Today's New York Post has an article by the Heritage Foundation's Peter Brookes on the emergence of an oil-hungry China. The bad news: don't expect gas prices in the $1.50 a gallon range any time soon (if ever again). The good news, it should now be obvious that the Kyoto Global Warming protocol had little to do with global warming and much more to do with trying to hurt the U.S. economy.

Under Kyoto, certain developing countries (read China, India) wouldn't have to curb their emissions of greenhouse gases, while developed nations (read U.S.) would have to make massive cuts.

Brookes reports:

Though still a developing economy, China already ranks as the world's No. 2 greenhouse gas producer. And its ongoing economic boom will put more and more of China's 1.2 billion people in the driver's seats of carbon monoxide-producing cars.

Making matters worse, China is the world's top consumer and producer of coal. It burns up 27 percent of the world's total production, spewing tons of pollutants into the air from old, inefficient state-owned factories.

In short order, the People's Republic will be the world's largest polluter. Yet its government is just starting to look seriously at environmental protection.

If global warming were truly the problem that many environmentalists and scientists in search of grant money claimed it was, then they wouldn't have constructed a Kyoto treaty that exempted the two most populous nations on the Earth.