In China too, relatively tough constraints on fuel consumption are being introduced.Still, until a way can be found of bringing America and the developing world on board, all attempts to control emissions are little more than spitting against the wind.Tony Blair perhaps put it best in his speech to the WEF when he said that if America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, then it must be part of their agenda too. India, the other big development story on the world stage today, has likewise said that until it has caught up with the West economically, emission controls are something to be confined to the already developed world.Even on this front, however, there’s reason for hope. None the less, it will be like rolling a large rock uphill.The continued absence from the negotiating table of the United States and China only highlights the main objection to multilateral efforts to find solutions, which is that if the two 10-tonne gorillas of energy consumption aren’t doing it, then we only cut our own throats by engaging. Many US states are independently of the administration introducing their own Kyoto-style emissions trading systems, while here in Davos the Republican senator John McCain says his own Kyoto-style bill stands a relatively good chance of becoming US law next year, regardless of what President Bush wants. They are now well entrenched, experienced, and it is unlikely they can be uprooted. But it is also true that they have not succeeded in spreading the uprising beyond Sunni areas.The insurgent movement consists of a mixture of groups.

Some 35 Sunni Arab groups have claimed responsibility for attacks though some may only be small cells. They include Iraqi nationalists, members of the former regime and self-defence forces of Sunni villages. Some 90 to 95 per cent of those detained by the US and the Iraqi army are Sunni, as are most of those killed in the fighting.The effectiveness of the Sunni resistance so soon after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the result of the alienation of the population by the US, the military expertise of former officers and the ferocious cruelty of the Islamic fundamentalists, the Salafi. A recent poll showed that 53 per cent of the five million Sunni approved of armed resistance. But the bigotry of the Salafi and particularly of the groups associated with the Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has angered and frightened the Shias. When the US first attacked Fallujah in April, there was an Iraqi nationalist reaction in Baghdad.

When the US destroyed the city in November, after suicide bombers had slaughtered teenage army and police recruits, there was no sympathy among them.A weakness of the resistance is that it has not developed a movement appealing to Iraqi nationalists as a whole. Bloodthirsty statements from Zarqawi tend to isolate insurgents. So too does the suicide bombers’ disregard for Iraqi civilian casualties The Sunni community is united in opposition to the US. It will never regain its predominance but does not know how it will fit into the new order.Did yesterday mark the end of Sunni Arab domination of Iraqi politics and start an era when the country will be run by the Shia and Kurdish communities? The change probably will not be so dramatic. If Sunnis have proved one thing, it is that they cannot be ignored when it comes to deciding Iraq’s fate. The US rues the day when it dissolved the predominantly Sunni security forces and army officer corps in May 2003, ensuring they became the embittered core of the guerrilla campaign..

Israel has agreed to allow the Palestinian Authority to deploy its own security forces in five West Bank cities this week in the latest of a series of confidence-building steps designed to entrench the still fragile and undeclared truce. There’s an issue of competitiveness here.But judging by the sessions and workshops here in Davos, the CBI may be a little out of touch with its members on this. What’s being introduced under Kyoto and the European emissions trading scheme is, in fact, the bare minimum. The consequent tax being assigned to carbon emissions is so low as to be hardly worth imposing at all.To say there is an appetite among business leaders for something harsher is putting it too strongly, but there is certainly a resignation to the likelihood of a considerably more constrained future on carbon emissions. Indeed, the company that fails to plan for this is likely to be at a big competitive disadvantage five years from now.

Tony Blair has made progress a priority for his chairmanship of the G8 this year, and indeed some of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming sessions and workshops here will feed directly into the G8 process. In extremis, it simply won’t be allowed to trade, or the cost of doing so will be too onerous to cope with.The world is still a long way from producing a fair and equitable system for capping and reducing carbon emissions. Here in Davos, with temperatures at minus 10, the surrounding peaks covered with freshly fallen powder and the air as clear as finest crystal, it’s hard to think of climate change as possibly the greatest danger to our planet and the billions of humans that inhabit it. Shares in the high street retailer Woolworths shot ahead by more than 20 per cent today after a potential bidder confirmed its interest in a takeover. It has undertaken a major restructuring, cutting some 30,000 jobs and selling several subsidiaries..