I FIND Luxembourg puzzling. It’s a founder state of the European Union, with a high standard of education, and yet it ranks, with Qatar, as the highest producer of CO2 per person in the world, at just over 20 tonnes annually.

It’s useful that there are only just over half a million residents, on a par with the Bradford District, but even so they certainly could do better than producing almost three times the CO2 that you and I are responsible for.

I suspect the clue to this anomaly is the size of the country. It’s tiny for a fully fledged nation, covering only 2,600 sq km compared with the larger 3,300 of Bradford Metropolitan District.

In some respects reducing their CO2 emissions is beyond their control as 99 percent of their energy production comes from imported oil and gas, both high CO2 producers, whereas lucky Bradford just imports its electricity from outside the district, from coal, oil, gas, wind, sun and nuclear power stations.

However they could do something about the petrol and diesel price for cars and lorries. It costs less in Luxembourg and so many vehicles from neighbouring states cross the border to fill up so explaining why Luxembourg’s fuel use seems to be double that of the EU average.

Selective taxation would quickly put paid to this practice but they seem to prefer attracting in high levels of international road transport, possibly to help them maintain their impressive average level of income.

Being wealthy means that there’s more municipal waste to dispose of than in most EU countries, and their annual 650 kg per person is larger than ours in Bradford, at less than 450, though ours is all taken out of the district for recycling and incineration.

On balance Luxembourg is too small for the statistics to be meaningful, the waste one apart.