A third feature of the Conference was the pleasure of hearing some people at the top of their professions. The highest marks went to the great entomologist E.O. Wilson on bio-diversity and Monsieur Trichet, the President of the Banque de France, who spoke more sense about international finance in half an hour than you will get from the financial press in half a year. To prove this, the Financial Times Moderator of this session made a nonsense of what had been said in a summary which was as crude as Eminem.

Finally, there was the ridiculous, hierarchical principle which drives session chairs to insist that the audience should only ask questions of the speaker panel. Personally, I regard it as more of a duty than a right to speak my mind from the audience on subjects where I know more than all of the panel put together.

I spoke my mind in Paris after a nominally distinguished panel had discussed "Globalisation and Governance" for 90 minutes without mentioning the United States. I observed that Washington's manipulation of the WTO set bad precedents. To punish the mild mannered Kashmir spinners and weavers of lowland Scotland to avenge modest measures to help the banana growers of the Windward Islands was, I thought, a spectacularly highhanded act on behalf of a country which purports to suspect 'Big Government'.

It is as well that the Conference broke up on the day before President Bush announced his new energy policy.

Kevin Carey

If there is any area of international policy where the actions of one economy affect all the others it is in ecology. I estimate that if the United States does not accept environmental responsibility in the next two years the WTO will begin to implode.

As for the Conference itself, the language was that peculiarly stilted hieratic beloved of diplomats. Tact was exercised almost to my screaming point.

I recognise the importance of international diplomacy in fire fighting but I am not so sure how relevant it is in the face of egregious aggression. Talking in code can be a waste of time. It misleads the aggressor into under-estimating the opposition but it also, by keeping the temperature down, misleads the victims into thinking that appeasement might yet work.

Away from the microphone there was talk that the citizenry of America will rise up in a body to protest against President Bush's enshrinement of collective selfishness; but I doubt it. A country that will accept, almost without murmur, the ravishment of Alaska, is hardly likely to worry about the submergence of the Maldives.

Nonetheless, as I have remarked before, the great surprise is not the selfishness but the prodigality. With such a budget surplus as it has, the United States could

• easily afford to become more efficient; to spend more on making power stations efficient;
  
  
• to subsidise the construction of more energy efficient houses;
  
  
• to make some more strides in automobile efficiency;
  
  
• but, above all, to take a radical look at pump technology.

Some idealists think that the Internet might come to the rescue but the Harry Potter affair is hardly encouraging. On-line retail might simply boost air and road freight.

Of course the blame is not all on one side. The recent expulsion of the USA from the UN commission on Human Rights was a scandal which was sadly under-reported in the generality of condemnation against the White House assault on internationalism. That a collection of torturing, imprisoning, secretive, corrupt dictatorships hold a majority in such a body says it all. The sadness is, that at a time when America is going into another phase of isolationism and when the WTO is in danger of self-destructing, the United Nations is also on the verge of collapse. It never had real moral authority and it has been chronically ineffective but during the 'Cold War' it did have a vital role in keeping communications open between the two superpowers and their allies. It is as if the stones of the Berlin Wall were crashing into the bureaucracy on the Lower East Side.

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