The world will not be saved in Kyoto next week. That much is clear from what has been happening here since the crucial UN summit on climate change opened last Monday in the city's brutalist-style precast concrete conference centre.
After four solid days of negotiations, delegates representing 147 countries can barely agree on what day of the week it is, never mind strike a deal on greenhouse gas emissions. They haven't even decided whether it's to be a "protocol" or an "amendment".
The "sherpas", as these senior officials and diplomats have come to be called, are still slashing through the undergrowth prior to the arrival this weekend of ministers and other political leaders - including the US Vice President, Mr Al Gore.
Mr Gore, who wrote an impassioned book on global warming and was even described by Barbra Streisand as a "true and faithful caretaker of the planet", will have a tough job trying to defend the enormous backslide by the US since the 1992 Earth Summit.
The "sherpas" are grappling with a virtual mountain of texts in square brackets - the standard UN way of indicating issues on which agreement has yet to be reached.
The television monitors giving a bulletin board of each day's events show a series of closed sessions of the Committee of the Whole - using its acronym "COW". God help its members; their working day runs from 8.30 a.m. until 11 p.m. and even later.
There are lots of familiar faces from previous conferences in Berlin (1995) and Geneva (1996). The only ones who seem to be smiling belong to the lobbyists from the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), representing oil, coal and motor manufacturing interests.
Friends of the Earth yesterday named the GCC as "The Dirty Devil" in a poll conducted among official delegates and representatives of environmental NGOs (non-governmental organisations). The runner-up for its "scorched earth" award was Exxon.
The results of the poll were announced with some glee by Mr John Gummer, the former British Environment Secretary in Mr John Major's government, who remains one of the most vocal figures calling for urgent action on the climate change issue.
Presenting the mock award to the GCC, he said it had spent $13 million (£8.84 million) on a disingenuous US television advertising campaign which suggested that climate change was not a problem and, therefore, nothing needs to be done about it. He also condemned Exxon's chief executive, Mr Lee Gramond, for its "determined campaign" to frustrate action on the issue. But he welcomed BP's recent withdrawal from the GCC, saying it showed that at least one major oil company wanted a "greener future".
But Mr John Grasser, one of the coalition's lobbyists, said he was "honoured" that it had won the "Dirty Devil" award from Friends of the Earth because it showed how effective the GCC's lobbying campaign had been. As a result of its media blitz in the US, Americans are now scratching their heads and asking why they should be signing a treaty in Kyoto which would put the US "at a competitive disadvantage" in relation to other countries such as China.
The GCC's biggest coup was to persuade the US Senate to adopt a resolution, by 95 votes to nil, which would effectively debar the Clinton administration from signing any deal which harmed the US economy or did not require commitments from developing countries.
This vote had "sent a very strong message to the White House", Mr Grasser said, adding that it was now clear - from the very limited proposals put forward by President Clinton in October - that this message was "being heard" at the highest level.
