The real action in health care

It's not taking place in the White House or Congress. The show to watch is the boisterous, free-market affair, precipitated by employers fed up with rising medical costs, and carried on by insurers and HMOs scrapping for turf.     

NSSM 200 and the world population explosion

This paper was published in the wake of Pope John Paul II's encyclical 'Evangelicum Vitae', which condemns abortion and contraception. The author describes how, in the mid-1970's, the Vatican blocked the implementation of President Nixon's 'National Security Study Memorandum 200', which was intended to combat global overpopulation. The author explains that excessive population growth is considered threatening to U.S. security interests, and concludes that "papal security-survival along with the influence of fundamentalist Protestant opposition to birth control is now pitted against the U.S. and world security-survival."     

Methods for estimating the population contribution to environmental change.

"This paper introduces general methods for quantitative analysis of the role of population in environmental change. The approach is applicable over a wide range of environmental issues, and arbitrary regions and time periods. First, a single region is considered, appropriate formulae derived, and the limitations to quantitative approaches discussed. The approach is contrasted to earlier formulations, and shown to avoid weaknesses in a common approximation. Next, the analysis is extended to the multiple region problem. An apparent paradox in aggregating regional estimates is illuminated, and the risk of misleading results is underscored. The methods are applied to the problem of climate change with two case studies, an historical period and a future scenario, used to illustrate the results. The contribution of change in population to change in green house gas emissions is shown to be significant, but not dominant in both industrialized and developing regions."