An arcane exercise in counting tanks, artillery and troops, and ultimately abandoned after the Warsaw Pact collapsed, the Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks were quietly known among bored participants as the "Most Bizarre Form of Ritual."

That tag of time-wasting absurdity can all too easily be applied to the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming.

For the last six years, a tribe of diplomats, cocooned in a language impenetrable to the outside world, has been counting forests, enumerating carbon-dioxide emissions and trying to figure their way through a regulatory maze and political minefield to complete Kyoto's rulebook.

The Kyoto MBFR has at last concluded, yielding its answer -- gigantic in size, mind-numbing in complexity -- to the greatest man-made threat to the world's fragile climate system.

But the irony is that this sprawling machine may never even clatter into life, for it risks being hauled away to become chief exhibit in the Museum of Failed Environment Laws.

Opposed by the United States, the biggest single polluter of carbon gas that drives global warming, Kyoto's fate now depends entirely on ratification by Russia to take effect.

And the Kremlin, at the latest UN talks which wrapped up here on Friday, demanded even more concessions before it will put the draft treaty to parliamentary approval, joining two-thirds of the world's 180 nations who have already ratified.

So is Kyoto doomed? Will US President George W. Bush's alternative to it prevail?

Not at all, according to many voices here, and they belong not just to green true-believers but also seasoned politicians and business executives.

"This really is the only game in town," British Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett said Thursday, urging Kyoto members to implement their promises "with renewed vigour."

"Technology alone is not enough. It is important to send the right signals to markets now," said Beckett. "Strong and unambiguous signals must give investors the long-term confidence that investments in low-carbon technologies will pay off."

Those remarks were echoed again and again by other environment ministers here, as well as by businesses who want to profit from the clean-up drive yet seek rules and incentives in order to take part.

What they specifically like is Kyoto's emissions "cap": industrialised signatories must meet specific goals in reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2008-2012, compared by their 1990 levels.

This "cap" is what Bush opposes most of all, for the energy-profligate US economy would have to make a huge, costly effort to meet its 1997 target.

Bush's alternative approach has been to dangle tax breaks and other carrots for clean technology to meet a voluntary emissions goal at home, and try to weave a web of bilateral deals on energy efficiency with Kyoto signatories abroad.

Suspicious environmentalists say the strategy is a US plan to "sabotage" Kyoto by wooing friends such as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But if such were the case, the "plot" is not working if Milan, attended by a huge US delegation that cranked out expensive PR power to pitch the Bush scheme, was any guide.

There was no sign of any weakening among poorer countries, who like Kyoto's funds to encourage the transfer of clean technology and cope with the impact of climate change.

Indeed, the G77 group of developing countries and China called on Russia to ratify the treaty and singled out the United States for an appeal "to come back on board as soon as possible."

And attempts by some US allies to postpone the next big conference, scheduled to be held in Buenos Aires in December 2004, until after the US election of November next year, were opposed by a large majority of countries.

"The Bush administration's plan is not taken seriously by other countries," said WWF's Jennifer Morgan. "The multilateral approach [remains popular] despite attempts by the Bush administration to undermine it."

For all this, Kyoto's survival chances depend crucially on the fact that, so far, there is no alternative -- and so much time and effort has already been put into crafting the mammoth machine that no-one is keen to start all over again.

SPACE.WIRE