by Kathleen Marquardt People are excited thinking about being able to live in alternative universes. Unbeknownst to them, they already do – and have been for most of their lives. Especially those born after the era when we wore our Texas Instrument calculators on our belts (our slide rules were…
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The Northern Virginia Regional Commission evaluated the climate-change readiness of the region and its military installations – identifying 129 projects to address readiness gaps.
Utilizing a $1.5 million Department of Defense grant, multiple counties and municipal governments participated in the study, such as Arlington, Fairfax, Prince William and Stafford counties, home to Joint Base Ft. Myer-Henderson Hall, Ft. Belvoir and the 58,000-acre Quantico Marine base.
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This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.
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Carbon capture is like burning witches.
In the 15th to 17th centuries, the elite in Europe and the United States believed that “evil humans were negatively affecting the climate and weather patterns.” The people were demanding something — anything — be done about famine and crop failure. There must be consequences, facts be damned, so inconvenient women on the fringes of society were labeled “witches” and burned at the stake in droves.
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The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear local governments’ climate damage lawsuits against energy companies on Monday.
The companies, who localities want to hold financially accountable for burning fossil fuels they allege damaged the climate, appealed their cases to the Supreme Court, asking it to weigh in on whether the claims should be heard in state or federal courts. The Court’s decision benefits the environmental activists behind the lawsuits, who prefer the matter to play out in state courts, where judges may be more inclined to rule in their favor, experts previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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The European Parliament finalized legislation Tuesday that will impose taxes on imports based on the greenhouse gas emissions made during their production, despite the objections raised by companies in the U.S. and China.
The European Union’s (E.U.) Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) would first take effect in 2026, and first cover emissions from companies producing iron, steel, cement, aluminum, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, according to the European Parliament. The taxes have been criticized by firms in the U.S., who are concerned about unnecessary regulation and red tape, and firms in China and the developing world, who use less green sources of energy than competitors in the U.S. and E.U., according to the Wall Street Journal.
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Despite Germany’s last-ditch attempt at realism, the European Union recently approved a 2035 ban on gas-powered cars, moving ahead with its “net zero” emissions agenda. In the U.S., the cost of achieving net-zero carbon emissions would be staggering – $50 trillion if the goal is reached by 2050 – as would the demand for raw materials, which in most cases would exceed current annual worldwide production.
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Ajay Banga, the former CEO of Mastercard that President Joe Biden has nominated to head the World Bank, told Axios Wednesday that both the bank and the private sector needed to spend “trillions” to combat both climate change and poverty.
Banga has been aggressively campaigning for the job, meeting with officials from 37 different governments in the past three weeks, Axios reported. The World Bank faces competing pressure from wealthy and developing countries over whether to focus on combatting climate change or poverty mitigation, but Banga said he does not view the two goals as inherently opposed to one another.
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CEO Larry Fink of investing titan BlackRock put reduced emphasis on climate and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals in an annual letter to the company’s investors and stakeholders Wednesday, amid Republican criticism of his firm’s investing strategy.
BlackRock has faced significant criticism from Republicans, who allege that the company has focused too much on “woke” investing to the detriment of its clients, and more recently Democrats who argue the company hasn’t gone far enough with its ESG efforts. Fink’s reduced emphasis on his firm’s role in the energy transition stands in stark contrast to his 2020 letter to investors, in which he argued the company had a “significant responsibility … to play a constructive role” in the transition to low-carbon sources of energy, Axios reported.
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Nearly one of every six pages of a document detailing the Pentagon’s management strategy are devoted to combating climate change and fulfilling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.
The Strategic Management Plan for 2022 to 2026, released Tuesday, covers 124 pages and underscores the actions the Department of Defense (DOD) is taking to fulfill the Biden administration’s broader national defense strategy. It lays out high-level, long term goals and steps the department will take to accomplish those objectives and overcome anticipated challenges, as well as performance metrics for so-called Agency Priority Goals (APGs) that include climate and diversity targets.
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The World Bank’s plan to focus future efforts on climate change will have a disproportionately negative impact on its poorest client nations, despite those same countries having repeatedly reported that they would prefer the bank focus on other issues, researchers at the Center for Global Development (CGD) reported Thursday.
