One week in and progress - if it's to be seen at all - can only be found "under the ... magnifying glass," as Karl Falkenberg, the European Commission's director general for the environment said Friday.

At a briefing Friday morning with Falkenberg, Ambassador Qingtai Yu of China, