Errors and Emissions Extruded

as reported by the NYT:

In the debate on global climate change it has long been a given that China, with its huge population and endless coal reserves, would overtake the United States early this century as the biggest source of the atmospheric pollution that scientists believe is warming the planet.
That spectre of runaway Chinese emissions has been cited by President Bush as a major reason for describing as "fatally flawed" the 1997 Kyoto agreement to protect the climate. The treaty exempts developing countries, including China, from its initial, binding limits on the output of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases that scientists believe are causing traumatic changes in the climate.
But treaty obligation or not, China has already achieved a dramatic slowing in its emissions of carbon dioxide in the last decade, Chinese and Western energy experts say….

"China's emissions of carbon dioxide have shrunk by 17 percent since the mid-1990's," according to an April report from researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "Remarkably, over the same period, G.D.P. grew by 36 percent. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/15/world/15CHIN