The Biden administration named former MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga as its nominee to replace the outgoing Trump appointee David Malpass as president of the World Bank Thursday, a key step in the administration’s efforts to refocus the agency from poverty prevention and take more climate action. However, just 6% of public and private representatives from 43 client nations listed climate change as one of the top three issues facing their country, according to a review of surveys conducted by the World Bank in 2020 and 2021, the GCD researchers reported.
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Liberal megadonor George Soros spoke in support of using an experimental weather control technology to alleviate global warming during a speech last week in Germany.
Soros, who has given millions of dollars to climate change groups through his nonprofit Open Society Foundations, touted a theoretical project to “repair the climate system” by creating white clouds that reflect sunlight away from certain warming areas with the goal of preventing ice sheets in Greenland from melting, Fox News reported.
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Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently appeared on NPR’s “News Hour” to discuss the looming catastrophe in Somalia and call for more aid to the troubled east African nation. In her interview, she repeatedly cited climate change as the reason for Somalia’s current predicament.
Framing problems, whether they occur in Syria, Somalia, or California, as primarily the result of “climate change” is inaccurate and unhelpful. The drought in the Horn of Africa is indeed severe, so bad, in fact, that NPR reports it as “the worst drought in 40 years.”
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The meat substitute market is collapsing after its meteoric rise, with key players in the industry facing massive layoffs and plummeting sales.
Fake meat products like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, which advertise themselves as healthy and environmentally friendly alternatives to meat, soared to national popularity in 2019 when they began selling their products with massive fast food chains. Impossible Foods was moving toward laying off 20% of its staff in late January just months after its competitor, Beyond Meat, announced plans to cut a fifth of its own workforce, according to Bloomberg.
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Left-wing billionaire George Soros and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are helping a World Economic Forum (WEF) climate financing program that aims to raise $3 trillion annually to help slash emissions and restore “nature loss” by 2050.
The WEF and the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations and Bezos Earth Fund, along with more than 43 other nonprofits, businesses and academic institutions, will become part of the “Giving to Amplify Earth Action” (GAEA) initiative that will fund efforts intended to limit global warming, according to a Tuesday WEF announcement. GAEA and its partners will finance charitable partnerships between public and private entities while identifying where the $3 trillion in funding is most needed.
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Certain basic functions of everyday life distinguish us from animals. Our use of fire is among them. We cook with it, heat with it, and light the darkness with it. In many ways, fire on the stove is the center of our family life. In days of our ancestors, we even kept wild animals at bay with torches burning hot with the rendered fat of animals.
Now the United States federal government is coming for our fire. It’s to protect the children, the federal government says, through an unelected bureaucrat who wants to regulate gas cookstoves out of existence.
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The just-departed polar vortex confirmed that when Mother Nature is enraged, it’s wise to have options. Maddeningly, today’s “pro-choice” Democrats want Americans to have one energy choice.
Neo-totalitarian, Left-wing eco-extremists are banning new natural-gas access in scores of locales. If not reversed, this cruel, stupid, needless policy will kill Americans.
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Concern about catastrophic climate change has been the biggest factor driving ESG, yet the likelihood of climate change being catastrophic and the attainment of net zero are not open to debate or challenge by participants in financial markets. In the last of his four part review of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, Rupert Darwall argues that this undermines the function of financial markets as efficient, unsentimental allocators of people’s savings in a way that maximizes growth and economic well-being.
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This is a question without an answer. But for nearly three weeks in November, over 35,000 people including heads of state and the global corps d’elite, pretended they were solving what they claim is the most urgent crisis in the world—the climate emergency—while ignoring the only relevant question. What is a practical alternative to fossil fuel?
Also ignored at the latest U.N. Climate Change Conference, an event sponsored by some of the world’s biggest corporations and covered, uncritically, by the biggest media conglomerates on earth, was the primary reason for environmental challenges in the 21st century. It’s not fossil fuel. It’s population trends.
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The Republican Party struggled with young voters ages 18-29 in the 2022 midterm election, largely due to issues such as abortion, gun rights, and climate change, according to an analysis from Look Ahead Strategies.
CNN found that House Democratic candidates “won voters under 30 by 28 points,” which was a two-point increase over the 2020 election data for that age group.
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Former President Barack Obama will rally with Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) on December 1, and urge Georgians to cast early ballots for Warnock in his runoff U.S. Senate race against Republican Herschel Walker.
According to a report at NBC News, Obama’s team said, following the former president’s rally for Warnock at the end of October, attendees “signed up to complete hundreds of door knocking shifts.”
