What's the point? It's easy to ask when leaders jet in from around the world in carbon-belching planes for an awayday of talk, as they did this week over climate change. For me, the answer is exemplified by a different piece of punctuation. Not a point, but a comma.
I came across one of these apparently nondescript little curls almost 30 years ago, nestling deep in a negotiating text in the United Nations headquarters building where the leaders met in New York. What made it special was that it was enclosed, all by itself, in square brackets, showing that the world's governments could not agree on whether it should be there or not.
Now it may not have been the most contentious comma in the 2,000-year history of the mark (which, I'm told, traces its descent from Aristophanes of Byzantium, who ran the great library of Alexandria in the second century BC). That accolade may belong to one in a contract between North American communication companies that caused a row that took $700,000 in legal fees to sort out. But it was controversial enough to be getting on with.
For days on end, the world's diplomats argued about it. Eventually, I gave up trying to make sense of it. I had to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, as my wife was coming with me, we took a 10-day break in New England on the way. But on returning to Manhattan, I found the wretched punctuation mark as hotly disputed as ever.
I have mercifully forgotten what the relevant sentence was about, though the comma did – in fairness – change its meaning. The world has equally long forgotten the negotiations, between rich and poor countries, themselves. I do remember that they were never successfully concluded. Indeed, for all I know, the contentious comma is still there, snug between its brackets, in a yellowing document in a vault beneath America's most populous city.
But to get to the point, as they say. With just 15 negotiating days left before governments meet in Copenhagen in December supposedly to finalise a new climate agreement, the man in charge of the negotiations – the somewhat dour Dutchman Yvo de Boer – complains that they are "afloat on a sea of brackets". I haven't looked to see if any of them enclose a solitary comma (somehow life seems too short), but I do know that there are 2,500 sets – all surrounding different points of contention – in the 200-page negotiating text.
At the present rate, most will remain as unresolved as the 30-year-old comma in New York. And yet almost every one of the world's governments (Saudia Arabia appears to be a rare exception) seems to want to seal a deal.
So the system is failing. Cumbersome at the best of times, UN procedures seem unable to bear the weight of an issue as important, urgent, and complicated as climate change. Negotiators insist on giving no ground until the very last minute, usually in the early hours after the talks were supposed to have ended, just before their eviction from the building to make way for the next booking (on one occasion, I remember, an underwear exhibition). But a new climate deal would be too complex to be cobbled together like that.
Hence last week's climate summit, designed to break the deadlock by getting national leaders involved. It was designed intelligently, minimising formal speeches (no 94-minute rants from Colonel Gaddafi) and treating the leaders like human beings, hard though this might be in some cases.
So they spent most of the time in small groups, mixing rich and poor countries, the polluters with their victims. The leaders of the highest emitting nations had dinner with those from low-lying island states due to disappear as sea levels rise.
Whether this succeeded in engaging the leaders' commitment will become clear in the next few weeks, but nothing less has a chance of energising the negotiations. And once involved they will need to stay so. Nicolas Sarkozy suggests another summit in November, Gordon Brown wants leaders to go to Copenhagen (and says he is ready to go himself). Both will probably be needed if any sort of worthwhile agreement is to be reached.
The issue is far too big to be left to the negotiators – or even to the environment ministers who usually have to strike the deal in the end. Only national leaders have the authority to take the decisions, which will determine the shape of economies as well as the environment and could usher in a new era of growth. If they don't, we could be looking at not so much a comma, as a full stop.
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