The Johannesburg compromise is beneficial or squalid depending on your point of view, writes Frank McDonald at the Earth summit.
The European Union, which likes to portray itself as the light of the world at UN summits, was left yesterday with a problem. Its 15 member-states had come to the second Earth summit insisting that "targets and timetables" to implement commitments already made must form the core of the Johannesburg Plan of Action.
What they managed to achieve was a compromise, either beneficial or squalid depending on one's point of view. The 187 participating countries knew that none would get everything they wanted. Give-and-take is very much the character of UN horse-trading, and this summit was no different.
There can be no doubt that EU delegations gave this summit their best shot, especially on the issue of setting targets for increasing renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. But what they ran into in the end was the breeze-block wall of the fossil fuel lobby, led by the US.
Traditionally, UN summits go down to the wire and even beyond it. At the Bonn climate change summit last June, for example, the clock was stopped at midnight and everyone pretended it was the previous day because that was the deadline they set for agreement to be reached.
Not so in Johannesburg. To the surprise of most observers, a deal was struck late on Monday night with two days left to go. Many delegations had block-booked flights home on three different days - today, tomorrow and Friday - to cover all eventualities, including the possibility that the negotiations would drag on and on.
But the British Environment Secretary, Ms Margaret Beckett, said that when it came to the crunch on the energy text, the EU was told in no uncertain terms by the US and the OPEC wing of the G77 Group of developing countries that it could talk as long as it liked but it wouldn't get a better deal than the one on the table.
The EU was also well aware that the US had made a significant concession in agreeing to set a target year of 2015 to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation.
Indeed, EU environment ministers, both male and female, had hugged each other at 3 a.m. on Monday when this element of the deal was struck.
It was almost inevitable, therefore, that the EU would have to go along with a less than satisfactory text on energy, which not only fails to set a target for increasing the share of renewables but also left fossil fuels in the basket of options - despite their undeniable generation of the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
For the EU, this was a bitter pill to swallow. It had fought long and hard for a specific target for renewables, even backing Brazil's plan to increase its share of the global energy market to 10 per cent by 2010, however unrealistic that might appear. But the fossil fuel lobby, a very powerful vested interest, wouldn't budge.
So what we ended up with, in effect, was a classic piece of fudge that left EU spin doctors in a quandary.
A spokesman for the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, conceded that the compromise was disappointing, but insisted that it had advanced the energy agenda far beyond the 1992 Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro.
He also highlighted Mr Cullen's role in keeping nuclear energy out of the package. On Sunday, six EU member-states - Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Ireland - signed a statement committing themselves not to aid the development of nuclear power stations in Third World countries.
Another plus, according to the spokesman, was the agreement to reduce the risk of harmful chemicals by 2020. But even this doesn't go as far as phasing them out by that or any other date. Like many of the other elements of the text, it is hedged to achieve consensus at the lowest common denominator level.
He said even Greenpeace had concluded that the outcome here was more positive than that at Rio, where energy didn't rate a mention in the first summit's voluminous Agenda 21 - the UN's blueprint for sustainable development in the 21st century - because it was so contentious.
Mr Nitin Desai, the summit's secretary-general, stressed that there was a commitment now, for the first time, to increase the share of renewables. He even went so far as to say the deal struck in Johannesburg was "the strongest document on energy that the international community has received".
The commitment to "substantially increase the global share of renewable energy sources" is intentionally vague, but at least progress is subject to being regularly evaluated - a sort of "benchmarking" exercise that might have some effect in the longer term in boosting the use of wind and solar power.
It was at the insistence of the US and its allies in OPEC as well as Canada, Japan and Australia that "cleaner, more efficient and cost-effective . . . fossil fuel technologies" were included. It is, after all, the same case our own Government has made for the two new peat-fired power stations at home.
The EU has underlined its bona fides