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When it comes to environmental policy, the only “solutions” coming from liberal politicians activists involve radically restructuring society and centralizing more power in the government — while, of course, handing out billions in tax dollars to politically-favored special interests.
Whether it’s the Paris climate accords, Green New Deal or the recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act, these political schemes to remake the economy often end up enriching the climate industrial complex and empowering unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies.
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Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg will not be attending the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in Egypt because she believes that the conference fails to effectively push the environmental agenda.
Thunberg on Sunday declared COP27 to be a “scam” where world leaders feign concern for the “climate crisis” to get attention during a question and answer session at the launch of her new book in London. The 19-year-old environmentalist said that world leaders are endangering the planet by “lying and cheating” instead of implementing “major changes” to reduce carbon emissions.
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America is floundering in an epidemic of anxiety, depression and drug use.
One in six Americans takes some kind of psychiatric drug, mostly antidepressants, a medical study concluded, and some of them (Prozac and Paxil) are linked to acts of violence. A third of high school students cannot shake feelings of sadness or hopelessness, another report found, and nearly 2 0% of teens have contemplated suicide.
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Public school districts are adopting curricula on climate change from well-funded progressive groups casting the issue as a threat to life on the planet that students should respond to through activism.
As of fall 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards that require science classes to teach human-caused climate change as a peril beyond dispute, according to K12 Climate Action, a group that is part of the progressive Aspen Institute.
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When you look at climate alarmists, there are really only two options: they either don’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re lying.
The “Little Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’”-like cries of “existential threats” brought on by climate change would be hilarious, if it wasn’t for the disastrous impact from misguided actions to “fix” the problem. However, the fable about a youngster fabricating an emergency time and again isn’t that far off from today’s climate-change evangelists; they both need to recognize their stories are quickly losing credibility.
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Major cities across the U.S. are employing climate officials to help manage the response to “extreme heat” conditions, according to The Washington Post.
Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix have appointed “chief heat officers” to mitigate the effects of climate change and to protect the city’s low-income minority residents, whom they deem especially vulnerable to high temperatures, reported the Post. Currently, heat waves are sweeping across the U.S. with temperatures reaching up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit in states like Texas and Oklahoma, according to Yahoo News.
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The Supreme Court delivered a massive blow to the Biden administration’s climate change plan Thursday, severely limiting the power of federal agencies.
The Court, in a 6-3 decision on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), limited the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, significantly curtailing the power of the federal agency. The decision restricts the agency to regulating individual power plants and not the entire power sector.
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Eight Republican House members have introduced legislation to defund climate czar John Kerry and other “climate tyrants“ inside the Biden administration, blaming them for an energy crisis that has sent gasoline soaring to $5 a gallon.
The group, led by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for CZARS Act that would ban federal funding for any activity of the special presidential envoy for climate, including salary and both administrative and travel expenses.
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The Equity Subcommittee of Maine Governor Janet Mills’ (D) Climate Council is recommending a plan to pay “disadvantaged” and “overburdened” state residents to attend its meetings because, according to its ideology, victims of systemic discrimination suffer greater impact from climate change than average Maine residents.
The Equity Subcommittee’s report, released in February, claims that some individuals in Maine, particularly those who are victims of “historical and systemic discrimination, underrepresentation, and isolation” are “more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than others.”
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Blackrock has gone from being known as the largest asset manager in the world to being known as the investment company that pushes a social agenda on the companies it invests in. From cajoling corporate America into signing the manifesto of stakeholder capitalism, the Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Responsibility, to putting anti-oil board members on the board of oil companies, Blackrock has developed a reputation, at least among conservatives, as a company that is imposing CEO Larry Fink’s social agenda on American capitalism.
In fact, the reputational issue is so prevalent that Fink spent much of the recent annual report rebutting it, arguing that what he is practicing is simply capitalism and that the imposition of climate change minimization measures and other ESG issues relevant to stakeholders is simply capitalism. The standard arguments here are that practicing ESG is not politics but rather risk management. Typically ESG proposals talk about reputational risk or the risk that at some point in the future governments will embrace the values expressed in ESG circles and impose them involuntarily on businesses. In such cases, for example, fossil fuel companies will be stuck with “stranded assets”, i.e. oil and gas wells rendered worthless by the coming age of enlightened energy regulation.
