The Happy New Year news is that Kyoto is dead. It expired at the end of 2012, leaving the world with 58% more greenhouse gases than in 1990, as opposed to the 5% reduction sought.

The second phase started Jan 1, 2013. Russia decided to discontinue its participation, and Ukraine and Belarus may follow suit. Canada is officially out. The U.S., China, and India have not committed to reducing emissions (Voice of Russia 12/31/12, quoted in CCNet 1/2/13). Continue reading →

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is claiming authority to regulate virtually anything it chooses based on the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory, not just of radiation carcinogenesis, but of everything. If economist Frédéric Bastiat tried to construct a reductio ad absurdam on pollutants, like the one in The Candlemakers’ Petition to ban sunlight, he would find that what he proposed as absurd is taken seriously by the EPA. Continue reading →

Civil Defense Perspectives September 2012, Vol. 28 No. 6

After Fukushima, people are asking questions such as: Should Japan, and the world, totally give up on nuclear energy(Nature 6/7/12)? Casualties from radiation, from the worst nuclear accident in history, are still zero. But what about the projected later cancers?  What if an accident contaminates the environment forever? Should people be allowed to return home?

A rational discussion of evacuation policy must begin with the question: “What is the dose?” The follow-up: If we evacuate Fukushima, should Denver be evacuated? How about Finland?  Continue reading →

Civil Defense Perspectives July 2012, Vol. 28 No. 5

An obscure 1984 newsletter than I unearthed while cleaning out a filing cabinet predicted fiscal armageddon, followed by a world government, because of a Third World debt crisis.

It was said that a default would collapse the entire international banking system. At the time, the total debt of the four largest Latin American countries was: Argentina, $38 billion; Brazil, $88 billion; Mexico, $82 billion; and Venezuela, $31 billion. Continue reading →

Civil Defense Perspectives May 2012, Vol. 28 No. 4

To sell national or “universal” (that is, compulsory) health insurance,  “reformers” use individual hardship stories and statistical hype. Barack Obama claimed that medical costs cause a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren claimed that “at least” 46% of all bankruptcies had a medical cause in 2001, and that this represented a 23-fold increase over 20 years.

Although the statistics are flawed, the cost problem is real. The proposed solutions do not prevent bankruptcy, but rather assure it—for the existing medical system, and ultimately the whole economy. Continue reading →

On Dec. 7, 2011, Pearl Harbor Day, Stephen Jones arrived at his destination in Oceanside, Calif., having traveled 3,550 miles by bicycle from Martha’s Vineyard since Sep 23. Along the way, he stopped at about 160 fire stations, police departments, or emergency management offices in 17 states to provide life-saving nuclear preparedness information to first responders. In these days of electronic information overload,  the most memorable, attention-getting message could be the one delivered face to face by a man on a bicycle. Continue reading →

Civil Defense Perspectives September 2011, Vol. 27 No. 6

Data should have killed the anthropogenic catastrophic global warming hypothesis, along with many other radical environmentalist policies, but lies have powerful protectors—including recipients of more than $32.5 billion in federal  funding for climate studies between 1989 and 2009, plus $79 billion more for climate change technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks for “green energy” (PFW-Tucson, September 2011). Continue reading →