Here's another bombshell. The least-waste-producing nations are small, poor and unindustrialized. Among them: Belize, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Burkina Faso.

An interesting tidbit from the Forbes report: "Some exceptional companies like [scientific instrument maker] Agilent Technologies take waste very seriously and track their own use worldwide. They publish their world, Asian, European and U.S. waste facts on their Web site in a way that the U.N. and the EPA might well imitate."

Amen to that. Here is the section of Agilent's web site to which Forbes.com refers. In particular, click on the Data Charts link. Excellent stuff. Note to industrial companies everywhere: Let's see more of this, please.

A Fine How-Do-You-Do
"Garbage Truck Catches Fire, Crashes Into House" -- Headline, WIS-TV, Columbia, S.C., May 23

The Almighty Must Have Bigger Fish To Fry
"Future Of Trash Collection In The Hands Of Paradise" -- Headline, Tampa Beach Beacon, May 24

It's been a busy week in the realm of global warming and energy-related news. Where to start? Let's see. Iowa corn farmers are going all ethanol-giddy. Presidential candidate Al Gore is morphing into a climate-change matinee idol. Senator-slash-presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton has laid out an energy plan and says the U.S. must halve its consumption of foreign oil by 2025. Eminent science writer and heretofore global-warming skeptic Gregg Easterbrook has jumped ship and joined the believers. Former Delaware Governor Pete du Pont says the science is still way too fuzzy to jump ship, so ignore that Easterbrook behind the curtain.

Whew. How do you make sense of all this? Go to a wise guy, I always say. Like the wise guy who runs this web site, the EcoEnquirer. Roy Spencer is his name, and he is an actual, true-to-life scientist (NASA, University of Alabama) -- albeit one with a wacky streak.

Be sure to vote in the EcoEquirer EcoPoll. Wait, make that plural: EcoPolls. There are quite a few of them. Keep hitting your browser's Refresh button. Each poll, it seems, is sillier than the last.

If Spencer keeps at this, The Onion, which up till now has been the Internet's side-splittingest environmental "news" site, had better brace itself for some serious competition. I mean, not serious. Oh, never mind.

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.