The purpose of Bali - Talk, Talk, Talk, and bash the US.....

The whole thing was just ridiculous...and the end result worthless...

As those 10,000 weary delegates were at last able to jet off home from 10 days on their holiday isle, perhaps the best summing up of what they had achieved came from Humberto Rosa, head of the delegation representing the European Union.

"It is exactly what we wanted," he said. "We are very pleased. We will now have two tremendously demanding years, starting in January. Many meetings, many discussions, many people passing many hours doing things."

The basic purpose of Bali, as we were tirelessly reminded by the BBC, Al Gore, old Uncle Ban Ki-moon and pretty well everyone else, was that this vast assemblage of people should gather together to vilify George Bush.

It was he alone who stood in the way of saving the planet, by refusing even to sign Kyoto into law, let alone participate in the new historic agreement which is to follow, and to discuss which Bali was all about.

(It is conveniently forgotten that it was the US Senate which unanimously voted not to ratify Kyoto in 1998, when the vice-president of the USA was Al Gore).

In the end, as in all good comedies, the "baddies" came round to the side of light, the US representative made her "climbdown" by saying that her country was now ready to join the "consensus", and everyone could go home happy.

The reality of Bali, however, was that all this vilification of America as the "world's worst polluter" was only displacement activity - to disguise the fact that, when it comes to the crunch, no one is really prepared to step off the bandwagon of economic growth, by making the unthinkable sacrifices which would be required if any of them actually meant what they said.

They are all happy to work themselves into an intense state of excitement by chanting their quasi-religious mantra: that there is now "absolute scientific consensus" that Planet Earth is doomed unless we cut our carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050.

But no one is prepared to take any serious step towards that inconceivable goal unless everyone else jumps too.

America refused to ratify Kyoto because it didn't include the "developing countries" such as China, still building a new coal-fired power station every four days and about to overtake the US as the world's leading CO2 emitter.

China and India say they cannot be expected to cut their emissions until they have caught up economically with the already industrialised nations which caused all that rise in CO2 in the first place.

The European Union likes to claim that it is "leading the world on climate change", while Germany builds 26 new coal-fired power stations, Britain plans to double its number of air passengers and the EU's emissions continue to rise (just when America's last year actually fell).