Mr Jan Pronk had tears in his eyes yesterday when he got a standing ovation in Bonn for engineering the historic compromise to save the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The latest climate-change summit had been on the verge of collapse.
Mr Pronk, chairman of the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention (COP6), had tried to reach a similar deal in The Hague last November. But he was unable to bridge a gap between the positions adopted by the European Union and the US.
In the early hours of yesterday in Bonn, the Dutch Environment Minister must have feared that his name might forever be associated with failure. But he made a heartfelt appeal to delegates to work through the night, if necessary, to reach a deal.
Some 12 hours later, after yet another frenetic round of meetings in front rooms, back rooms and corridors of the Hotel Maritim, bleary-eyed delegates assembled for their first plenary session since last Friday to hear Mr Pronk declaring the summit a success.
The entire conference rose to its feet, clapped and cheered the chairman and he stood up to applaud them too, thanking everyone who played a role in the tortuous negotiations leading to a historic day for the future of the planet.
Details of the draft agreement, which was adopted by acclamation, must be worked out this week by officials. Nobody was in any doubt about the significance of what had been achieved - a relatively sound base on which to build the architecture of Kyoto.
There had been fears that the US decision to disown the protocol might encourage some of its allies to kill it off in Bonn. Even though Japan, Canada and Australia had major reservations, their ministers knew they could not leave Bonn empty-handed.
One of the main sticking points was compliance, in other words whether there would be a penalty regime for industrialised countries that failed to meet reduction targets for greenhouse-gas emissions. Japan had problems on this score.
Although its Environment Minister, Ms Yoriko Kawaguchi, had arrived in Bonn with a negotiating mandate, she could not give her consent to the package until it was referred back to Tokyo; and no response could be expected until after 5 a.m. yesterday.
Japan's decision to accept the package, after the EU and other parties agreed to a further compromise on compliance - which effectively dilutes its legally binding effect - opened the way for an agreement to be reached by all of the parties, apart from the US.
US isolation at the final plenary session was underlined when Ms Paula Dobriansky, head of its delegation, was loudly booed for her declaration that the US took the issue of climate change seriously and "will not abdicate our responsibilities".
She had reiterated the US position that Kyoto was not sound policy and said the Bush administration would have problems with the compromise package agreed in Bonn, which allows for more liberal use of forests as "sinks" for carbon emissions.
There can be no doubt that its adoption puts moral and political pressure on the US to rejoin the Kyoto process, sooner or later, and a succession of speakers at yesterday's plenary said that they, too, would like to see the world's biggest polluter back on board.
As things stand, the world has gone ahead with Kyoto without the US. Ms Margot Wallstrom, the EU Environment Commissioner, suggested that the agreement reached in Bonn, on its implementation, had changed the balance of power between the US and the EU.
Environmental groups were unanimous in paying tributes to the EU and G77 (developing countries) delegations for the positive roles they played throughout the talks, and criticised Japan, Canada, Australia and Russia for the roadblocks they had erected along the way.
Kyoto is still afloat but it has taken on water, according to Friends of the Earth. It had survived the best efforts of the US administration to kill it off. That in itself was a triumph for citizens all over the world who had campaigned so hard for it.
The World Wide Fund for Nature Conservation described the deal as a geopolitical earthquake. Other countries had demonstrated their independence from the Bush administration on the world's critical environmental problem. Now Kyoto could be ratified.
What's needed for the protocol to come into force is the so-called 55-55 formula - ratification by a minimum of 55 UN member-states, including countries responsible for 55 per cent of the developed world's greenhouse-gas emissions in 1990, the base year of the convention.
Given that the US accounted for 36 per cent of these emissions, the participation of Japan, Canada and Australia in Kyoto was crucial, and they knew it. That's why they were able to extract so many concessions on sinks, emissions trading and compliance.
Even though the EU can barely stomach some aspects of the deal, it is prepared to live with it at least until the terms can be improved during subsequent negotiations. But the EU and G77 countries knew that if they tabled any amendments it would have unravelled.
"I could give you 10 examples of changes I'd like to have seen," said Mr Olivier Deleuze, the Belgian Energy Minister, who heads the EU delegation. "But I prefer an imperfect living agreement to a perfect one that doesn't exist."
The EU was prepared to go further in terms of making real cuts in emissions instead of looking for more loopholes. But even though the Bonn deal is full of them, Ms Wallstrom was moved to say: "I think we can now go home and look our children in the eye."
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