaremongering everybody into a big crunchy panic resulting in still more big government dictates that endorse economic slowdown as the solution to environmental problems.One of the organized environmental movement’s biggest arguments against natural gas is that the release of methane, natural gas’s main component, into the air during the production and delivery process is an even more dangerous and potent greenhouse...

So there I am, pulling into a gas station in my town, and Tarek is smiling. He owns the station, and right now he's charging me $4.25 a gallon. American motorists may not be better off than they were four years ago, but Tarek certainly is. When President Barack Obama took office, the average price for a gallon of regular gas was $1.84. That means gas prices have more than doubled on Obama's watch. But why? The primary reason is that the system is rigged. Oil companies watch the worldwide speculation market, and if the traders are bidding the price...

President Obama’s staff arranged for him to be personally briefed last summer on a loan program to help clean-energy companies, two months before the program was thrust into headlines by the collapse of its flagship, the solar company Solyndra, records show. About the same time, then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley resolved a dispute among administration officials over another project in the program, clearing the way for a $1.4 billion loan, according to documents and sources familiar with the situation.

CARSON CITY – With U.S. Sen. Harry Reid's 5th annual National Clean Energy Summit set to kick off today in Las Vegas, the debate over alternative energy development and the government's role in its future rages on. The purpose of the day-long event as described on the website is to, “once again bring together clean energy visionaries and leaders, public officials, business executives and entrepreneurs, investors, students, and the media to discuss how to empower the public with tools to promote the clean energy economy; increasing jobs and our energy independence.” But the role of the federal government in the...

Former President Bill Clinton to Give Keynote Address at Nation’s Premier Annual Clean Energy ConferenceLas Vegas, NV — On Tuesday, August 7, 2012, “National Clean Energy Summit 5.0: The Power of Choice” returns to Las Vegas at Bellagio Hotel & Resort for the nation’s foremost conversation about clean energy options. As a passionate advocate for energy alternatives, Former President Bill Clinton will give a keynote address during the summit about the importance of taking action and utilizing the power of choice when it comes to clean energy. The annual conference is hosted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), MGM...

Last week, just before the opening of the U.N.’s Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro, the New York Times ran an op-ed that decried the rapid rise in carbon dioxide emissions during the two decades since a similar meeting was held in Rio.The authors of the article — Christian Azar, a professor at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, and two economists from the Environmental Defense Fund, Thomas Sterner and Gernot Wagner — claimed that the world needs to “kick its addiction to fossil fuels” and that renewable energy provides the road to salvation because “the seeds of an...

“Mr. Obama, the clean energy industry called and they want their reputation back.”It has been clear from the beginning that Obama positioned the whole “green” hype to do four things: Siphon off taxpayer money to be used for crony donor kickbacksTake over more government control of business Create and use as his own “Green Labor Union” forceKill our economy ala Piven by increasing regulations and taxes I never could understand the roll of the openly Marxist radical Van Jones, until you realize that under him “everything” would be a green job.  Effectively Jones would use the government to fund or...

A UN push to provide electricity to more than one billion people who live off the grid is threatened by indecision at an important global development conference this week, despite robust support from EU leaders. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, has called for a “global clean energy revolution” to provide electricity to the developing world by 2030 and he won commitments to the plan from the European Commission earlier this year. But negotiators meeting in New York ahead of the 20th anniversary Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro appeared to fall short of agreeing commitments to provide sustainable energy in...

‘Clean energy” is the political darling of the moment. President Obama has made the promotion of clean energy one of the centerpieces of his administration and his reelection effort. The Democratic National Committee claims that “clean energy” investments are “helping pave the way to a more sustainable future, creating new jobs and entire industries here in America.” Last month, the Center for American Progress, a leftist think tank, released a report that touted the need to build a clean-energy economy.On Sunday, an editorial in the New York Times extolled the benefits of renewable energy and declared that the “clean...