Everyone at the UN climate-change summit in The Hague packed their bags and headed home at the weekend with a heavy sense of disappointment that no deal could be done to cut the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed by scientists for causing climate change.
"You have sunk the world," said the banner erected by Friends of the Earth International on what remained of its sandbag dyke in front of the Netherlands Congress Centre; a symbol, and reminder, of the vulnerability of humanity to flooding, rising sea levels and other threats posed by global warming.
Greenpeace predicted that floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme weather "will get worse and no country will be immune". Like many others, it blamed the US and its umbrella group allies - Canada, Australia and Japan - for "insisting on a treaty that would effectively allow them to increase rather than reduce emissions".
In the end, there was simply no formula of words that could be cobbled together to bridge the yawning gap between the EU's commitment to real progress in cutting emissions and the umbrella group's insistence on a liberal use of loopholes, such as claiming credits for forests and farmland as "carbon sinks".
The talks had continued through Friday night into Saturday, with Britain's bluff Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, taking it upon himself to act as a broker. But though the US and its allies softened their position, they did not go far enough to meet the EU's determination to defend the "environmental integrity" of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
According to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, who spent a week at the summit, the umbrella group seemed to be working on an assumption that the EU was "so desperate for a deal in The Hague that we would cave in. What they didn't understand was that our emphasis on `environmental integrity' wasn't just a mantra."
The US, in particular, was looking for the impossible, Mr Dempsey said. If its proposals, tabled last Monday by Frank Loy, Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, had been accepted, it would have meant no real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the country which is the largest single emitter, accounting for a quarter of the world's total.
The collapse of the sixth climate-change conference was particularly devastating for its president, the Dutch Environment Minister, Jan Pronk. Had it produced a credible deal, he was set to be hailed as the Hero of The Hague; as things turned out, he was left with egg on his face and even considered falling on his sword.
Though he has a lot of experience of international negotiations, Mr Pronk is seen to have made a tactical error in leaving it until Thursday night to produce his set of compromise proposals in a last-minute effort to reach a consensus. It might have been much more productive had they emerged earlier in the week, to give more time for horse-trading.
It is difficult to disagree with the verdict of Michael Meacher, the British Environment Minister, that the first four days of the summit's final week were effectively wasted. The working groups set up by Mr Pronk to deal with the basket of outstanding issues were also too large to make progress on the really thorny questions, such as sinks.
The Pronk plan, as it came to be called, was vague and ambiguous. Its proposal that industrialised countries should cut emissions primarily through domestic action, rather than offsetting emissions by planting more trees in Third World countries, was capable of almost any interpretation, which is why it was immediately rejected by the EU.
Mr Pronk's other mistake was to assume that his EU colleagues would row in behind him and that, with a bit of give-and-take on all sides, a bargain could be struck. However, because of his own role as conference president, he wasn't present for most of the marathon EU co-ordination meetings and underestimated the EU's strength of purpose.
Not that the EU itself didn't make mistakes. Its ministers went to The Hague with general positions and at no point produced a comprehensive paper spelling out their bottom line to the other delegations on the crunch issues facing the conference. As a result, the EU could only react to initiatives by others, such as last Monday's US proposal on sinks.
The US delegation's primary objective was to secure a deal that could be ratified by the US Senate, but this could only have been achieved by watering down the commitment it made in Kyoto three years ago to cut US greenhouse-gas emissions by 7 per cent by 2010.
Now that George W. Bush looks more likely to occupy the White House from January 20th, many fear his links with "big oil" and his publicly-stated scepticism on climate change will lead to a hardening of the US position. If this happens, it may prove even more difficult to reach an agreement when the talks resume in Bonn next May.
The only hope is that public opinion in the US could shift on the whole issue and, perversely, the collapse of the Hague summit might assist in focusing attention on the issues at stake. Certainly, the US business community has been moving in the right direction.
The Hague summit did make some progress in outlining a package of financial support, worth $1 billion a year, for developing countries as well as "technology transfer" to help them contribute to global action on climate change, for example, by relying more on renewable energy sources rather than burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
But the key political issues - including an international emissions trading system, the scope of a "clean development mechanism" for developing countries, the rules for counting emissions reductions from carbon "sinks" such as forests, and a compliance regime - could not be resolved in the time available.
"This conference highlights both the importance and the difficulty of making the transition to low-carbon economies," said Klaus Toepfer, who heads the UN Environment Programme. "It is better to suspend the talks and resume later to ensure that we find the right path forward rather than take a hasty step that moves us in the wrong direction."