Priests of the Aztec Empire were early global environmentalists. They convinced the Aztec people that severe weather changes and the death of many species of plants and animals would occur unless appropriate rituals were performed.

At the top of those cute pyramids that they prevailed upon the people to build were sacrificial altar stones. The Aztec people were taught (by their religious and governmental leaders) that these stones must be kept wet with human blood. If the stones were allowed to dry out, the sun would cease to shine.

We do not know the fate of any Aztec scientists who proposed to make an experimental test of this theory. We suspect, however, that they were allowed to make a positive contribution to the global environment directly upon the altar stones.

It is most gratifying to contemplate the advanced developments of our ancestors. For many centuries, humanity has been stifled by the scientific methods advanced by Western Civilization. These methods require experimental observation, hypotheses that are tested by direct observation, and a rigorously rational analytical methodology that depends upon demonstrable truth at each step.

This scientific method is deficient, however, in that it does not allow for "proactive'' conclusions based upon the wishful thinking of politically correct "scientists,'' politicians, new world order bureaucrats, and their retainers in the new environmental elite. Fortunately, this deficiency is overcome by Aztecan science.

With Aztecan science, any possible global environmental disaster that can be imagined can be immediately overcome before its potential effects are allowed to harm the planet. There is no need to wait for experimental verification of the hypothesis.

Moreover, with Aztecan science, potential disasters can be tailored to meet special needs. When the elite decides, for example, that world government is needed, catastrophes that can be prevented by weakening of national laws in favor of global laws are made available. When the elite decides that there are too many people, catastrophes that require cutbacks in the energy and chemical technologies that permit large numbers of people to live are invented.

The primary theoretical advance of Aztecan science over its predecessor lies in its recognition that the value of a hypothesis rests not upon experimental test of its validity but upon its political value to the ruling elite. Like other profound human insights, this advance has roots far back in history. Although we are crediting the Aztecs, we expect that many ancient Asian and European pagan leaders warned their people of dire environmental consequences that would occur if they stopped worshiping graven images of Baal.

The Aztecs were conquered by Cortes with about 200 men in 1519. At Oregon State University, students are taught that the 200 Spaniards were able to prevail over the large, virtuous Aztec nation because these Europeans were "religious fanatics,'' which caused them to fight more energetically. Gunpowder helped, too. Most useful, however, were the tribes of Indians living near the Aztecs, the blood of whose women and children had been used to prevent environmental catastrophe. These tribes allied themselves with Cortes.

Yet, we have been releasing carbon into the atmosphere in very large quantities for over 50 years - and atmospheric temperature is going down (see previous issues of Access to Energy). For the last two decades, we have even had sophisticated thermometers on orbiting satellites. These thermometers have recorded a decrease in atmospheric temperature during the past two decades.

The global warming bandwagon has one central purpose - population control. If energy availability can be curtailed, a lot of people are going to die. This is genocide by international treaty with an enormous propaganda campaign to permit its implementation and to keep people ignorant of its intent and effects.

DDT is banned; CFCs are banned; and carbon must be restricted -and catastrophe will not occur. Our new Aztecan priests will then take credit for saving us - while the river of blood continues to flow.

and 620 healthy control children published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Leslie Robison, one of the authors of the research report, is quoted as saying, "The risk [of leukemia from magnetic fields] doesn't exist.'' This statement implies that Robison has knowledge that the risk of childhood leukemia from power lines is zero.

As previous Access to Energy articles have shown, it is very unlikely that electromagnetic fields from power lines can increase the probability of cancer to a significant extent. Nevertheless, the Ro-bison statement illustrates a special problem encountered when honest science is mixed with sound-bite journalism.

Unfortunately, opponents of the treaty in the United States Senate are basing their opposition to the treaty on a campaign of political envy rather than upon the scientific evidence that this treaty is entirely unnecessary and will not improve or preserve the global environment.

The highlighted text in the Kemp article reads "The drastic cut in energy use this treaty would require would not be legally binding on developing nations, including three of the biggest carbon-dioxide producers.'' (These are India, South Korea, and China.) The argument is being made that the treaty places the United States at a competitive disadvantage to other countries. While true, this is an irrelevant and dangerous argument. Suppose that these countries should agree to conform or, at least, pretend to conform to the treaty. Then the opposition, which should be based on science rather than envy, will melt away.

In this treaty, we are seeing an order of magnitude worsening of the anti-science, anti-technology, anti-free enterprise, anti-human New Age mythology that is promoted by of much of the American elite.

In pest control, for example, the nuclear mass production and release of sterile male screw worms has permitted the eradication of screw worms in the United States, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Fruit flies have been eradicated in California, Florida, Australia, The Marianas, Japan, and Guam.

Engineers have now built a gas turbine that is 4 mm in diameter. (There are 25.4 mm per inch.) The authors report that, with current technology, a gas turbine generator, complete with compressor and combustor, can be built that is less than one cm³ (10 mm on a side) and delivers 50 watts of electric power.

Interestingly, the power-to-weight ratio improves as the size diminishes, so the thrust-to-weight ratio of these micro turbines is 10 times greater than that of modern aircraft engines.

