ALL day long, gas guzzling stretch limos pulled up outside the United Nations in New York to deliver or collect the diplomats who will spend this week trying to agree on a strategy aimed at putting the world on a path of sustainable development.
New York is an ironic venue for the talks. It is not only the financial capital, but also the emblem of a country which is responsible for generating more than 20 per cent of the entire world's carbon dioxide emissions, blamed for causing climate change or "global warming".
The sweltering heat and humidity of this seriously unsustainable city hardly matter to the diplomats. Most of them are staying in luxury hotels and eating out in "upscale" restaurants, all air conditioned by vast quantities of energy from power plants burning fossil fuels.
The conscience of the world is represented, too, by a more down market crew of environmental NGOs (nongovernmental organisations), who pointed out that some 5700 billion is frittered away every year to subsidise a huge variety of activities which damage the environment.
The five day special session of the UN General Assembly is officially called "Earth Summit Plus Five". But some NGOs have dubbed it "Earth Summit Minus Five", because relatively little progress has been achieved since the much hyped 1992 gathering in Rio de Janeiro.
In its own assessment, "Five years after Rio: Where do we stand?", the UN concedes that 20 per cent of the world's population - mostly those living in the rich industrialised countries - are still consuming 80 per cent of its resources.
"Gaps between rich and poor continue to grow", it says. "The poorest countries have become even more marginalised. Over 1.1 billion people 20 per cent of the world's population - live in absolute poverty, on the equivalent of less than one dollar a day".
Their representatives are trying to persuade the richer countries to sign a draft political declaration which, among other things, would commit governments to reduce by half the number of people living in absolute poverty by 2015.
Overall the latest "UN Critical Trends" report concludes that, while "global catastrophe is not imminent", the present "business as usual" approach is unlikely to achieve a desirable balance between economic growth, equitable human development and environmental protection.
Tropical rain forest destruction - one of the emotive issues which led to the Earth Summit five years ago - continues, with an area the size of Nepal being cut or burned down every year. And this is related to an annual loss of up to 50,000 species of plants, animals or insects.
An estimated three million tonnes of toxic and hazardous waste crosses national borders every year, some of it ending up dumped in developing countries; measures to strengthen the Basel Convention's ban on this form of "trade", agreed in 1995, have not yet become legally binding.
Then there are the overfished oceans, the emerging crisis over access to unpolluted fresh water, the degradation by pesticides of millions of acres of farmland, the rapid growth in fossil fuel use in many developing countries, such as China, and the absence of any firm action on climate change.
Many of these "negatives on the balance sheet" were listed by the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, at yesterday's opening session. And he warned the assembled delegates, representing more than 170 countries, that failure to act now could result in conflict over vital natural resources.
Mr Razali Ismail, Malaysian president of the General Assembly, said that the planet was "teetering on the edge" because people were consuming resources as if we were the last generation on Earth".
According to Greenpeace, the next century is a "disaster waiting to happen" if the current approach of governments and industry towards environmental problems was not changed. Mr Paul Hohnen, one of its directors, said that "business as usual" was putting the planet out of business.
The feeling here yesterday, certainly among environmentalists, was that the real decisions had been taken in Denver, at the "G7 Plus One" summit. The view was that the Denver communique suggested that "saving the planet"
was not one of the most important priorities for the world's richest industrialised countries.
Despite efforts by European leaders to persuade the US to go along with the EU's target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent of their 1990 levels by 2010, President Clinton insisted that any deal on targets or timetables should be left over to the climate change conference in Kyoto next December.
President Chirac of France explained this reluctance by saying that the Americans were "major polluters", responsible for emitting "three times the amount of greenhouse gases as the average Frenchman". However, he took some comfort from the fact that the US had at least agreed on 2010 as the target year.
The New York Times report on the outcome of the Denver summit appeared on the same page as an advertisement from the Mobil Oil company, addressed to delegates attending the UN's special session. This warned that "rigid targets and timetables" would have a "crushing effect" on US industry and jobs.
Meanwhile, as NGO representatives gathered to hammer out their strategy, diplomats met in committee to see if agreement could be reached on the draft political declaration which is to be issued at the close of this week's session. This covers so many contentious items that a final consensus will be miraculous.
