FAR from rekindling the "spirit of Rio", as it was meant to do, the UN General Assembly's Special Session - called to review progress since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro five years ago - exposed deep divisions among its 170 plus participating countries on a range of environment and development issues.

The special session was not expected to "save the world", but few anticipated that it would end in such rancour. The fact that delegates could not even agree on a political declaration was seen by most environmentalists and Third World activists as a "disaster". Many diplomats also saw the outcome as a major setback.

Although a parade of world leaders had mounted the UN's podium to admit that environmental degradation was continuing and that most of the pledges made at the Rio summit remain unfulfilled, there was no consensus on what needs to be done - least of all on measures to curb climate change.

Any international agreement on this critical issue at another UN conference in Kyoto next December must involve the world's industrialised countries, who are also the main polluters. But strong pressure from oil, coal and motor manufacturing interests has frustrated efforts to take firm action in this area.

Tony Blair claimed credit for the fact that Britain is one of the few countries which look likely to achieve the Rio target for cutting green house gas emissions (largely due to the Tories closing down much of its coal industry). And he strongly implied that the United States must follow Britain's example.

Last Thursday, American environmental activists staged a rally in the sweltering humid heat of New York to call on President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore - who wrote a bestselling book on climate change, describing it as the biggest environmental threat facing the planet - to take action on the issue.

The US and Ireland have one thing in common in this respect. ,Both countries are experiencing an economic boom which has contributed in no small way to increasing their emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed by the UN's panel of 2,500 scientists for causing climate change.

The big difference, of course, is scale. Whereas Ireland's contribution to the phenomenon of global warming is tiny and can be accommodated under the EU's "umbrella", the US produces more than 20 per cent of the estimated six billion tonnes of carbon dioxide that's pumped into the Earth's atmosphere every year.

As the New York Times noted, "to satisfy the critics demanding swift and decisive action from the US to head off global warming, Mr Clinton would have to pledge that a nation in the midst of an energy binge was about to break its addiction to cheap fossil fuels" - an act requiring "extraordinary political will".

Just how cheap these fuels are was illustrated by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, at last Thursday's rally of US environmentalists. That morning, when he was buying a litre size bottle of spring water from Maine at a New York delicatessen, be realised that it was dearer than a gallon of petrol.

With the Republicans in control of Congress and industry lobbies such as the Global Climate Coalition warning of "dire consequences for the US economy if radical action is taken to cut CO2 emissions - for example, by raising taxes on fossil fuels - it's little wonder that environmentalists are gloomy about the prospects.

WHAT'S more, the American people are not prepared for change. If the scant media coverage of this week's "Earth Summit + 5" is any yardstick, most of them are living in blissful ignorance of global warming and its potentially devastating effects - including the inundation of 9,000 square miles of low lying US coastal lands.

The only issue that concerned New York's Channel 2 news team last Thursday was that Mr Clinton's appearance at the UN would create "presidential gridlock on the East Side". Along with other TV channels, it preferred to lavish broadcasting time on the Christie's auction of Princess Diana's castoffs.

That's why Mr Clinton's decision to summon a special White House conference on the science and economics of climate change is so important if there is to be any chance of convincing the US public and Congress that the threat it represents is "real and imminent", as the President himself declared in his UN speech.

YET surely there are "win win" results in his headline grabbing proposals to install solar panels on one million American roofs and to treble the fuel efficiency of the country's gas guzzling automobiles? These measures will not solve the problem, of course, but they are steps in the right direction.

Lionel Hurst, Antigua's ambassador to the US, told Thursday's rally that so many of the inventions of modern times had originated in the US he was confident the application of American ingenuity" could help the world to find ways of solving the human induced problem of climate change.

Mr Hurst is leading spokesman for the 40 strong Alliance of Small Island States, which are in the front line if sea levels rise because of global warming; they are "the canaries in the coal mine," as he put it. Indeed, several of the AOSIS countries could simply disappear unless global warming is reversed.

They are members of the G77 group, which now represents 132 UN member states in the developing world. But so are Nigeria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which have huge vested interests in the continued consumption of oil. And just like the AOSIS countries, they paddle their own canoes at UN conferences.

Similarly, Australia is obstructing efforts to deal with global warming because it wants to protect the value of its coal reserves. And rapidly developing countries such as China are relying on fossil fuels to drive their economies, following the same sorry path as the rich industrial countries.

It is now five years since the Earth Summit, 10 years since the Brundtland Commission's report, Our Common Future, and 25 years since the first UN conference on the environment in Stockholm. In the intervening period, much has been gained in knowledge and understanding about the problems facing the planet.

Sooner or later, world leaders will have to face up to their responsibility to find solutions - and implement them. The onus rests on the rich industrialised nations which are obviously better placed to take action; if they fail to provide leadership, developing countries will draw their own conclusions.

But there is a sense that things are spinning out of control, with globalisation - by far the biggest change - since Rio - now submerging "sustainable development" almost everywhere. Until this goal is stitched into the World Trade Organisation's agenda, the likelihood of achieving it will remain elusive.