Free Republic

He never mentioned him by name, but former President Barack Obama made it clear Friday at a rally in Miami’s Overtown that by electing Andrew Gillum governor of Florida, the state can deliver a blow to President Donald Trump.... On Friday, the faithful jammed into a sweltering, cavernous room at Miami’s Ice Palace Film Studios, several attendees wearing Obama T-shirts they said dated to his first run for the presidency in 2008. Gillum’s campaign said more than 4,000 people attended....

<p>PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — They burst onto the Pittsburgh political scene with the nominations of Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato, two Democratic socialists, who defeated Pennsylvania Reps. Dom Costa and Paul Costa in the Democratic primary last May.</p> <p>“It’s really exciting because it proves what we can do when we get out and knock on doors,” Becca Tasker told KDKA political editor Jon Delano on Friday.</p>

As has been the case so many times in recent history, this year’s election in Florida might be the most important race to watch. The governor’s race is a proxy battle that pits a Trump-endorsed congressman against the Bernie Sanders-endorsed mayor of Tallahassee. Indeed, a Trump versus Bernie battle was what many expected to see in the 2016 presidential election – and may very well see in the future. The candidates for Florida governor, Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum, are running on vastly different fiscal policy agendas in a race that could give political observers insight into what...

A recent report from New Hampshire, published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, notes a 70 percent die-off of new moose calves over the course of a three-year field study. It elicited this comment from a professor of wildlife ecology: “The iconic moose is rapidly becoming the new poster child for climate change in parts of the Northeast.” The decline is happening in New England where there are no wolves to blame. In many other northern corners of the Lower 48, moose populations also are in trouble. The scientific study, mentioned above, noted that among the 170 radio-collared moose calves,...

More than a year after the US Environmental Protection Agency took down information on climate change from its website for an “update”, it now seems uncertain whether it will ever reappear. In April last year, the EPA replaced its online climate change section with a holding page that said the content was being updated to “reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump”. Information previously found at epa.gov/climatechange made it clear that human activity was warming the planet, resulting in harm to Americans’ health as well as crucial ecosystems on which humans depend. The “update” page has now given...

Is there a law somewhere which requires that public schools must aim for mediocrity?Nobody denies that our toys, including games and robots, are smarter than ever. Meanwhile, everyone seems to agree that we humans are moving in the other direction: dumber and dumbest.The unanimity of opinion is rather shocking. You see on the Internet a lot of headlines like this: “Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing — and some experts argue it's because humans have reached their intellectual peak.” As for why, there is a colorful variety of opinion. Some people blame pollution, diet, and/or environmental degradation....

When the Left brings up ‘Medicare for all or Obamacare’, instead of pointing out that Government run healthcare would cost $32.3 TRILLION over the next 10 years, Republicans need to say ‘that would raise Federal taxes on every taxpayer 20%’. Period.

Socialism is traditionally defined as the government owning the means of production, and it just as traditionally leads to authoritarianism. Maybe it’s cool to think of oneself as a socialist now that we are decades away from Stalin’s Great Terror and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. With a body count in the millions, you’d think “socialism” would be hard to rebrand. But thanks to Bernie, being a socialist is in vogue. One of the ironies of the Trump presidency is that his political opponents, while decrying his impetuousness and authoritarian tendencies, happen to favor modifying our political and economic system into...

MADISON, Wis. - Halloween weather can vary dramatically from year-to-year across southern Wisconsin. Because of climate change, Octobers are warming for much of the country. That includes right here in Wisconsin. Since 1970, October temperatures have climbed by an average of 2.3 degrees in Madison. A warming October not only brings concerns locally, but across the country and across the world. Climate change has scary consequences for trick-or-treaters, too. Supplies of chocolate, the backbone of Halloween, are at risk from rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns. Areas of West Africa, which support a majority of the world’s cacao trees, could...

Climate scientists have not been properly accounting for what plants do at night, and that, it turns out, is a mistake. A new study from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that plant nutrient uptake in the absence of photosynthesis affects greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. In a study published today in Nature Climate Change, lead author William Riley demonstrates how to improve climate models to more accurately represent land biogeochemical dynamics. Using a new global land model they developed and integrated in DOE's Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), Riley and his...

