The Bundy ranch standoff illustrates the tension between land rights and an ever more expansive federal bureaucracy. Could ranchers find the law on their side?

Alan Caruba argues that President Obama is waging a real war against conventional U.S. energy sources — coal, oil. and natural gas — but in ways that benefit his friends and punish his enemies. His solar initiatives have mostly been money laundering operations (at least, effectively) like Solyndra; his continued stalling on the Keystone XL pipeline benefits billionaire Warren Buffett; and his administration has issued the fewest number of onshore oil and natural gas leases and drilling permits on federal lands since the government began maintaining leasing and drilling permit records.

Ever since the wind power Production Tax Credit expired last year, the lobbying to restore the costly, wasteful tax credit has been intense. Recently, 26 Senators and 118 House members signed a letter urgning its restoration — but whether they will succeed is an entirely different matter. As a result, even GE’s Jeffrey Immelt is talking about “a world that’s unsubsidized.”

As dangerous as current EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and her former colleague Al Amendariz were, recent revelations indicate that two other EPA officials — convicted felon John Beale and Robert Brenner — may have been much worse. The pair concocted the sue-and-settle scheme that provides virtual kickbacks to “friendly” plaintiffs. They also manipulated scientific studies and even authorized illegal experiments on human test subjects to “justify” extremely stringent EPA regulations that slow or reverse business development — and now the EPA claims it cannot find the scientific data upon which some major job-killing rules were supposedly based.

The media will engage in an orgy of environmental tall tales and the usual end-of-the-world predictions. It will scare the heck out of youngsters and bore the heck out of anyone old enough to know better.

There are a lot of theories as to the real reason the Bureau of Land Management has chosen this time to try to seize Cliven Bundy’s cattle and shut down his ranch. The most easily disproven theory is that the cattle are threatening the desert tortoise. Others suggest that Senator Harry Reid, whose lieutenant now runs the BLM, has a secret deal with the Chinese to build a huge solar array on the property. Marita Noon believes she has uncovered a third possibility — that the BLM wants to control the mineral rights to oil and natural gas in the area.

Most people have never heard of UN Agenda 21, yet, it is at the heart of many of our federal programs since the late 1990s. They reach every corner of the U.S. and impact millions of Americans who don’t even realize the document exists.

Roger Helmer, MEP: “Britain’s renewables objectives will drive a million more British families into fuel poverty by 2020. We will come to see wind turbines as the redundant relics of our compulsion to do something.” Watch Now.

Paul Driessen lays out the case for ending the ban on overseas shipment of crude petroleum, and in the process notes how shipping crude and refined petroleum overseas would be a boon to the U.S. economy and might also prod European nations to rethink their own policies towards energy production.

Watch Jonah Goldberg now: Social justice is about the state amassing ever increasing power in order to do “good things.” What are “good things?” First, last and always economic redistribution.

Marita Noon rates the value of the options listed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for achieving U.S. energy independence, and then lists several options that might really make a difference.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is chock full of alarmist statements not supported by science. So what else is new? CFACT advisor Larry Bell notes, among other things, that the Earth is some 14% greener than it was 30 years ago, thanks largely to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

What with the failure of the war on carbon dioxide to take hold, anti-energy zealots had to find another enemy — and this time, the enemy is methane from cow farts. The U.S. dairy industry is about to be besieged as viciously as the coal and oil and gas industries have been smeared and demonized even since the U.S. Senate rejected the Kyoto protocols. This war will get ugly before most Americans even realize it is happening, or that their prosperity is the chief target.

Do global warming policies save human lives? A Stunning new report found the exact opposite. The report, entitled “Global Warming Policies Might Be Bad for Your Health,” was produced by leading researcher Dr. Indur Goklany and found that issues of poverty like malnutrition and unsafe water have a global impact of death and disease 70 times larger than that of theoretical climate change.