Unless you're under the legal drinking age of 21, you probably recall the days when the possibility of American energy independence seemed farcical, little more than a meaningless political slogan inserted into presidential State of the Union speeches as a formality more than any sincere aspiration.  Throughout the 1970s, oil-producing Middle…

Even as anti-gas tax riots raged in France this week, naturalist David Attenborough warned a crowd at a United Nations climate change summit in Poland that "the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon." U.N. General Assembly President Maria Espinosa told the media that "mankind&…

Breaking news:  The end of the world is near due to climate change, according to the United Nations.  You'll be forgiven if your immediate response is, "What else is new?"  We've been hearing the same thing year after year since at least the first "Earth Day," on the heels of Woodstock, the moon landing and Joe…

President Donald Trump's critics are belittling him for not buying the politically correct narrative that global warming is to blame for the California wildfires. Instead, Trump correctly points to decades of mistakes by state and federal forest agencies that caused the woodlands to become overly dense and blanketed with highly flammable dead wood…

With consumer confidence at a 17-year high and economic prospects looking relatively strong, congressional Democrats have taken to grousing about the gas pump as a midterm strategy. "These higher oil prices are translating directly to soaring gas prices," declared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, "something we know disproportionately…

For decades, Americans were constantly lectured about our need to achieve energy independence.  As far back as November 1973, Richard Nixon warned, "From its beginning 200 years ago, throughout its history, America has made great sacrifices of blood and also of treasure to achieve and maintain its independence.  In the last third of…

In America and across the world, class warfare and climate alarmism constitute two core elements of the extreme left's agenda.  Unfortunately for them, those two crusades increasingly stand in tension with one another.  Specifically, the left's Quixotic agenda for fighting climate change ends up disproportionately harming the poor, who…

It's been a difficult week for Al Gore.  Its tragicomic quality was amplified because it was supposed to be a lustrous one with the debut of "An Inconvenient Sequel," the followup to his 2006 jeremiad "An Inconvenient Truth."  But then investigative journalist Drew Johnson of the National Center for Public Policy Research…

 We're running out of time.  If we don't do something to stop global warming - pardon, "climate change" - our Midwestern glaciers may recede, leaving enormous lakes bordering major population centers like Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit in their wake.  Obviously, that's not among the claims in climate alarmists' repertoire…

Taking climate alarmists at their word, shouldn't the earth be uninhabitable by now?  Here's what climate hysteria godfather Paul Ehrlich solemnly predicted in 1974:  We are rapidly applying intolerable pressures on the planet at the same time we're seriously undermining the earth's ability to withstand those pressures.  Unless we…

After just six months, a bipartisan consensus within New York has emerged that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Clean Energy Standard (CES) plan is a policy and political disaster.  It’s all a tawdry tale of crony capitalism, bureaucratic overreach, unilateral taxation and wasteful subsidies. Now, the focus shifts to appropriate solutions…

While the left panics over President-elect Donald Trump and the erosion of democratic norms, President Barack Obama went ahead and issued another decree without any regard for the nation's legislative process. It's nothing new. Obama's latest executive move, banning offshore drilling in large areas of the Atlantic and Arctic waters, folds neatly into…

This week, departing First Lady Michelle Obama invited derision when she lamented to Oprah Winfrey, "We feel the difference now.  See, now we are feeling what not having hope feels like."  Uncharacteristically for a First Lady, Mrs. Obama had campaigned desperately on behalf of Hillary Clinton, so perhaps her negativity should…

A comprehensive new survey entitled "The Politics of Climate" from the left-leaning Pew Research Center offers encouraging insight into Americans' views toward global warming orthodoxy.  The climate alarm industry, however, only seems to double down on efforts to shove that false orthodoxy down our throats as the inconvenient truths…

It's bad enough when climate alarmists subject the rest of us to their increasingly dubious harangues.  It becomes far more sinister when they concoct Solyndra-like schemes and force taxpayers to subsidize them.  After all, we're now over a quarter-century into the synthetic global warming "crisis."  During that time, the…

When is enough enough?  When a rational person knows they aren’t going to win, that their point isn’t going to be heard, that they came up short – they throw in the towel.  Sure, a toddler may continue to whine and cry, but an adult moves on.  There’s a time and a place to protest, to stand your ground. …

If a pair of extreme green ballot measures fall in the Rocky Mountains and no one in the liberal media is paying attention, does the collapse make a sound? This week, two anti-fracking initiatives backed by deep-pocketed environmental lobbying heavyweights, such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, failed to gather enough signatures. The more draconian…

The left has concocted a lucrative category of politically correct victims: "climate refugees." It's the new Green racket. U.S. taxpayers will now be forking over untold billions to ease the pain allegedly inflicted on "carbon's casualties" by industrial activity. By contrast, those who have suffered as a direct result of government…

The climate is changing. It’s true. Earth’s climate has always changed and global warming was a prerequisite for the growth and expansion of human civilization. So it’s disappointing to learn that only 70 percent of Americans believe the climate is changing. That’s according to a new Monmouth University poll, which has more…

What do you call it when elites fly their private jets to an international climate change conference to forge a deal with despots that caps American prosperity without our consent? You call it progressivism. It's estimated that 50,000 carbon-spewing humans participated in the Paris climate conference. But while President Barack Obama was taking his…

"The streak survives.  For the 10th year running, Florida dodged a hurricane, setting a new record, while the rest of the eastern seaboard escaped a hit by a major hurricane."  So announced the Miami Herald this week under the headline "Florida Sets Record:  10 Years Without a Hurricane."  Another day, another…

Like so much flotsam and jetsam, failed global warming prophecies accumulate a decade after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.  Columnist George Will wryly recounts the words of Leon Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher, who solemnly said of Trotsky at an event that Will infiltrated as an Oxford student, "Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness…

The most transparent administration in American history is at it again — dodging sunlight and evading public disclosure. Joining former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her secret servers, former IRS witch hunt queen Lois Lerner and her secret email accounts, former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and her Internet alter egos, and former…

Here in my adopted home state of Colorado, orange is the new Animas River thanks to the blithering idiots working under President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency. It's just the latest man-caused disaster from an out-of-control bureaucracy whose primary mission is not the Earth's preservation, but self-preservation. As always, the government…

This week, President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change." Obama is posing as the environment's savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark "the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and…

Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Laudato Si, was supposed to be all about climate change — wasn’t it? From the moment the Vatican put out word in December that the Holy Father was keenly interested in the question of environmental protection, particularly the United Nations meeting on climate change in Paris later this year, the mainstream…

Unlike Pope Francis, I believe that air-conditioning and the capitalists responsible for the technology are blessings to the world. Perhaps the head of the Catholic Church, who condemned "the increasing use and power of air-conditioning" last week in a market-bashing encyclical, is unaware of the pioneering private company that has donated…

For global warming alarmists, the inconvenient truths just keep accumulating.  The unintentional humor served up by their increasingly desperate rationalizations provides one of the more enjoyable byproducts of that process.  For sheer comedic treasure in that regard, it's difficult to beat the far-left Daily Kos.  A headline this…

When one side in a policy debate begins advocating imprisonment for opponents, it tends to suggest that side is losing on the substantive merits, not winning.  Case in point:  the ongoing man-made climate change debate.  Stop us if this sounds familiar, but the United Nations just issued yet another report alleging that anthropogenic…

Want to stump a global warming alarmist?  Just ask him to describe how the Great Lakes were originally formed.  At over 94,000 square miles, the Great Lakes constitute the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth, and possess fully 21% of its surface fresh water.  Lake Superior alone is the world’s largest continental lake,…