BALI, Indonesia - Two weeks of international climate talks marked by bitter disagreements and angry accusations culminated in a last-minute U.S. compromise and an agreement to adopt a blueprint for fighting global warming by 2009.
Now comes the hard part.
Delegates from nearly 190 countries must fix goals for industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions while helping developing countries cut their own emissions and adapt to rising temperatures.
Negotiators also will consider ways to encourage those countries to protect their rapidly dwindling forests -- which absorb carbon dioxide.
"This is the beginning, not the end,'' United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who made a plea Saturday on the Indonesian island of Bali for action, told The Associated Press. "We will have to engage in more complex, long and difficult negotiations.''
The Bali conference was charged with launching negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. That pact requires 37 industrial countries to reduce greenhouse gases by a relatively modest five per cent on average in the next five years.
As the "Bali Road map'' talks begin, the focus again will fall on the United States, the lone major industrial country to reject Kyoto. For many, the focus will fall a year down the road, to the U.S. election and the next president, one they hope will be willing to deal on deeper, mandatory emissions cuts than George W. Bush, who favours a voluntary approach in reining in greenhouse gases.
What those negotiators decide by 2009 is likely to help set the course of global warming and climate change for decades to come.
In a series of pivotal reports this year, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN network of climate and other scientists, warned of severe consequences -- from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction and other effects -- without sharp cutbacks in emissions of the industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for warming.
To avoid the worst, the panel said, emissions should be reduced by 25 per cent to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Those numbers, endorsed by the Europeans and other Kyoto-ratifying countries, were written into early versions of this conference's final decision -- as a guideline, not a binding target. The U.S. delegation, led by Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, managed to get the figures expunged.
But it was a secondary matter that precipitated the riveting, 11th-hour fight.
India sought to amend the document to strengthen requirements for richer countriess to help the poorer with technology to limit emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Dobriansky objected. "We are not prepared to accept this formulation,'' she said, setting off loud, long boos in the hall.
Next, delegate after delegate took aim at the United States. Dobriansky's intervention was "most unwelcome and without any basis,'' the South African delegate said. "We would like to beg them'' to relent, the Ugandan said.
Then Kevin Conrad, the delegate from Papua New Guinea, delivered his sharp rebuke:
"If you are not willing to lead ... Please get out of the way.''
America's isolation was complete. No one spoke in support. And Dobriansky capitulated, withdrawing the U.S. objection, to general applause.
She later told reporters she reversed field after feeling reassured that developing countries would make a contribution to emissions reductions under the road map.
Hans Verolme, World Wildlife Fund climate campaigner, offered a different interpretation. "We have learned a historical lesson: If you expose to the world the dealings of the United States, they will ultimately back down,'' he said.
The road map plan does ask for more from the developing world, tasking negotiators to consider "mitigation actions'' -- voluntary actions to slow emissions growth -- by poorer countries, including such fast-growing economies as China's and India's.
Their exemption from the Kyoto Protocol's mandatory caps has long been a key complaint of American critics.
On industrial nations, the Bali plan instructs negotiators to consider mitigation "commitments,'' mandatory caps as in the Kyoto deal. But the lack -- at U.S. insistence -- of ambitious numerical guidelines troubled many environmentalists.
"The people of the world wanted more. They wanted binding targets,'' said Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace Brazil.
Climate policy analyst Eliot Diringer, of Washington's Pew centre, looked on the positive side.
"It puts no one on the hook right now for emissions reductions,'' he said. "What's important, though, is that it lets no one off the hook either.''