Harvesting crops or building a house in the Florida sun is grueling work, and a new report shows that it’ll only get more miserable and unsafe for workers as climate change sends temperatures soaring. By at least one safety standard, it was too hot for Floridians to do very heavy labor (like digging with a shovel) for at least an hour a day almost every single day this summer. Unworkable, a report from Public Citizen and the Farmworker Association of Florida released Tuesday, spells out the risks to the state’s large population of outdoor workers, particularly construction and agricultural workers....

Election 2018: Next week, voters in five states will decide whether they want to raise their own taxes, kill jobs and lower their standards of living. All in a fanciful effort to stop "global warming." They'd be better off letting the free market do the work. Washington, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado all have global-warming ballot initiatives, each heavily financed by environmental activists. New Mexico voters will decide whether to elect a powerful land commissioner who promises stiff curbs on emissions. None of these will make any difference in the global climate. But they will cost their residents dearly. In Washington,...

Climate science and Christian fundamentalism might not seem to go together, with a recent poll showing that only 28 percent of white evangelicals believe Earth is warming because of human activity. But Katherine Hayhoe says it's never been a problem for her. An evangelical Christian and director of Texas Tech University's Climate Science Center in Lubbock, Hayhoe calls science and religion "two sides of the same coin." She's made it her mission to advocate for climate action without alienating people who might be unreceptive to scientific explanations for climate change because of their beliefs. Hayhoe came to prominence in 2016,...

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report describing the new risks the world will likely face by 2040 if governments fail to make significant progress on climate change. Yet, the likelihood of dramatically cutting greenhouse emissions in the U.S. is stymied by political divides among both politicians and the public about the urgency of the problem. Helping science teachers effectively teach students about climate change is one of the most important topics in science education. Science teachers, however, often report feeling ill prepared in both content and pedagogical knowledge to teach environmental science and...

Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is unfolding more rapidly than previously imagined, many policymakers around the world are rolling back environmental protections. Anthropologist Jennifer Carlson will give a talk, “Denial’s Authority: Anti-Environmentalism and the Aesthetics of Negativity in Contemporary Climate Politics". Carlson is the Cornell Society for the Humanities 2018-19 sustainability fellow. Carlson will discuss how embracing anti-environmentalism provides a kind of social affirmation. “If we’re going to reach out to people, we have to understand that we’re not being asked to educate or optimize, but to improvise with and learn from how their vernacular theories of power and...

Thousands of Central American migrants trudging through Mexico towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty. But another crucial driving factor behind the migrant caravan has been harder to grasp: climate change. Most members of the migrant caravans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador - three countries devastated by violence, organised crime and systemic corruption, the roots of which can be traced back to the region’s cold war conflicts. Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems...

Global wildlife populations have fallen by 60% in just over four decades, as accelerating pollution, deforestation, climate change and other manmade factors have created a "mindblowing" crisis, the World Wildlife Fund has warned in a damning new report. The total numbers of more than 4,000 mammal, bird, fish, reptile and amphibian species declined rapidly between 1970 and 2014, the Living Planet Report 2018 says. Current rates of species extinction are now up to 1,000 times higher than before human involvement in animal ecosystems became a factor. The proportion of the planet's land that is free from human impact is projected...

Who doesn’t love a pay rise? Or a windfall. Or a boost in the return of your savings or investments? Sometimes, however, depending on your circumstances, a marginal pay rise can cost you more than you might think. Take a €5,000 pay rise, for example. The net return to you of this is just €2,400, or €216 a month, if you’re a higher-rate taxpayer. And yet it could put you out of reach of getting a grant for third level, which could be worth about €72,000 for three children; from getting a medical card in your senescence, and discounted childcare....

The growing backlash against plastic waste has a new target: paper coffee cups. Paper cups sourced from sustainable forests have for years been hailed as a more environmentally friendly option than plastic foam, with Dunkin’ Brands Group Inc. and McDonald’s Corp. recently pledging to switch to paper. But paper cups are attracting new scrutiny, because they contain a tightly bonded plastic lining that needs to be separated before the paper can be recycled. The process requires specialist facilities, meaning most cups, even if put in the recycling bin, end up as trash. The issue is gaining attention as consumer awareness...

Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn. It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level. How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown...