Tough negotiating at the UN summit on global climate change will get under way today when politicians from many of the 160 participating countries assemble in The Hague.
Based on previous experience of climate change conferences, it is only when ministers or political leaders begin to arrive that the crunch issues are resolved.
At present the EU and US are poles apart on curbing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. A particular problem is the use of "loopholes" such as offsetting higher gas emissions against growing more trees. But both sides are anxious to conclude a workable agreement before the summit concludes on Friday.
Relentless pressure is being applied by environmental lobbies, who see the summit as a make-or-break opportunity to begin serious reductions in the volume of greenhouse gases which scientists say are causing climate change.
The lobbies have made both a colourful and vociferous contribution and are helping to force change.
There is also unrest among developing countries about the drift of the talks. At one stage over the weekend the G77 group, which represents their interests, threatened to walk out because most of the meatier exchanges were taking place in private.
Mr Jan Pronk, the Dutch Environment Minister, who is chairing the summit, admitted that no progress had been made in the first week of talks between diplomats and officials. "The only good thing to say is that we are no further apart", he said.
The EU is determined that the summit must uphold the "environmental credibility" of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, which requires the industrialised world to begin to cut back on its greenhouse gas emissions by 2010.
But the US is still pressing for a liberal use of loopholes, such as claiming credits for all of its existing forests as "carbon sinks", and even American environmentalists fear that this would circumvent the need to cut US carbon-dioxide emissions.
The EU's blunt insistence that the US - which is responsible for 24 per cent of global emissions although it accounts for less than 5 per cent of the world's population - must not substitute sinks for cuts has dismayed the US delegation.
Ms Kalee Kreider, of the US National Environmental Trust, who has been monitoring the talks, said it had calculated that the US could set aside almost half of its Kyoto target of a 7 per cent emissions cut through this loophole alone.
"It's basically an accounting trick that would allow `business as usual', which is why the EU is so scathing about it", Ms Kreider said. "And the trees may not even survive. What happens if there is a repetition of last summer's record forest fires?"
The Government will be represented at The Hague by the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey. Under the EU "burden-sharing" deal in May 1998, Ireland agreed to cap the growth in greenhouse-gas emissions at 13 per cent above their 1990 levels by 2010. However, official UN figures show that the Republic is already up by 18 per cent.
