Generous allowances for the use of forests and even farmland as "carbon sinks", to reduce the need to make real cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, are among the principal features of a compromise package proposed at the Bonn climate summit.
This and other loopholes - devised to placate Canada, Australia, Russia and Japan - will reduce the Kyoto Protocol's emissions reduction targets for industrialised countries from 5.2 per cent on average to just 1.8 per cent, according to some analysts.
The package was put together by Mr Jan Pronk, the conference chairman and Dutch Environment Minister, following an intensive round of negotiations involving four working groups on the "crunch issues" at stake between the EU and other countries.
As a result, it contains something for everyone. There is even a provision to provide aid for oil-producing countries, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to assist in diversifying their economies if they lose oil revenues as a result of the implementation of Kyoto.
The G77 group of developing countries, with which the EU had been working closely, secured a commitment for "new and additional" aid for adaptation measures to deal with climate change as well as the installation of cleaner technologies to cut their own emissions.
The total aid package is estimated to cost industrialised countries some $530 million a year, of which the EU will pay more than half. The US will pay nothing towards the fund because it is not prepared, at least at this stage, to ratify Kyoto in any form.
Canada, Australia and Japan won major concessions on the use of emissions trading and other "flexible mechanisms" in the protocol. As a result, there will be no longer be a 50 per cent cap on their use by any of the industrialised countries - including EU member-states.
Under Kyoto, it was envisaged that "a majority" of emission reductions would be achieved at home by the industrialised countries and that the use of "flex-mechs", as they are known in the jargon, would be "supplementary" to domestic cuts. With Bonn, that is now gone.
However, the deal ensures that countries must have robust reporting and verification systems in place before they could participate in emissions trading or in funding specific projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for developing countries.
Though some interpretations had it that nuclear power projects were "explicitly excluded" from the CDM, as a means of winning emission credits, the text itself merely says that industrialised countries are to "refrain from" making such investments in the Third World.
Either way, this was seen as a victory for the EU and for environmental groups who had campaigned hard against the nuclear option being included - and a defeat for the nuclear industry itself, which had lobbied strongly in favour of its carbon-free (but waste-plagued) technology.
Simplified procedures have been established to provide incentives for small-scale renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects in developing countries. The text also excludes "avoided deforestation", a loophole that could have been a bottomless pit had it survived.
But Canada and Japan have won major concessions on the use of trees as carbon sinks. The scale of their victory is apparent from Appendix Z, under which Canada can write off 12 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year against forestry and farmland and Japan 13 million tonnes.
Russia has done even better, with an allocation of 17.6 million tonnes - though this is unlikely to be used, given that its emissions are well down on 1990 due to economic collapse; that's why it will be one of the main beneficiaries of an emissions trading regime.
By comparison, the allocations for other major industrialised countries are 1.24 million tonnes per year for Germany, 0.88 for France, 0.58 for Sweden and 0.37 for Britain. Incidentally, Ireland's allocation, at 50,000 tonnes a year, is the same as Slovakia's. These caps on the use of sinks are regarded as significant. But environmental groups have criticised the text's vague words on the need to protect the biodiversity of forests. It is also weak on environmental impact assessment and public participation in decision-making.
Overall, the use of forestry and farmland as sinks for emissions by industrialised countries is limited to some 169 million tonnes of carbon. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, this is equivalent to two-thirds of the cuts they were meant to make under Kyoto.
Mr Jurgen Tritin, the German Environment Minister, said the liberal use of sinks was "directly opposed" to the EU's position throughout the last several years of climate negotiations. But the nature of international negotiations meant that compromise was inevitable.
However, EU negotiators managed to ensure that any carrying over of existing sinks beyond 2012 - the end of the current Kyoto "commitment period" - was excluded and that countries would have to show a sound scientific basis for the use of sinks after that deadline. But WWF complained that there is no ceiling on the amount of Russian "hot air" that will enter the system as a result of other countries buying up credits through emissions trading - other than a loose ban on trading by countries that are failing to meet their targets.
On the contentious issue of compliance, the text proposes that there should be legally binding consequences - including a complex system of penalties. As WWF noted, this recognises that voluntary commitments "have not worked and are highly unlikely to work in the future".
Despite its obvious defects, the EU and most of the environmental groups represented at the Bonn conference saw the Pronk paper as a first step towards establishing a "strong architecture" for the Kyoto Protocol that would enable countries to begin ratifying it.
But it is weaker than the compromise deal rejected by the EU last November in The Hague, which caused those talks to collapse. What has happened in the meantime is that the hands of Canada, Australia and Japan were immeasurably strengthened by the US decision to pull out.