While it is certainly true, as Mallove points out, that many revolutionary technological advances have been initially opposed by closed-minded critics, it is equally true that large numbers of intelligent and well-educated people have sometimes participated in delusions and manias that turned out in retrospect to have been foolish indeed. Opposition to a new idea is not evidence that it is a good idea (although such opposition can be reason for optimism).

Cold fusion research is expanding because an increasing number of laboratories are reporting excess energy production at levels believed to be too high for chemical processes and are also finding residual changes in elemental composition during the reactions - changes of some elements into others as evidence of nuclear reactions.

There are two primary difficulties. First, these devices (and there are now many different designs) tend to be unstable with widely variable quantitative results from experiment to experiment. For example, Mallove reports that the Patterson Power Cell has generated as much as 1,300 watts output for 1.4 watts input, but usually generates 5 to 10 watts output from between one-third to one-thirtieth as much input.

Second, there is not yet an accepted theoretical basis for this phenomenon even among its strongest proponents. Hypotheses vary from chemically assisted nuclear reactions of a sort never before recognized to the inadvertent release of universal "zero point energy.'' The term "cold fusion'' originates from the hypothesis that energy is being produced by the conversion of mass into energy through fusion of hydrogen atoms to produce helium atoms. This explanation does not, however, explain all of the experimental results.

A trick question sometimes placed on examinations in courses on equilibrium thermodynamics involves the rate of chemical reactions. The student is given detailed information which allows the calculation of the amount of energy that will be produced by two chemical reactions. He is asked to predict which reaction will proceed with the greater rate. The trick is that equilibrium thermodynamics does not provide information about reaction rates as a function of energy. Not recognizing this, many students try to give a prediction.

A bottle containing a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen can sit safely on the shelf for many years with no change even though the potential energy release is very great. The bottle will explode if a spark is introduced to initiate the reaction. Many much less energetic reactions occur spontaneously.

Against "cold fusion,'' it is argued theoretically that nuclear reaction rates at low temperature are too slow to be measurable and that the expected amounts of specific nuclear reaction products have not been observed. It cannot be proved, however, that nuclear reaction rates cannot be increased by some heretofore unknown catalytic mechanism. Nor can it be shown that there are not undiscovered new types of nuclear reactions.

With the additional possibility of some process (zero-point energy release is almost the province of science fiction, but serious physicists say it is there and potentially usable) other than a nuclear reaction, it is just not possible to prove theoretically that the reported energy release in cold fusion experiments cannot happen. These experiments might turn out to be misnamed, but the name is not the essence of this issue.

If you are especially interested in this subject, read the Analog article by Eugene Mallove and especially some of the publications he references. Try not to "trust and parrot'' either cold fusion proponents or cold fusion critics. The Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion will be held in Vancouver, Canada from April 18-23, 1998, where the best efforts of the proponents will be on display.

As the year 2000 approaches, everyone from One World globalists to New Age mystics is dancing with increased vigor. We anticipate increasing activity in all sorts of nuttiness as the date nears. We did not expect, however, that this would include computer technology.

Now the merchants of fear are telling us that Western civilization will terminally collapse on 1 January 2000 because some older computer software that is still in use was not written to roll its date forward properly into another century. We are being told that government activities will abruptly stop (this is a disaster?), trucks and trains will not roll, financial institutions will cease activity, and we shall all find ourselves in post-Civil War America without the necessary survival skills.

Although I have used computers very extensively for over 30 years, I cannot claim to be an expert on this subject. I do think, however, that some humility is appropriate. The vast computer industry is made up of hundreds of thousands of our most talented technologists. During the past twenty years they have transformed digital technology so completely that they have managed to place a veritable engineering miracle in a small, inexpensive box in more than half of American homes.

Now, we are expected to believe that this entire industry is going to fall flat on its face and take Western civilization down with it because of bugs in older software that were known to be present many years in advance. Most disaster scenarios are, of course, based on real factors -amplified beyond reason. The year 2000 bugs do exist. A sub-industry of computer programmers is currently prospering by fixing these bugs. Some ill-managed enterprises will probably fail to fix this problem appropriately. (We could hope that this includes government computers, but then the taxpayers would just have another failure to finance.)

If all of our computers stopped tomorrow, there would be a period of disruption while we reverted to the previous, less efficient pre-computer methods - with which most of our essential technology was built. A nuclear attack might stop a large fraction of those computers through EMP. An obsolete software bug is very unlikely to do so.

Prices decreased gradually over time until, ten years after deregulation, the real price of natural gas had fallen 27-57%; of long distance telecom had fallen 40-47%; of airlines had fallen 29%, of trucking had fallen 28-56%, and of railroads had fallen 44%.

The Brookings authors, Ellig and Robert Crandall, estimate that deregulation of industries in the late 1970s and 1980s is now saving Americans about $60 billion per year. The article does not estimate, however, American losses since then from new regulations.

Dean says that the U.S. gauge was copied from the English gauge by English immigrants. That gauge came from English tramways which were built with the jigs and tools that were used for building English wagons.

The wagon spacing was standardized so that the road ruts would match the wheels and produce less wear on the wagons during long distance hauls. The standardized ruts were derived from those in the Roman roads which were built in Europe and England. The ruts were initially made by Roman chariots that were all alike in wheel spacing.