A last-ditch effort is under way to salvage negotiations on the Kyoto climate accord after the Dutch minister chairing United Nations talks in Bonn issued a draft compromise to break months of deadlock.
The European Union said today it could accept the deal but there was resistance from Japan and Russia. Leaders at the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Genoa were briefed from Bonn in the small hours and could step in to decide the issue.
US President George W. Bush told the G8 yesterday that the world's biggest polluter still had no intention of adopting the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which would force it to cut emissions of the industrial greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
But the EU, Japan and others are still struggling in the former West German capital to narrow their own differences on technical aspects of the UN pact that could allow them at least to get it into force in the rest of the world next year.
With memories of the 11th-hour collapse of a similar summit at The Hague in November, chairman Mr Jan Pronk, the Dutch environment minister, handed delegates from 185 countries an ultimatum to back his proposal quickly or face another failure.
It was take it or leave it, Mr Pronk said: "I believe in my text. I hope you are going to believe in the balance as well."
"This pragmatic solution is not only politically pragmatic but meets criteria of environmental credibility," he said of one key compromise that displeased the EU by allowing Japan, Canada, Russia and others to do much less to cut their actual pollution because they have extensive forests that absorb carbon dioxide.
Known as "carbon sinks" in the jargon of climate change, those woodlands were an item that sank the Hague summit.
Environmental campaigners said the concessions on sinks may shrink the actual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to just a fraction of the five percent target embodied in the Kyoto accord. But that was an acceptable compromise to clinch a deal.
The head of the Russian delegation, Mr Alexander Bedritsky, told Reuters: "A lot of work still needs to be done."
The Europeans also appeared to have secured tougher mechanisms to ensure countries actually complied with the treaty, where Japan, for one, had favoured a softer approach.
President Bush, questioning some of the science behind the most pessimistic predictions of rising sea levels and more severe weather, went back in March on those undertakings given by his predecessor Mr Bill Clinton. He said Kyoto was "fatally flawed".
Environmentalists warn that more delay from a failure of the Bonn talks risks killing off the Kyoto accord altogether.
They say that gas building up in the atmosphere is already trapping more of the Sun's heat on Earth, melting polar ice and fuelling extreme weather patterns of drought and flood.