Free Republic

As I discuss below, in the nineties the crooked Enron corporation paid purported scientists and environmental groups to claim that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause higher temperatures. In the previous post I mentioned that some professors may be so incompetent they actually believe the greenhouse gas myth. Those who have previously accepted money for supporting the myth may be reluctant to admit that they lied. Younger professors may fear punishment by corrupt department heads if they don't support the myth. Corrupt federal bureaucrats seem to have taken over Enron's role in supporting the global warming scam. Federal...

Fire department officials in Kyoto said they have confirmed 33 people died in a suspected arson attack in Kyoto. They say 36 others were injured. The fire broke out around 10:30 a.m. on Thursday at the studio of Kyoto Animation. It took firefighters nearly five hours to extinguish the blaze. Officials say about 70 people were in the building at the time of the fire. Police say one suspect, believed to be in his 40s, has been taken into custody. The man was reportedly seen pouring a flammable liquid inside the building before it went up in flames. Witnesses also...

Most of the dead and the 36 injured were workers at Kyoto Animation, known for mega-hit stories featuring high school girls, with places featured in the stories even becoming “pilgrimage sites” for their fans. The fire started in the three-story building in Japan’s ancient capital after the suspect sprayed an unidentified liquid accelerant, Kyoto prefectural police and fire department officials said. Japanese media reported the fire might have been set near the front door, forcing people to find other exits and possibly delaying their escape. So far, 20 people were confirmed dead, including 12 on the first and second floors,...

The global elite has little idea what afflicts the poor, says Pope Francis. He's right ---but that observation sometimes applies to him, too. In his US visit, the pope is already creating headlines about the urgent need to respond to climate change. Invoking the need to "protect the vulnerable in our world," he calls for an end to humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels. But do the world’s poor believe that carbon cuts are a top priority? Since March 2013, the United Nations has sought citizens’ ranking of 16 policy priorities. More than 8 million people have participated, with nearly 3...

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...

Texas is larger than most countries in the United Nations, some not much bigger than the postage stamps they print for collectors, but each with a vote that can cancel ours out. Texas is about to a vote against the U.N.’s sovereignty-destroying Agenda 21, so named because it claims to be setting a “sustainable growth” agenda for the 21st century. Agenda 21 is in fact a global power grab similar to climate-change treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. It uses the imaginary threat of unsustainable growth which allegedly threatens to plunder the planet’s finite resources, like climate change allegedly threatens planetary...

First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to a Buddhist Temple in Kyoto is costing taxpayers nearly $80,000 for rental cars, according to a government contract. Mrs. Obama, who is traveling to Japan and Cambodia for a girls’ education initiative, will arrive in Kyoto, Japan, on Friday. According to the White House press office, “The First Lady will travel to Kyoto on March 20 and visit the Kiyomizu-Dera Buddhist Temple and the Fushimi Inari Shinto Shrine. She will also greet staff from the U.S. Consulate in Osaka.” …

Obama administration officials who say they intend to sign a “politically binding” agreement to drastically reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at the United Nations’ (UN) climate change conference in Paris next year already have a legal strategy to turn any non-binding accord into federal law, warns Christopher Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Horner told CNSNews.com that the “name and shame” effort is an alternative to a new climate change treaty already being drafted by the UN that would have to be ratified by the U.S. Senate. “Obama’s statement acknowledges that he cannot get a new climate...

Three years ago, wooden toy wholesaler Yutaka Katayama picked up a camera and started taking pictures of ordinary life in Kyōto, Japan. Since then photography has become an obsession. "It's my life's work," he wrote over email. Katayama has taken thousands of pictures of the legendary ancient city that once was the imperial capital of Japan. He has also found a favorite theme: the stray cats that are found all over Kyoto. "I feel the strength to live from a stray cat," Katayama wrote. "They seem to live a quiet life always looking for food and a place to live...

LONDON (Reuters) - International climate scientists are more certain than ever that humans are responsible for global warming, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, according to a leaked draft report by an influential panel of experts. The early draft, which is still subject to change before a final version is released in late 2013, showed that a rise in global average temperatures since pre-industrial times was set to exceed 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, and may reach 4.8 Celsius. "It is extremely likely that human activities have caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface...

