Jan Pronk, the Dutch Environment Minister, was doing his best. As president of the sixth UN climate change conference and with the clock ticking towards midnight, he had a responsibility to come up with something that would bring this crucial summit to "a politically successful conclusion".
His 14-page "note", distributed on Thursday night, was laced with the arcane, even incomprehensible, language that has come to characterise these tortuous negotiations. Only when the experts and number-crunchers had thoroughly analysed it did the implications of the compromise text became clear.
Most of Mr Pronk's EU colleagues were taken aback by how far he had gone to accommodate the US-led "umbrella group", which includes Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway. John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, was said to have "gone ballistic" about it at an EU co-ordination meeting yesterday.
Svend Auken, the Danish Environment Minister, was more diplomatic. Mr Pronk was one of them, "a colleague and a friend", but he was wearing his hat on this occasion as a "mediator" between the competing power blocs. However, his text was "flawed and unbalanced" and not the basis for a deal.
The EU's view, trenchantly expressed at a crowded press conference by the French Environment Minister, Dominique Voynet, is that it would be "a step backwards" from the commitments made three years ago in the Kyoto Protocol, because greenhouse gas emissions would go up rather than down.
Essentially, as every environmental NGO (non-governmental organisation) at the summit pointed out, Mr Pronk's paper is riddled with loopholes on emissions trading, the use of forests and farmland as "sinks" for carbon dioxide, and only vague measures to ensure compliance with the Kyoto targets.
The Climate Action Network characterised it as "a sell-out" of the original EU position, which sought tight controls on the use of loopholes to ensure that all the rich industrialised countries would achieve an overall 5.2 per cent reduction in emissions, largely through domestic actions.
According to their calculations, the inclusion of sinks, both at home and abroad, would change the target from -5.2 to -2 per cent. This loophole alone, the World Wildlife Fund predicted, meant the US would gain most, adding nearly 57 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to its emissions total.
What's more, Mr Pronk's text sets no effective limits on emissions trading, including trade in Russian and Ukrainian "hot air" (the credits they have accumulated since the Kyoto base year of 1990) simply because of the massive industrial decline that followed the Soviet Union's collapse.
An analysis by Greenpeace, based on tweaking the figures in its huge data bank, suggested that all the loopholes in the "Pronk plan" would allow the US and other industrialised countries to increase their greenhouse gas emissions by 2010 by between 5.6 and 8.6 per cent, compared to 1990 levels.
Such an outcome would make a farce of the Kyoto targets, completely undermining the "environmental integrity" of the Protocol - a bottom line for the EU from the outset of these talks - and signalling to the world that "business as usual" had effectively triumphed at The Hague.
Neither are there any safeguards to protect tropical rainforests, as an American NGO, Environmental Defence, pointed out. In fact, it said, the proposal would create huge cash incentives to get rid of substantial tracts of mature rainforest so that it could be replaced by new "carbon sink" plantations.
There are some positive aspects in Mr Pronk's text. As flagged by the Americans on Thursday night, a new fund worth $1 billion a year is to be set up under the UN's Global Environmental Facility (GEF) to help developing countries adapt to climate change, starting with the poorest and most vulnerable.
The total outlay, according to Friends of the Earth, is a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of dollars spent by the World Bank every year on fossil fuel projects in developing countries, notably mining and coal-fired power stations.
As expected, nuclear power projects would appear to have been excluded from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), under which industrialised countries can claim credits against their greenhouse gas emissions by funding projects in developing countries, for example, in renewable energy.
However, to the intense dismay of environmentalists, nuclear power has not been excluded from "joint implementation" (JI) projects by OECD countries in the former Soviet Union. True, nuclear energy emits no carbon dioxide, but it remains heavily tarnished by Chernobyl and radioactive waste disposal.
Mr Pronk's text recognised that greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries were still relatively low and would "grow to meet their social and development needs". As for industrialised countries, it said Kyoto "has not created or bestowed . . . any right or entitlement to emissions of any kind".
But there remains a huge philosophical gulf between the EU and the US in their whole approach to the climate-change process. It was summed up the other day by Frank Loy, head of the US delegation, when he said Europeans seemed to like "pain"; as a Californian, if he had a headache he took an aspirin.
The EU countries, as Dominiqe Voynet said, had come to The Hague with the aim of negotiating a deal that would result in real cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. "We did not come here in order to trade away the work done in Kyoto", she said, adding that others unfortunately were looking for a blank cheque. Margot Wallstrom, the EU Environment Commissioner, agreed.
"Although Mr Pronk had promised a document that would spread the `pain' and the gains evenly, the EU considers the proposals to be seriously imbalanced to our disadvantage and unacceptable in their present form," she said in a statement.
The EU, which has come to regard itself, with some justification, as "the light of the world" on climate change, realises it cannot sell its own public a deal from The Hague that is widely perceived to be not worth the paper it is written on.
Yesterday angry environmental NGOs gathered near its base here chanting "EU stay strong. EU stay strong." Their fervent hope is that the EU will not agree to cave in to the US simply to improve the chances of having a much watered-down version of the Kyoto Protocol ratified by the US Senate.
In a way, the old metaphor in property circles about the great Irish breakfast, as a measure of the seriousness of purpose of the parties to a deal, seems very apt in contrasting the relative positions of the US and the EU at these talks: "The hen is involved, but the pig is committed".