Many of the delegates will have to pack up on Friday and leave on Saturday too, because their travel arrangements require it. If an agreement is reached late Friday night or Saturday morning, it will be without the review of observers, and without the participation of many of the delegates. Pronk has said that his draft will force all nations to bear the pain equally. What that really means is that only the developed nations will bear the pain - 150 developing nations are not bound by the Protocol. Should the U. S. delegates sign such an agreement, they would be deliberately ignoring a unanimous Senate Resolution that says the Senate will not ratify a treaty that fails to bind all nations.
Smart money is on some kind of agreement.
Failure to reach real agreement, after five years of negotiations, should send a pretty strong signal that there may be some fundamental flaws in the basic document. The most basic flaw was incorporated in the original Berlin Mandate at the first Conference of the Parties in 1995 - the decision to exclude 150 developing nations. A third fatal flaw was the decision to set a firm time line for implementation. The time line began in 1995 in Berlin, by declaring that a Protocol would be adopted in Kyoto in 1997. In Kyoto, the delegates declared that the rules for implementation would be agreed at the Hague in 2000, in order to achieve full implementation by 2002 - to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development where the original Climate Change Treaty was adopted.