President Barack Obama called for a $10 tax on every barrel of crude oil. The response from Texans and their friends, not unsurprisingly, has been swift and impassioned. The President has proposed an oil tax he says, to help fund new
On Thursday, Pope Francis met with Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio in the Vatican, where the two reportedly discussed the care of the environment, among other things.
California Gov. Jerry Brown is not yet canceling plans to attend the UN climate change conference in Paris, despite Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino. “We’ll update the advisory if there are schedule changes,”
Long one of the world’s worst polluters, a large part of mainland China is now surrounded by a pall of unbreathable smog that at times reaches levels of particulates 50 times higher than the maximum levels set by the World Health Organization.
Facing an anticipated denial from the Obama administration, TransCanada has asked to suspend any further action on its permit for its cross-border Keystone XL pipeline.
In the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris next month, a group of cardinals, patriarchs and bishops have called for a radical, legally binding international climate agreement that mandates, among other things, complete global decarbonization by 2050 and “an end to the fossil fuel era.”
Pope Francis has come out swinging in his very first public address on American soil, telling President Obama that “climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation” while calling religious liberty “one of America’s most precious possessions” that must be defended from all threats.
“With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary,” George Will writes as he excoriates Francis’ supporters for falling for media headlines that supposedly advertise the Pope’s positions on issues but rather “have the intellectual tone of fortune cookies.”
An array of individuals who have served as political allies to President Obama will be on hand to greet Pope Francis when he arrives at the White House later this month.
In a stunning show of chutzpah, a group of some 93 Democrats signed a letter to Pope Francis outlining the talking points they would like him to touch upon in his address to the U.S. Congress on September 24.
President Obama has been joking from the White House’s Instagram account about his encounter in the Alaskan wilderness with survivalist Bear Grylls. You’ll never guess what he said. “Glad this was the only Bear I met in the park.” Yes.
In a new study, the liberal protestant Public Religion Research Institute claims erroneously that Catholics are left-wing when it comes to gay marriage, climate change, and even abortion.
The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican said that during Pope Francis’ visit to the United States next month, he expects the Pope will urge the U.S. to embrace its history of welcoming immigrants.
With the Pope’s U.S. visit looming on the horizon, pundits are voicing their predictions that President Barack Obama will attempt to seize the opportunity to cash in on the Pope’s popularity to galvanize support for the Democratic Party.
“All great change in America begins at the dinner table,” Mark Levin quotes President Reagan’s Farewell Speech in the final chapter of Plunder and Deceit.
When President Obama came into office, his appointees to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promised anti-farm activists and other environmental groups that a crackdown on animal waste was in the works. But nearly seven years later, no new rules have been proposed on how to further restrict about 300 million tons per year of animal waste, causing activists to cry foul.
In their write-up on the poll, Associated Press journalists Rachel Zoll and Emily Swanson wondered aloud how American bishops and priests could be so negligent in carrying the Pope’s words to their flocks. The writers lament that early on “questions arose about whether American bishops and parishioners would embrace the message with any enthusiasm.”
Shadowy Big-Oil-funded forces are on a mission to blacken the name of billionaire eco-evangelist Tom Steyer. Or so his friends have told Bloomberg. “They are going to try to dirty him up,” said Court, a Steyer ally. “He is personally
President Obama is not alone in wielding governmental power to clamp down on carbon-emitting energy. While he weaponizes the Environmental Protection Agency to take on coal-powered energy, potentially shutting down hundreds of coal-fired power plants, Alberta’s new socialist NDP government is pushing ostensibly environmentally-minded policies against oil on shared premises of combating “climate change.”
Residents of Tianjin, China are reporting on social media the emergence of a strange foam throughout its streets following the first rainfall since a massive chemical explosion destroyed much of the city. Chinese officials are claiming the foam is safe, while announcing that at least ten corporate executives are being “controlled” for an investigation into the blast.
A two-day Vatican workshop on climate change and human trafficking came to a close Wednesday after a like-minded group of some 60 mayors from around the world met with Church officials and United Nations representatives to discuss a coordinated response to environmental challenges.