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A coalition of 16 Republican governors sent a letter Tuesday to President Joe Biden, urging him to rescind a proposal introducing a series of climate requirements for companies.
The recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposal, which forces publicly-traded companies to share so-called climate change risks and greenhouse gas emissions, would harm businesses and investors by adding high compliance costs, the governors argued in the letter addressed to both Biden and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. The climate disclosure rule, they added, would also represent an overstepping of the SEC’s authority.
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The Supreme Court denied a petition from 10 Republican-led states Thursday requesting it to block a key Biden administration climate policy.
The decision ensures that President Joe Biden’s so-called “social cost” of carbon policy — which assigns an estimated dollar value or cost to every ton of carbon emissions, according to the Government Accountability Office — can remain in place and be used for future federal permitting processes. The high court rejected states’ April 27 petition without giving a reason or listing which justices opposed it, according to a one-page filing published on the Supreme Court docket.
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On Earth Day, a 50-year-old environmentalist and photographer from Colorado named Wynn Alan Bruce lit himself on fire outside the US Supreme Court.
Friends of Bruce, who subsequently died, said he was worried about climate change.
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Sin, punishment, redemption: as an ideology, environmentalism shares many features with organized religion. Falling after Easter this year, Earth Day, which was celebrated April 22, focuses on the sin-and-punishment parts of the trilogy. Redemption comes later, toward the end of each year, at the annual U.N. climate conferences that will save the planet.
On Earth Day this year, however, a loud dissenting voice was heard. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event in Florida, Donald Trump attacked climate-change catastrophizing.
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Twitter will no longer sell ads with messaging that contradicts the United Nations’ (UN) scientists, according to a statement from the Silicon Valley tech giant.
“To better serve these conversations, misleading advertisements on Twitter that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change are prohibited, in line with our inappropriate content policy,” the statement says. “We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis. This approach is informed by authoritative sources, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports.”
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The biggest decision the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is likely to make this year will be on mandated disclosure of information related to climate change and corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. The Commission has been working on the issue since early last year, and a new proposed rule is now scheduled to be released on March 21st. The contents of that rule will likely determine the future direction of “responsible” investing in the United States.
In March of last year, then-Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee issued a request for information on the matter, consisting of 15 questions and described as a response to the “demand for climate change information and questions about whether current disclosures adequately inform investors.” The questions covered a wide range of topics, from how to measure greenhouse gas emissions to how climate disclosures “would complement a broader ESG disclosure standard.”
When the SEC first issued guidance on climate change-related disclosures for public companies in 2010, the standards were fairly general and advisory, but the questions from last year’s request-for-information suggests that the agency’s leadership is considering a more aggressive and prescriptive framework.
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Thousands are dying from Russian missiles and bombs in the suburbs of Ukraine.
In response, the Biden Administration’s climate-change envoy, multimillionaire and private-jet owning John Kerry, laments that Russian president Vladimir Putin might no longer remain his partner in reducing global warming.
“You’re going to lose people’s focus,” Kerry frets. “You’re going to lose big-country attention because they will be diverted, and I think it could have a damaging impact”
Read MoreThe Supreme Court heard arguments in West Virginia v. EPA on Monday, a blockbuster case that could have major ramifications in future separation of powers cases.
The case, which stems from an Obama administration climate rule, has wide-ranging implications for how the federal agencies may issue future regulations and rules, according to the parties that brought the case before the high court. States, environmental groups, large power utility companies, civil liberties organizations and pro-coal industry groups have inserted themselves in the case over the last several years, signaling the importance of the questions it has raised.
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President Joe Biden has continuously stated that “climate change” is the highest priority of his administration, fueled by Build Back Better spending. We are witnessing the disastrous impacts that establishing the wrong priorities can have.
On the day Biden became President, America was energy independent, our borders were secure, and the world was relatively peaceful.
Biden has done everything possible to shut down, curtail, and undermine American energy production. First, he shut down the permitted Keystone Pipeline. Then he eliminated fracking on federal lands, and slowed permits for new oil fields.
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The Associated Press announced Tuesday that it had secured funding from several progressive interest groups to hire two dozen climate change reporters.
The outlet referred to the groups’ funding as “philanthropic grants” and promised that the groups wouldn’t have any editorial control over the climate change content published, according to an announcement. But the five organizations — the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium and the Walton Family Foundation — are well known for pushing a variety of left-wing causes and funding Democratic political campaigns.
