DURBAN, South Africa -- The longest U.N. climate conference in history ended at dawn yesterday with diplomats swinging a pick-axe at the wall that has long protected developing countries from taking legal responsibility for fighting global warming.

After two all-nighters, a bitter midnight battle between the European Union climate chief Connie Hedegaard and Indian Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan and a frantic 3 a.m. huddle of top ministers where U.S. envoy Todd Stern helped broker a deal that hinged on three critical words, South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane gaveled the deal.

By 2015, countries will begin to negotiate a new climate change deal to take force by 2020. Unlike the current Kyoto Protocol that requires only developed nations to cut carbon, all major emitters will be for the first time called to account for their greenhouse gas emissions.

"We're pleased with that," Stern said in a courtyard outside the plenary hall after the sunrise decision. "Fundamentally, we got the kind of symmetry we have been focused on since the beginning of the Obama administration."

The Big Two. Representing the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet, Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate negotiator and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, in deep discussion between marathon sessions at Durban. Photo courtesy IISD RS.

As part of that deal, the European Union agreed to submit new emission reduction targets for a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol starting in 2013. The 27-nation bloc will be among a much smaller group of countries now part of Kyoto, because Japan, Russia and Canada have effectively pulled out. The United States is not a party to that treaty.

Also gaveled through was the design of the Green Climate Fund to help protect poor nations from weather disasters and transition to cleaner energy systems. At the same time, though, countries made no decisions about how they will find money to put in the fund.

The final text of the so-called Durban Platform makes no mention of a phrase cherished by developing nations: that they have "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities."

The phrase has become shorthand for the belief that all developing countries from poverty-stricken Malawi to wealthy China should only cut carbon voluntarily and in exchange for finance and technology from fully industrialized nations.

Stern characterized the Durban Platform as the seeds of the only type of global warming agreement Congress and the American public could ever accept: one that puts the United States and China on a level legal playing field. Democrats in Washington echoed that.

"This agreement moves us away from an unhelpful paradigm," Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a statement. "It sets up a transparent process that forces China and the major emerging economies to keep their word on climate change. Now all major greenhouse gas emitting countries will be on-record contributors to a solution."

But many developing countries and aid groups called the decision an unmitigated disaster. Throughout the night, a group of young activists wearing "Climate Justice Now" T-shirts groaned and shook their heads each time another struggling nation diplomat signaled that despite strong concerns with the deal, it would not be blocked.

"This was an exercise in the avoidance of responsibility, led by the United States," said Karen Orenstein, international policy campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

Meanwhile, Climate Justice Now -- a group that believes poor nations are owed reparations from industrialized countries with the largest historical greenhouse gas emissions for environmental crimes -- called the outcome "climate apartheidv... whereby the richest 1 percent of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99 percent."

Rising above low expectations

The 17th Conference of the Parties, or COP17, began with the lowest of expectations. It drew 20,000 delegates and other participants -- half as many as descended upon the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit -- and the Obama administration's objectives were modest at best.

With little to offer the world by way of new commitments to cut carbon -- given that Congress had killed a climate bill and showed no intention of revisiting it -- the U.S. team instead focused on nailing down the details of agreements made in Cancun, Mexico, last year.

But it arrived to find intense anger and frustration directed at the United States from all corners, accused of wanting to do nothing more ambitious than color in the details of an agreement scientists determined is insufficient for averting catastrophic global warming. At one point, a heckler met with sustained applause after she interrupted Stern's major address to the U.N. climate body.

In the end, according to Mexican Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba, the United States did not stand in the way of a deal.

"I have to say the U.S. has played a very constructive role. They have moved and they have showed willingness ... to accept in principle a process to negotiating a legally binding instrument," de Alba said.

Meanwhile, many details of the Cancun agreements did get done. In addition to fleshing out how the Green Fund will operate, the final text creates an adaptation committee and a process that will lead to the creation of a climate technology center. It also details transparency measures that will require countries to report the progress they are making in meeting their emission targets.

Parties also adopted text on the so-called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program, which seeks to reduce carbon by preserving forests (see related story). Some issues remain outstanding, but negotiators ironed out disagreements that sprung up midweek over options for possible financing and whether market-based mechanisms and offsets for a carbon trading program should be possible sources of funding.

"Everybody agrees on public financing for REDD+. And almost all the financing right now is public," said Doug Boucher, who handles forestry issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Bolivia and Brazil have historically opposed the commodification of forests for carbon mitigation, while the United States and India have supported allowing forest protection programs to operate as offsets to bring down the cost of compliance with carbon reduction programs.

REDD+ escapes from near death

But this week's key players were Japan and Australia, who took the pro-market stance, and Brazil, which argued against the use of financing from offsets. The spat injected uncertainty into one aspect of the negotiations that had been expected to go smoothly.

"We got some indication that it was going wrong Tuesday," Boucher said. By Thursday negotiators had hit a serious bump in the road. "One of my colleagues who works on forest stuff for Brazil said, 'Yes, it is dead, but it's not yet embalmed,'" he said.

But by Friday, REDD+ rose from the dead after a compromise on funding sources allowed the body to adopt language that would set up a yearlong working group on the issue. The final language called for a wide variety of financial sources and allowed parties to consider "appropriate" market-based approaches that would be developed by the COP to support reforestation efforts in developing countries.

The final agreement on the Green Climate Fund, meanwhile, builds the basic architecture of the structure expected to administer a portion of the $100 billion annual climate aid pledge countries have made. Here the United States won a key sticking point -- that the fund be largely independent of the U.N. climate conference. The final text makes the fund "accountable to and functions under the guidance" of the United Nations.

The agreement also authorizes the board to set up an interim secretariat immediately with the goal of convening the first board meeting by April 30, 2012. The first two board meetings are to be hosted by Switzerland and South Korea.

Activists said without money -- or even setting up a place where the question of raising money could be discussed, which the U.S. blocked -- the Green Fund is an empty shell.

"The creation of the Green Climate Fund is a significant achievement, but this fund will be useless if there is no money in it," says Ilana Solomon of ActionAid International. "Rich countries, particularly the U.S., have chosen to overlook a number of viable options to generate new funding, thereby threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of poor people."

On balance, the agreement is "a new step," Brazilian Minister Izabella Teixeira said as she milled about the plenary hall at dawn awaiting the final gavel to fall.

Without a "firewall" protecting hundreds of developing countries at different stages of wealth and emissions from having to take responsibility, countries will have to have hard new conversations about equity. Those same conversations will have to happen amongst developing countries themselves, opening up a whole new pandora's box of issues and potential rifts between nations.

But, Teixeira said, she thinks countries are ready for it. "I think it is a really historical decision," she said. "This is excellent. This is really excellent."