LONDON -- How to save the world: make sure your car tires are inflated properly. Eh?
Even if everything that was painfully agreed at the 1997 Kyoto conference on global warming was carried through, even if what the Bonn meeting last summer salvaged from the Kyoto meeting was carried through, emissions of carbon dioxide would only fall by 2 percent.
The world's largest polluter, the United States, has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol. China is not involved, and it is the prospect of China industrializing -- of even a small proportion of its vast population taking to cars -- that is terrifying many of the world's ecologists.