From his election in April 2013, Pope Francis had steadily gained approval among US citizens, starting at a modest 58 percent and slowly but inexorably climbing to 76 percent in February 2014 and culminating in a high of 78 percent at the end of that year. The moral capital Francis had built up seems to have fallen precipitously in recent months, and his approval rating now languishes at just 59 percent, barely more than what it was just after his election.
California Governor Jerry Brown mounted his bully pulpit at the Vatican Tuesday, citing the Bible and excoriating climate change skeptics as greedy swindlers more interested in profits from oil than the well-being of humanity.
California Governor Jerry Brown will take his utopian foreign policy to the Vatican to participate this week in an environmental summit hosted by Pope Francis. Despite California’s majority Democrats’ intention to banish celebrations of Catholic missionary Father Junipero Serra’s accomplishments, Brown will carry a state resolution supporting Pope Francis’ recent draft “Encyclical on Climate Change.”
The United States will be heavily represented at the workshop, with its eleven politicians making up nearly 20 percent of the total participants. There will be no one participating from some of the countries with the worst record of polluting the environment, including Russia, China and the former Soviet Republics.
The workshop, titled “Modern Slavery and Climate Change: The Commitment of the Cities,” will explore the connection between climate change and new forms of slavery. The official website of the workshop asserts that it is a “fact” that “global warming is one of the causes of poverty and forced migration, which are breeding grounds for human trafficking, forced labour, prostitution and organ trafficking.” Mayor de Blasio will deliver a speech describing his administration’s environmental plan for New York City.
Naomi Klein, a Canadian environmental crusader who describes herself as a “secular Jewish Feminist,” addressed Vatican officials Wednesday, bashing “economic experts” who place “outsized value on protecting corporate profits and economic growth” rather than the poor, who she said will
In a recent interview, Bishop Mario Toso, who co-wrote the first draft of the papal encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, denied that Pope Francis had any intention of “canonizing” scientific theories regarding climate change, but only wished to assert his authority on the moral level.
Pope Francis’ controversial encyclical letter on the environment may already be having an effect on US politicians, according to Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, who said Wednesday that the Pope’s words have softened the climate rhetoric of two Republican presidential hopefuls: Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
In a truly bizarre reversal of roles, in the course of just a week the New York Times has gone from being the Church’s most trenchant detractor to being an ardent enforcer of Catholic doctrine, polling Catholics to find out whether or not their parish priests are preaching about the Pope’s new encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’.
Franco Prodi, a celebrated Italian atmospheric physicist and brother to former Italian Premier Romano Prodi, advises caution and humility when dealing with global warming, since we still know very little about the history of climate change and far less about its future.
Pope Francis tackles more than just dirty air and polluted rivers in his new encyclical on the environment. He also warns that a society dominated by media and Internet can stifle human relationships and dull the mind, a syndrome he refers to as “mental pollution.”
Rarely has the Vatican reacted more swiftly to a journalistic fiasco than it did this week, banning veteran Italian journalist Sandro Magister from the Holy See Press Office and revoking his accreditation just hours after Magister published online a leaked version of the letter.
In no fewer than 17 tweets as of this printing, Pope Francis has begun e-blasting excerpts from his new encyclical letter on environmental stewardship, calling above all for an “honest debate” on the situation of the environment and what society can do about it.
Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. Pope Francis’ ongoing concern for environmental issues, which will attain its fullest expression with the release of his encyclical on human ecology Thursday, has deep roots in his own personal experience, especially as archbishop of Buenos Aires, home to one of the most polluted places on the planet.
There are still many organizations in the world that require employees to take an oath of secrecy regarding the information they are privy to, and the Vatican is one of them. It would seem that oath-taking, however, has come to mean little.
The Pope has insisted that the poor are the ones who suffer most from systematically trashing the environment, and there certainly does seem to be a remarkable correlation between poverty and pollution.
Human beings urgently need to wipe themselves out to avoid ecological catastrophe, the leader of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement has claimed. In an interview with the Big Issue magazine, Les U Knight (pseudonym assumed) said that the extinction of
President Obama used a commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy Wednesday afternoon to make clear that his administration views climate change as the most severe threat to national security.
In the United States, and most of the western world, there is an ideological war with dire physical consequences. It is the war on fossil fuels. But, even if you understand that energy is central to everything in modern society, the war is much bigger than energy. It is about freedom. It is about control. It is about global governance.
