Brussels - The final round in a boxing match is the time for desperate efforts as the battered fighters aim for a last-minute knock-out. Picture 27 such fights going on in the same ring, and you will have some idea of the diplomatic struggle gripping the European Union as member states grapple over the final details of a legal proposal for fighting climate change ahead of a summit on December 11-12.
"Europe faces a moment of truth over the next week on the issue of climate change. ... (The EU needs) an agreement which shows that Europe is serious about climate change, that it isn't backing away despite the economic difficulties," Britain's Climate Minister Ed Miliband said Thursday at a meeting with EU counterparts in Brussels.
In March 2007, EU leaders agreed that the bloc should cut its emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2, the gas most associated with global warming) to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and to deepen that cut to 30 per cent if other world powers make similar commitments at a summit in Copenhagen in 2009.
The proposal is nothing less than a "third industrial revolution," Poland's Europe Minister Mikolaj Dowgielewicz said on November 27.
But ever since the EU's executive, the European Commission, in January proposed laws saying how the bloc should hit its goals, the EU's 27 members have been locked in combat as each one bids to wrench the laws in favour of its own national economy.
States are deeply at odds over the question of how much protection highly-polluting industries receive, how much rich countries should pay poor ones to clean up their act, and how they should protect their voters from sudden electricity price rises.
"Of course national parliaments are trying to back away, (saying) we should wait for (US president-elect Barack) Obama or Copenhagen, or because of the financial crisis," French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, whose country has the unenviable task of chairing the talks as holder of the EU's rotating presidency, said.
The debate is set to come to a head at Thursday's summit, when EU leaders get to grips over the most difficult outstanding issues.
And ahead of the summit, the diplomatic manoeuvring has reached fever pitch, with the French government in non-stop talks with member states and the European Parliament - which would also have to approve any political agreement - in a bid to clinch a final deal.
Diplomats in Brussels are still reeling from an ambassadorial debate on the climate package which began at 9 o'clock on Friday morning and finished at 6 o'clock the following morning.
That meeting set up a series of "trialogues" between French officials, the commission and the European Parliament - negotiations on individual points which have run through night after night.
It also led to a flurry of proposals from member states, with staff in the EU's central bureaucracy complaining that they have now received so many papers that they barely have time to read them, let alone translate them into the bloc's three working languages.
At the same time, EU leaders have been engaging in a frantic round of bilateral and multilateral meetings.
The biggest of those is due on Saturday, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy - the host of next week's summit - is set to travel to Poland to debate the climate proposals with their most vocal critics: Poland, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
But officials across Brussels agree that the toughest question - who pays the bill of stopping climate change - is so contentious that only a summit of all the EU's leaders will be able to answer it.
At the equivalent summit in March 2007, when Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel brokered the initial EU deal on the principle of cutting CO2 emissions, the debate was over shortly before midnight.
With EU member states now at one another's throats over the details - and costs - of the commission proposals, diplomats say that the next meeting will be lucky to get a deal before dawn.
And that means that Sarkozy will have to have all his wits about him if he is to keep the EU's climate proposals from a damaging fall.
