YES WE CAN!

Here's a sure cure for global warming: Just Say No. Stop adding carbon dioxide, the primary villain among greenhouse gases, to the air, period.

Such an "eco-topian" future might seem a green and wishful pipe dream, right up there on the reality scale with cold fusion or automobiles that run on water. It hardly rated a mention at the global warming summit in Kyoto, Japan, where diplomats and energy mavens wrangled mightily over how to merely slow the gusher of heat-trapping gases rising from mankind's industrial and transportation colossus.

Yet many experts are confident that, on paper at least, human society can burn little or no fossil fuels -- the main source of human-caused carbon dioxide -- while managing to live in equilibrium with the atmosphere and still prosper. These experts are sure that somewhere beyond Kyoto, if climate change turns out as nasty as some fear, lies the possibility of a

true solution. "Technically, we don't have to sweat it," said Florentin Krause, a physicist and, until recently, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.