Free Republic

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is poised to implement a new regulation without legislative approval to join 10 other states in a climate change agreement based on restricting carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.But lawmakers, policy analysts, and tea party activists in Virginia who oppose what they consider costly regulations of industry are raising questions about the economic and scientific arguments underpinning the proposed rule.They say the Virginia General Assembly should have a straight up-or-down vote on Northam’s plan, in part to ensure that any revenue the governor raises from “carbon trading” is collected and dispersed in a manner consistent...

One of the hottest spots during the just-concluded Global Climate Action Summit was the private runway at San Francisco International Airport, where SFO spokesman Doug Yakel reports corporate jet traffic was up 30 percent over normal. Airport sources told us that the carbon-spewing corporate jets nearly filled the landing area’s parking slots and that many had flown in for the conference. The three-day climate confab drew more than 4,000 elected officials, business executives and environmentalists from around the globe and was aimed at addressing how to lower the carbon emissions responsible for global warming. The summit was organized by Gov....

California Gov. Jerry Brown said Friday that the state plans to launch its "own damn satellite" into orbit to battle climate change. The man the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko famously dubbed "Gov. Moonbeam" made the announcement at the conclusion of a two-day climate summit he organized in San Francisco. [Snip] Before Brown's announcement, two prominent Democrats and a Republican mayor criticized Trump for his decision to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate accord. "While Donald Trump may have pulled out of the climate agreement, the American people have not," former Secretary of State John Kerry said...

The Sun of a Beach Mouse If you own a house on the beach on Perdido Key you just got screwed to the wall by Escambia County in sunny Florida, sometimes referred to as LA (Lower Alabama). It’s a shame how the liberals have begun to pollute a once conservative enclave in Sunny Florida. Escambia County is proposing a non-ad valorem (NAV) levy on the rich residents of Perdido Key for the protection of the Perdido Key Beach Mouse. It’s basically a soak the rich levy and it’s illegal. They could use tax revenue but in Florida local governments have...

Former Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton wants supporters to tell their senators to vote against Judge Brett Kavanaugh becoming the newest justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Clinton’s main reason for opposing President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee? Man-made global warming. “Replacing Kennedy with Kavanaugh would swing the Court to a new, hard-right majority that would rule against curbing greenhouse gases for years—maybe decades—that we can’t afford to waste on inaction,” Clinton wrote in a series of tweets published Friday....

Scientists now believe the earth is in for a big freeze due to the sun being totally void of sunspots for more than half of 2018. The sun has been completely free of sunspots for a total of 133 days this year, scientists are reporting.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals want to build a 5-foot tombstone where lobsters may have died after a crash on Route 1 in Brunswick, Maine, last week. According to the Brunswick Police Department several of the crustaceans that a Cozy Harbor Seafood truck was carrying got crushed as a result of the rollover. [Snip] The organization sent a letter to the Maine Department of Transportation asking if it could create the roadside memorial where the lobsters lost their lives.

Now more than ever, it’s imperative that Republicans take the lead on environmental issues. The opportunity is clear, with the GOP enjoying control of Congress and the presidency – an accomplishment quite impressive given the polarized state of American politics. To maintain this conservative majority and survive what will be a difficult fight in the midterms, however, Republicans must broaden their appeal by discussing issues that fall outside of the party’s traditional platform.  Fortunately, a number of congressional Republicans are devoting significant attention to environmental issues. An endorsement list compiled by the American Conservation Coalition showcases these efforts and highlights a...

A federal judge issued a nationwide injunction Thursday against the Trump administration for delaying the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule, dealing a setback to a key piece of President Trump's deregulatory agenda. The decision by the U.S. District Court in South Carolina means that the so-called Clean Water Rule is again operative in 26 states where district courts have not halted the regulation.

After nearly 15 years of planning, hundreds of public comments, and a handful of lawsuits, a page turned Friday morning for a 10-mile stretch of Interstate 70 in north Denver.A slate of prominent transportation officials and politicians, including Gov. John Hickenlooper, formally broke ground on the $1.2 billion "Central 70" Project that will remake that section of freeway that officials call the lifeblood of the quickly growing Denver metro area."Without infrastructure, you can't grow. That's just a fact of life," Hickenlooper said after the event. "It's really building the foundation for the next 50 years of economic development for Colorado."Critics...

Fossil fuel energy has understandably become the clay pigeon of environmentalists in the past decades – with oil & gas companies having lied too often about the impact of their activities on climate change or environmental pollution for the public to ignore. Oil spills have destroyed many a habitat both onshore and offshore, with an immeasurable number of animals and humans having suffered. But it is important to acknowledge that oil and gas companies are not the only guilty parties, with all types of energy production leading to environmental harm in one way or another. The ‘clean’ energy narrative that...

The Trump administration recently proposed the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule. The proposed rule offers modifications to Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards with a “preferred alternative” for model years 2021 through 2026. Without a doubt, the Trump administration’s proposed revision is a welcome victory for consumers’ wallets and for consumer choice. The Obama administration implemented fuel-efficiency mandates that would force auto manufacturers to have a fleetwide fuel-economy average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The new rule’s “preferred” change would maintain the existing fuel-economy mandate through 2020 (increasing to 37 mpg) and keep the level at...

Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no. The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never ratified the Kyoto Treaty some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don't have a cap-and-trade carbon emission program. That environmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world. Yet the...

NEW ORLEANS—Sterling Burnett doesn’t always want to sit next to someone he doesn’t know on a train, plane, or bus. But he’s willing to fight for the freedom of those same strangers when it comes time for them to purchase a motor vehicle. “What I care about is … your freedom to choose the vehicle of your choice,” Burnett, an environmental policy expert for the Heartland Institute, said during a panel discussion at the free-market think tank’s America First Energy Conference that took a critical look at fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. “I don’t think government should be in...

Insanity: Despite the fact that you could bury the world’s trash in a minuscule portion of the Earth, Left-wing environmental wackos are hell-bent on getting as many modern conveniences banned or regulated as possible. In recent months they’ve managed to convince liberal lawmakers and policymakers that plastic straws will destroy the planet if they are not banned from at least some major cities. Now these same goofballs are coming after another party favorite: Balloons.

According to recent media accounts, America is in a population death spiral. Open-borders activists have seized on the narrative to promote ever-looser immigration policies.But the narrative is wrong.In fact, women in the U.S. are more likely to be mothers than in the past, and they are having more children, reports the Pew Research Center.The Pew study found that women have 2.07 children during their lives on average – up from 1.86 in 2006, the lowest on record. Family size is also up. In 2016, mothers at the end of their childbearing years had had about 2.42 children, compared with 2.31...

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards were devised back in 1975, amid anxiety over the OPEC oil embargo and supposedly imminent depletion of the world’s oil supplies. Of course, barely 15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952.Somehow, improved technology and geological acumen kept finding more oil. Then the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution postponed the...

Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm Anthony Watts / 11 hours ago August 7, 2018 By Rob Bradley writing at IER “If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050…. The rise in global temperature is predicted to … caus[e] sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”— Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun.” New York Times, June 24, 1988. It has been 30 years since the alarm bell was...

Remember that video of an emaciated Baffin Island polar bear that went viral last December? It became the poster bear for climate change. National Geographic made a stunning admission - it was a bit bogus. The Statement: National Geographic went too far in drawing a definitive connection between climate change and a particular starving polar bear in the opening caption of our video about the animal. We said, "This is what climate change looks like." While science has established that there is a strong connection between melting sea ice and polar bears dying off, there is no way to know...