CAMBRIDGE, England -- So our great leaders were unable to reach agreement in The Hague last month on how to save the planet from environmental pollution. So we can continue pumping out ozone-destroying fumes to our hearts' content, especially gas-guzzling drivers in the good old United States. Forests can go on being destroyed, grasslands turned into deserts, seas turned into sewers and our children and grandchildren turned into asthmatics while politicians sit around slanging each other.
What happened to the statesmen who could have put teeth into the Kyoto Protocol negotiated three years ago? There are some, but they do not seem to have been in The Hague.
One was in Cambridge last month. Nobel laureate Lee Yuan-Tseh, president of Taiwan's prestigious Academica Sinica, was in town to give the annual Chuan Lyu Lecture at the China Center of the university's East Asia Institute. The title of his lecture, "Taiwan at the Crossroads," was a provocative one that attracted a large number of Chinese students and faculty. They expected an analysis of political events in Taiwan and relations between it and the mainland.