Free Republic

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has recently announced a hardline approach that bans the entrance of electric bicycles by visitors or staff due to SAFETY CONCERNS. NREL is a federally-funded R&D center that focuses on sustainable energy solutions, including research into solar energy and energy efficiency, among others. According to the NREL’s fire marshal Nicholas Bartlett, micromobility devices such as electric scooters and bikes are no longer permitted to be charged or stored in the buildings. Bartlett explained: The data in the past few years shows an alarming trend of injuries and deaths, as demonstrated by entities such as...

Workers are replacing the charming rusty chain that lines the road to Fort Point with a dull metal barrierLink loss: Say goodbye to San Francisco’s favorite chain.Marine Drive in the Presidio isn’t even a mile along, but as it descends a short hill from Lincoln Boulevard, you’re awarded with one of the most commanding views in San Francisco. Ahead, the Golden Gate Bridge towers above the hulk of Fort Point, while on the right, the constantly churning bay splashes on the rocky shore. Over the next few weeks that view is going to change. The bridge and fort will still...

Sometime in the past year, this tiny planet we live on in an obscure corner of our Milky Way galaxy went through some sort of tipping point, a “state change” of sorts, and now things are different from how they’ve been at any other time in the 300,000 year history of the human race. Nobody knows for sure what that change or tipping point is. — One theory is that variations in dust concentrations in the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere — a function of the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean allowing more or less fine dirt to be picked up and...

The world's largest whales are more than just astonishing creatures. Much like the ocean, soil and forests, whales can help save humanity from the accelerating climate crisis by sequestering and storing planet-heating carbon emissions, researchers say. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, climate researchers suggest that whales are important, but often overlooked, carbon sinks. The enormous size of these marine mammals, which can reach 150 tons, means they can store carbon much more effectively than smaller animals. And because whales live longer than most animals, some for more than 100 years, the paper...

It would hit Alina Black at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl. Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws. In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip...

Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you’ve generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year. If you’re flying, you’re adding a significant amount of planet-warming gases to the atmosphere — there’s no way around it. But there are some ways to make your airplane travel a little bit greener. The most effective way to reduce your carbon footprint is to fly less often. If everyone took fewer flights, airline companies wouldn’t burn as much jet fuel. ...according to some calculations, a round-trip flight from New York to San...

Weird weather and climate warming are two separate things, but a Stanford team is linking them. Using math, powerful computers and historical records, research led by Noah Diffenbaugh found that climate change has boosted the odds of extreme heat, drought, punishing rainstorms and retreating sea ice. “The odds of hitting record-setting level of extremes have been made greater by climate warming,” caused by human emission of greenhouse gases, said Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. In the past, scientists typically avoided conflating individual weather events and climate change, citing the...

Every community that rings San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to rising seas. But while some places are preparing, others are not -- and no single agency is coordinating the effort, according to two new civil grand jury reports. "It is a slow-moving emergency," said state Assemblyman Rich Gordon, D-Menlo Park, lead author of the state's first report on climate-related flooding and organizer of a conference Friday at NASA Ames Research Center called "Meeting the Challenges of Sea Level Rise." In Santa Clara County, the water district should coordinate the county's effort, the grand jury recommended -- a project the district...

Electricity consumption has dropped dramatically this summer because of the mild weather, and it is translating into more manageable electric bills. PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, says electricity demand in the mid-Atlantic states was down 13.5 percent in June compared with last year. Peco Energy Co. customers used 14.9 percent less power in June than they did a year ago, and sales are off 2.5 percent for the first six months of the year, according to PJM. Public Service Electric & Gas, the New Jersey utility, sold 17 percent less power in June, and 4.5 percent less for the...

Stanford University sophomore Sabine Bergmann wants to focus her education on issues involving global warming. "I really want to spend my life and career on climate change," the 19-year-old said. "But there's no major geared toward that specific topic, because it's so new and cutting-edge." But on Thursday, she went through a kind of accelerated program on the subject as some 1,500 higher-education institutions and schools across the country delved into what was described as the largest teach-in on global warming in American history. Students, teachers, climate experts and others nationwide simultaneously participated in workshops and activities that sought to...

