Suppose that a person or a group committed the following acts in your town: released a man-eating tiger near a school; killed livestock; drove out a number of businesses; extracted large sums in ``protection money'' from businesses that were permitted to survive; set up a partial blockade and kept many needed goods from being delivered; bribed or threatened officials to pass and enforce an ordinance forbidding effective forms of self-defense, including passive barriers; interfered with maintenance of drainage canals, levees, and firewalls; shut down sources of energy; dispatched agents of influence to subvert community loyalties; and unleashed propaganda blaming the residents for all of their own troubles and taking credit for saving them from certain disaster.

You would not call such a person a friend, a leader, a savior, an ally, or a benefactor.

If the town were a nation, and the perpetrator were someone like Saddam Hussein, these would be acts of war, even if no shots were fired and no bombs were detonated.

Then consider the following facts:

In Colorado, there were 246 black-bear attacks and 127 mountain-lion attacks against people between 1995 and 1996. The number has increased steadily since trapping was banned. Since 1986, there have been nine cougar attacks in California, more than were recorded in the entire United States in the previous 100 years. In February, 1997, a coyote attacked a four-year-old girl in Los Angeles. In 1994, farmers lost 520,600 sheep to bear and wolf attacks, and in 1995, 117,400 cows were lost in the same way (The DeWeese Report, June, 1997).

Toledo, Ohio, stands to lose 5,000 new jobs if General Motors scraps a plant now on the drawing board because of new regulations, and many communities already on the brink of bankruptcy will be forced to spend millions to clean air that is already 70% cleaner than in 1970 (The DeWeese Report, August, 1998; Heartland Institute, Candidate's Guide to Environmental Issues).

New rules will, according to the EPA, cost farmers and small farm-related businesses about 3% of sales. One study estimated that Chicago alone would have to spend $2.5 to $7 billion/yr to comply with new particulate and ozone standards.

Even without new regulations, U.S. businesses, according to the EPA's own figures, spend $3 billion and 115 million hours each year completing its required paperwork. This is probably an absurdly low estimate. A study by Thomas D. Hopkins of the Rochester Institute of Technology showed that federal rules cost American firms $677 billion this year, not counting decreased productivity and other indirect costs. Firms with fewer than 20 workers (90% of American businesses) spent almost twice as much per worker ($5,532) as companies employing more than 500 ($2,979).

To obtain the freon they need for refrigeration equipment, Americans are paying black-market prices and risking criminal penalties (multi-million dollar fines and 70 years in federal prison). CFCs are the second most lucrative smuggled commodity, after illegal drugs. While converting cocaine to crack brings a four-fold profit, sale of a canister of freon can bring a 23-fold profit. Methyl bromide, essential for the safety and adequacy of our food supply, will be contraband in Jan. 2001.

In the age of nuclear proliferation and chaos in the country with the most nuclear weapons and ICBMs, the U.S. is still abiding by the ABM Treaty. The Administration has committed $11 billion over eight years to buy seven Boeing 747s outfitted with high-energy lasers. They are evidently supposed to dogfight in airspace over North Korea awaiting missile launches.

Meanwhile, U.S. conventional warfighting capability would be seriously jeopardized by fuel restrictions imposed by the Kyoto Global Warming [Energy Rationing] Treaty to be signed in Dec. 1997. Training maneuvers in particular would be limited.

Prime agricultural land in Northern California has suffered devastating flood damage due to regulators' interference with the construction of needed dams, the repair of levees, and timely release of water from reservoirs.

If the global warming alarmists truly cared about atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, they would suggest replacing coal with uranium for large-scale generation of electricity. Instead, they are silent about this option, their goal of shutting down nuclear construction in the U.S. having been achieved already. Meanwhile, U.S. reactor companies are lobbying Congress and the Administration for permission to compete with France, Canada, and Russia in supplying $60 billion worth of civilian nuclear reactors to China. (China has environmental deals in the works to ``combat global warming.'') U.S. utilities see this business as vital to the survival of their industry.

Schoolchildren are being ``browbeaten into an irrational rejection of consumption, economic growth, and free market capitalism'' in school programs that use biased, inaccurate materials. The EPA has authority to spend about $13 million on environmental education and has given grants to 1,200 such projects (NY Times 4/22/97).

EPA head Carol Browner said about Clean Air regulations: ``When it comes to children's health, I will not be swayed.''

A federal judge said about complex EPA regulations: ``The people who wrote this ought to go to jail.''