In the first quarter of this year, U.S. carbon emissions hit a 20-year low. As Figure 1 below demonstrates, the U.S. has observed substantial reductions in CO2 emissions over the last five years. These reductions contrast with the increases in CO2 emissions that the Energy Information Administration forecasted in 1998 when the U.S. was considering committing to CO2 emissions reductions in the Kyoto Agreement. At the time of these discussions, the EIA estimated that CO2 emissions would increase at a rate of approximately 1.3 percent annually through 2020. In fact, to reach the Kyoto Agreement target for 2012, the U.S....

Carbon emissions in the U.S. have hit a 20-year low due to a supposedly environmentally unfriendly drilling technique that has created an abundance of cheap natural gas. The free market, it seems, does it better than the EPA. Environmentalists find themselves between shale rock and a hard place after a little noticed technical report documented how the natural gas boom caused by the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has actually helped the environment in a major way while also creating jobs and economic growth. In the report, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a part of the Energy Department, said...

PITTSBURGH (AP) — In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal. Many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. Michael Mann, director of...

Property Rights: Few have heard of Agenda 21, the U.N. plan for sustainable development that tosses property rights aside. But Alabama has, and it recently secured a victory as important as that over union power in Wisconsin. After Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's stunning triumph over the excesses and abuses of public-sector unions, the London Telegraph's James Delingpole, an indefatigable opponent of global warming fraud, opined in a piece titled, "How Wisconsin And Alabama Helped Save The World," that we should take note of "an equally important but perhaps less well-publicized victory won in the Alabama House and Senate over the...

A proposed Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which has been signed by President Obama but not yet ratified by Congress, will subordinate U.S. naval and drilling operations beyond 200 miles of our coast to a newly established U.N. bureaucracy. If approved, it will grant a Kingston, Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority (ISA) the power to regulate deep-sea oil exploration, seabed mining, and fishing rights. As part of the deal, as much as 7% of U.S. government revenue that is collected from oil and gas companies operating off our coast will be forked over to ISA for redistribution to poorer, landlocked...

How did I end up in Japan a month after the Fukushima disaster? Life of late had been far more work than anything. With too much comp time, it was time for another adventure. Time to make it a series of adventures. I started out in a place nicknamed paradise, Hawaii, the North Shore to be even more specific. The North Shore in the winter times means big surf. With water in the 70s and the air in the 70s to 80s, how could this combo not be Paradise? My next stop was two weeks in Tokyo and Kyoto. The...

If Canada’s “green” media — especially in the Parliamentary Press Gallery — demanded the same standards of accountability of themselves as they do of politicians, they would be killing entire forests right now apologizing to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Why? Because in sidestepping the economically suicidal stampede onto the green energy bandwagon which they relentlessly shilled for, Harper was right and they — along with the Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Greens — were wrong. Today, so-called “green” energy is in retreat all over the developed world, as taxpayers and consumers in countries that blindly raced into it are in open...

Russia supports Canada's decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, says its foreign ministry, reaffirming Friday that Moscow will not take on new commitments. ... Canada, Japan and Russia said last year they will not accept new Kyoto commitments

Canada on Monday became the first country to announce it would withdraw from the Kyoto protocol on climate change, dealing a symbolic blow to the already troubled global treaty. Environment Minister Peter Kent broke the news on his return from talks in Durban, where countries agreed to extend Kyoto for five years and hammer out a new deal forcing all big polluters for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Canada, a major energy producer which critics complain is becoming a climate renegade, has long complained Kyoto is unworkable precisely because it excludes so many significant emitters. "As we've...

Canada will pull out of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, Environment Minister Peter Kent said on Monday, dealing a symbolic blow to the troubled global treaty. Canada will become the first country to formally withdraw from Kyoto, which it says is badly flawed because it does not cover all major emitters of greenhouse gasses, notably the United States and China. (SNIP) “As we’ve said, Kyoto for Canada is in the past … We are invoking our legal right to formally withdraw from Kyoto,” Kent told reporters after returning from talks in Durban, South Africa, on extending the protocol. He...