California AG Jerry Brown and VMware CEO Diane Greene participated in a "Public and Private Sector Accountability and Action" panel at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's "Clean and Green" Projections 2008. Jerry Brown: I wouldn't call it [GW] the core of my office, because the office has 1,100 lawyers, and maybe 15 are working in this particular area. But it is getting attention because the burning of fossil fuel, oil, gas or coal is at the heart of almost everything we do every day of our lives, and it is the engine that has driven economic growth, prosperity, and the...

California Public Utilities Commission unveiled a proposal to create financial incentives for utilities to get their customers to use less power, with the threat of big fines if they do not. The plan would help meet the aggressive targets of the state's global-warming law passed last year, which calls for drastic cuts in CO2 emissions. "This is one of the most important regulations on utility efficiency in history," said Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program of the Natural Resources Defense Council. It's precedent-setting for the nation." Opponents say California, which has some of the highest electricity rates in the...

Robert Pastor intends to give away U.S. sovereignty to a newly forming North American Union exactly as he gave away the Panama Canal to Panama during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.As we are taught in grade school, George Washington is the Father of our nation. If the North American Union comes into existence as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) asserts, then we all better get prepared for a new hero. Robert Pastor is the person most likely to be proclaimed the father of the North American Union, a designation consistent with his decades-long history of viewing U.S. national interests through the...

Hockey may be Canada's national sport but now that we're all North Americans, local ties, it seems, are the casualty of international competitiveness. It's happening again with Canada's mining giants Inco and Falconbridge. If North American integration confuses loyalties, it also rallies those on the further reaches of the ideological spectrum. When the Canadian prime minister recently visited the U.S. president, Linda McQuaig coyly suggested in her Toronto Star column that the question isn't how well these two conservative soul mates get along, but "What are they up to?"In the U.S., arch-conservative Jerome R. Corsi, in his Human Events Online...

Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway By Jerome R. Corsi Human Events 6-14-6 Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn. Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman's Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive...

Back in 2004, I published The Real Matrix, in seven parts (read them here). I had little idea how the process outlined there would accelerate in 2005 and 2006. Indeed, even those still "plugged in" ought to be wondering why the U.S. Senate just gave thumbs-up (62 yeas vs. 26 nays) to an immigration bill that most of the public does not want, and that would clearly be destructive of this country's long-term best interests – educationally, culturally, and economically. Those of us out here in the Desert of the Real are aware that the Senate just took us one...

Responding to a WorldNetDaily report, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., is demanding the Bush administration fully disclose the activities of an office implementing a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada that apparently could lead to a North American union, despite having no authorization from Congress. As WND reported, the White House has established working groups, under the North American Free Trade Agreement office in the Department of Commerce, to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, March 23, 2005. The groups, however, have...

THE SPP: ANOTHER SUMMIT SELLOUT   Phyllis Spivey April 19, 2005 "Border Talks Called Disturbing." So read the headline over the report of a meeting of trinational leaders considering "a raft of bold proposals for an integrated North America." According to a "confidential internal summary," the group discussed ways to merge key policies of the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The article might have been describing the March meeting in Texas of the leaders of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, but it wasn’t. The border story ran February 17 in the Toronto Star, dateline Ottawa. The meeting participants were academics, trade...

Author Jerome Corsi and Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., will be guests tomorrow on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show to discuss the White House's effort to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada that could lead to a North American union, despite having no authorization from Congress. Corsi and Tancredo will join Liddy for the entire 11 a.m. hour, Eastern time, and take calls from listeners. Corsi reported this week that Bush administration working groups have not disclosed the results of their work despite two years of massive effort within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The...

Despite having no authorization from Congress, the Bush administration has launched extensive working-group activity to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada. The membership of the working groups has not been published, nor has their work product been disclosed, despite two years of massive effort within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The groups, working under the North American Free Trade Association office in the Department of Commerce, are to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, on...