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A new study published in early February seems to indicate that many prior claims about the alleged acidification of ocean water dramatically exaggerated the process’s effect on fish and other marine life.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study was published on February 3rd in PLOS Biology, and reviewed 91 different studies of the effects that acidification allegedly had on the behavior of fish. Many of these studies claimed that this would lead to a significant decrease in the fish population, as affected fish would be less likely to evade predators in the wild.
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The Biden administration altered the official federal policy on approving new interstate natural gas facilities and pipelines, requiring a climate consideration.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced that it will begin to “undertake a robust consideration” of the environmental justice impacts of such fossil fuel projects before granting approval, according to a fact sheet published Thursday. The agency, which is the top regulator of domestic natural gas infrastructure, said its new policy will presume projects that cause 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year will have a significant impact on the environment.
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There are few more easily observable measures of the cost of everyday living than the price of gasoline at the pump. As has been widely reported, gas prices in the United States recently hit a seven-year high. The striking thing, however, is not just how high gas prices have gotten, but how fast and far they have risen.
Based on statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration—the statistical arm of the Department of Energy—weekly average retail prices for regular unleaded gasoline in the United States increased 94 percent in less than two years. Average gas prices rose from $1.77 per gallon during the week ending April 27, 2020, to $3.44 per gallon during the week ending February 7, 2022—nearly doubling in the process.
That was the largest percentage increase in gas prices within a two-year window since October of 2005, more than 16 years ago. In the election of 2006, Republicans—then the party in power—lost 30 House and six Senate seats, thereby losing control of both chambers, before losing the presidency two years later.
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French President Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday that his government would add at least six nuclear power plants to its arsenal in the coming decades.
“We are fortunate in France to be able to count on a strong nuclear industry, rich in know-how and with hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Macron said during remarks in the city of Belfort earlier in the day, France 24 reported.
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On Thursday, a federal judge ruled against a planned sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming, without evidence, that the leases would be damaging to the environment.
As reported by CNN, the Biden Administration made an effort to shut down all oil and gas leases across the country shortly after Biden came to power, with an executive order on January 27th indefinitely halting all new permits for such leases, pending a “rigorous review” of fossil fuel development programs. However, a lawsuit filed by 13 states ultimately led to a federal court in Louisiana blocking Biden’s order, allowing the sale of 80 million acres to move forward in November.
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Over the last decade, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) spent $1.1 billion on various projects that attempted to reduce carbon emissions through the practice of carbon capture and storage (CCS), only for the vast majority of these projects to either fail or be cancelled.
According to the Daily Caller, the waste of taxpayer money was revealed in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that was released in December. The report revealed that the DOE had invested $684 million in eight different CCS projects that focused on coal, only for seven of them to be cancelled, while only a single facility remained in operation. The remaining $438 million was spent on three industrial CCS facilities; of these three, two were successful while one was cancelled.
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It has been a little more than a month since the United Nations climate meeting at Glasgow, yet global use of fossil fuels has increased rapidly.
For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled domestic oil projects and vowed to stop funding for international fossil fuel projects. But as fuel prices rose, Biden responded to his self-induced energy insecurity by releasing 50 million barrels of oil reserves and even called for an increase in domestic oil production.
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The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Thursday that it would begin hiring 1,000 employees for its so-called Clean Energy Corps which will be tasked with fighting climate change.
The new climate unit will be composed of both current DOE employees and the 1,000 recruits, according to the announcement. The Clean Energy Corps was created by the recently-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill, which appropriated $62 billion to the DOE for accelerating the nation’s transition to renewables.
“This is an open call for all Americans who are passionate about taking a proactive role in tackling the climate crisis and want to join the team that is best positioned to lead this transformative work,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a message to applicants.
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Less than 40% of Americans view the coronavirus as a top-five issue to address in 2022, a new poll shows.
The Associated Press-NORC survey found that just 33% of Americans labeled virus concerns as a top issue, down 16 points from a year ago. On the other hand, 68% of respondents said that the economy was the top issue on which to focus this year, with subtopics ranging from inflation to unemployment and the national debt.
The results come as inflation has hit a multi-decade high and supply chain bottlenecks continue to affect Americans’ lives. However, it also comes as the Omicron coronavirus variant has fueled daily case counts near record-highs, with the U.S. now averaging over 650,000 new infections per day.
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