A mere 24kg of CO2 to travel by train from London to Edinburgh and back, but a staggering 206kg to take the same route by air Six times as much to go to Barcelona and back by air Heaven knows how much carbon Mrs Beckett has expended. The statistics became too much. Unlike Margaret Beckett, with her flights to meetings of Europe’s environment ministers in Brussels, I was shaken by the data on carbon emissions. They might recall, too, the beating Ernie Terrell took in the ring for refusing to use it, insisting on the former name, the slave name “What’s my name?” shouted Ali, between hammer blows.

I thought this rather ungentlemanly at the time, but I was young, and not black and not from Kentucky, and as the Greatest himself has said: “A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”. They will recall how important that name was to the man and his myth, how it reflected a determination to do what he thought right which was as dogged as his art was mercurial. Some, of course, will react with sadness to the news that Muhammad Ali has sold his name. Prodi does not have to fulfil any more political conditions before he takes over.

He has to have a majority in both houses, but that was confirmed yesterday. He has to report to the President of the Republic and be formally invested with his new office, along with his cabinet colleagues: the work of a morning.. Exhaust the procedures: an odd phrase, but it seemed to fit the bill. “It normally takes a few weeks to exhaust the procedures necessary for forming a government,” Associated Press reported yesterday, explaining why Romano Prodi, despite winning the Italian general election this week, was unlikely to start running the country until the second half of May.

But the surge in demand is the story of our globalised economy. Countries like China and India are growing rapidly, fuelled by fossil fuels. Our own thirst for oil shows no signs of being slaked either. The IEA estimates that the world’s total energy requirements will rise by 50 per cent in the next 25 years The pressures on supply are only beginning..