SAMSO, Denmark -- The people of this Danish island have seen the future, and it is dim and smells vaguely of straw.

With no traffic lights on the island and few street lights, driving its roads on a cloudless night is like piercing a black cloud. There is one movie theater, few cars and even fewer buses, except for summer, when thousands of tourists multiply the population.

Yet last year, Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island's sparse sunshine.

By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. "We just met it," said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders.

Ankara is the neighbour Europeans still won't let into their club. And yet the country behind the Bosporus is soon to become the communication hub for energy supplies bound for Europe. Die Zeit doubts the EU can go on snubbing the Turks indefinitely.

Turkey? For many a European, it is a precarious candidate for accession on the eastern edge of the EU. A farflung NATO outpost, a last offshoot of Western civilisation, bordering on nightmarish nations like Iraq and Iran. But this past summer, an astounding number of the world's potentates undertook a pilgrimage to Turkey, of all places. It was about energy. In this regard, Turkey lies right smack in the middle. It may have little in the way of resources itself, but several Central Asian countries, along with Russia and the Middle East, will soon be pumping fuel to Europe through Turkish pipelines. And which way those pipelines will run has become a cliffhanger involving high stakes and major geopolitical risks.

One traditional supply route runs from East to West. For 15 years Turkey has been under discussion as a transit country for the riches discovered in and around the Caspian Sea since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That includes the natural-gas fields in Turkmenistan; Kazakhstan's offshore Kashagan Field, the biggest oil field discovered in the past quarter of a century anywhere in the world; and Azerbaijan. For a long time it was not clear how all that was supposed to reach Europe. But on 13 July five heads of State came up with an answer in Ankara: they agreed the Nabucco gas pipeline from Turkey to Central Europe and then held a sumptuous ceremony to mark the occasion, over which Turkish premier Erdoğan presided like the ringmaster of a great energy circus.

Under-18s will be banned from using sunbeds in Wales because of the risk of skin cancer, the Welsh health minister said today. Edwina Hart also outlined plans to ban unstaffed tanning salons after reports that they were being used by children. Officials in Cardiff are considering all law-making means available to impose the ban. Hart said: "I am particularly concerned about the use of sunbeds by people under the age of 18 and by the use of coin-operated sunbeds." Sunbed operators in Scotland will be banned from serving under-18s and from running unsupervised salons in November.

"We had this big release ceremony," said Karen Dixon, director of Greenwich Audubon. "It was hilarious. I didn't know what I thought would happen. A parade? I guess I don't know what I thought 2,000 insects would look like but basically they were in a Tupperware container."

Cozying Up

Dixon said she also saw many holes in leaves and adult weevils [rhinoncomimus latipe] mating.

"They were very cozy," she said. "They were with each other in the Biblical sense."

It takes two to there years for the weevils to get established and make significant inroads, which they have done to mile-a-minute [persicaria perfoliata] in the mid-Atlantic states, Ellis said.

The provider of the weevils, state-run Phillip Alampi Beneficial Insect Rearing Laboratory in Ewing Township, New Jersey, can provide more of the insects than initially expected, Ellis said. The Connecticut project is funded primarily by the U.S. Agriculture Department.

"The key now is we need to give the weevils time," Ellis said. "We can't expect overnight success."

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for instance, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world's population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out only 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three percent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that about one sixth of the world's population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees (£40) a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning 30,000 rupees or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to the developed nations. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for instance, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.