The East Timorese Foreign Minister, Mr Jose Luis Guterres, became the last of 109 heads of state and 80 senior politicians to stand before the world yesterday and mourn for five minutes that humanity was in terrible shape and that Something Had to Be Done.
Few people had heard of him, fewer heard him, and fewer still could distinguish between him and most of the other world leaders who in the past three days have wrung their hands for five minutes and flown home.
As a collective group they proved to be remarkably similar, down to the colour of their suits (uniformly dark blue), their eyesight (most wear rimless glasses), their silk ties and their rhetoric. Politically, too, they have more or less spoken as one, embracing capital markets, trade and more co-operation between countries.
Only five outspoken renegades have bucked the trend and offered a different analysis. They may be out of step with the rest of the world, but the summit's unofficial clapometer suggests that they have deep support and could all earn a living on the boards.
President Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela, was the first and, in the absence of Fidel Castro, was widely regarded as the ring-leader.
"We must confront the elites," he began. The bureaucrats in the audience laughed and shifted uneasily.
"Neo-liberalism is inhuman," he continued. "It disintegrates life. It is guilty of all the disasters in the world. We have to fight it.
"We do not pretend to fight fires by respecting those who light them. Unless we realise this, there will be children here in 40 years' time who will debate the same things and there will be even more poverty and disasters. We are going in the opposite direction." He was loudly cheered, and followed just 10 countries later by President Dr Sam Nujoma of Namibia. After a quiet start, he had the many African delegates in the conference and press halls in stitches as he waved first one then both fists and attacked colonialism in general and Mr Tony Blair in particular. Well over his five minutes and departing radically from his official speech, he laid into Europe.
"The 21st century demands equality of people. If whites think they are superior, we condemn them and reject them. We are equal to Europe and if you don't think that, then to hell with you. You can keep your money. We will develop our Africa without your money."
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe devoted only part of his speech to attacking Tony Blair. The rest of it was even more forthright. "The programme of action we set for ourselves at Rio has not only been unfulfilled but it has also been ignored, sidelined and replaced by a half-baked unilateral agenda of globalisation in the service of big corporate interests of the north.
"The focus is profit, not the poor; the process is globalisation, not sustainable development, while the objective is exploitation, not liberation." The audience loved it and gave him a standing ovation.
President Castro took the Rio Earth summit by storm 10 years ago when he said, in the shortest speech to the loudest cheers: "If we want to save humankind from self-destruction we have to better distribute the wealth and technologies on the planet."
This time Mr Castro sent Mr Felipe Roque, his foreign minister, who repeated more than half his leader's 1992 speech and added: "The world is more unfair and unequal than it was 10 years ago. The gap has widened. The economic and political order imposed on the world by the powerful is responsible."
In the absence of North Korea and a few others which decided not to send anyone, President Yoweri Museveni, of Uganda, was the last of the renegade voices.
"The arrogant so-called non-government groups who interfere with the construction of hydro-dams in Uganda are the real enemies of the environment," he said, to some cheers.
To gales of laughter, he continued: "The IMF sometimes disorganise me. They tell me not to turn left any more, turn right. There is weakness on one side and arrogance on the other."