Americans need to examine the facts and draw their own conclusions.

Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has admitted losing more than 200 documents containing confidential business information from 82 companies, it nonetheless plans to expand the scope of information companies have to report under the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).

The agency wants facilities to report on the amounts of raw materials brought to and consumed on the site, even if they pose no risks to public health or to the environment. ``Materials use accounting'' would include information on which chemicals are used at each stage of the manufacturing process. The EPA wants the information to be on the Internet.

According to the White House Office of Science and Technology, the loss of proprietary information is already costing U.S. firms more than $100 billion each year.

More than 50 countries have reportedly been identified as having active research and development espionage agents in the U.S. (Investor's Business Daily 11/19/96).

Meanwhile, the EPA wants to bar scientists from access to the raw data, collected with taxpayer money, that was used to develop new standards for particulate emissions, citing concerns about confidentiality of medical data and ``data dredging'' by ``hired hands working for industry, environmental groups, or other advocacy groups'' (Science 7/25/97).

Critics note that the EPA [as usual] assumed that the health effect increases in a linear fashion with dose. Moreover, it failed to actually measure PM_2.5 (the level of the particle size of regulatory concern), using other measurements as a surrogate despite lack of information about their correlation.

A study that showed an association of illness with larger particles but not with smaller ones is not officially available, though it has been distributed through what some EPA officials call ``samizdat'' (National Review 7/28/97).

The recent increase in asthma-related deaths, especially in inner-city children, is probably linked to indoor air pollution, including contaminants from molds, dust mites, and cockroaches. Not coincidentally, indoor air-related problems began to increase after the ``energy crisis'' of the 1970s, when the federal government enacted both regulations and incentive programs that reduced ventilation in buildings, including federally subsidized low-income housing projects.

The EPA is now exploiting concerns about asthmatic children to push for the new rules concerning outdoor pollutants (ozone and particulates), which ironically were decreasing while asthma incidence was increasing. ``Cockroaches and bad federal regulations have more in common than most people think,'' concludes Ben Lieberman (CEI Update 6/97).

Al Gore claims that the glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana are melting due to human-induced climate change. Bruce Babbitt took a hike through the park looking for its namesake (Las Vegas-Review J 11/6/97). He mournfully noted that the carbon dioxide spewed forth from Charles Dickens's London still hovered above, and that the glacier extended to a certain marker in 1911, before Henry Ford began mass production of the Model T. He claims that ``we,'' like the Creator who speaks out of the whirlwind to Job, are ``reset[ting] the sea's boundaries and liquidat[ing] glacial storehouses.''

The global-climate bible of the Green church and the Clinton Administration, The Heat Is On by Ross Gelbspan, begins with a dramatic passage about the break-up of an ice shelf in Antarctica. ``The first thing I did was cry,'' said Argentine scientist Rodolfo del Valle to a Reuters reporter.

On p. 2, Gelbspan makes a stunning error: ``Measurements in the Antarctic peninsula show that its average temperature has risen by nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the last twenty years.'' According to the UCS, this was a small typo.

``Starting slowly,'' he writes, ``we may already have embarked on a profoundly horrifying journey.''

The book contains not a single table or graph and consists mostly of an ad hominem attack upon scientists who criticize the global warming hypothesis. Some have accepted funding from the Evil fossil-fuel industry and have reportedly engaged in heated, unscientific rhetoric.

Gelbspan's arguments are as bogus as his claimed Pulitzer Prize. Japanese whaling ships failed to detect any change in sea surface temperature in the 60 to 70 degree South latitude band between 1946 and 1984, and most Antarctic land stations show no statistically significant warming trend. Satellite monitoring of sea ice has shown no significant overall trend since 1973, but there is a great deal of regional variability (Nature 9/1/97).

For Secretary Babbitt's information, much of North America was once covered by a glacier. Turning off everyone's ice-maker will not bring it back, even if we wanted it.

While the Administration may keep U.S. industry from helping to build the 150 civilian nuclear reactors that China envisions, the U.S. continues to help build nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The Administration has raised the exemption threshold for supercomputers from 1,250 to 7,000 M-tops (millions of theoretical operations per second). The Chinese are using American products to build the next generation of nuclear weapons. The cumulative capacity of supercomputers in China is higher than at the Pentagon, according to Pentagon official Stephen Bryen (Investor's Business Daily 7/21/97). Moreover, a covert operation run by the CIA and National Security Council provided Beijing with missile hardware and software including targeting capability and guidance systems (Insight 5/26/97).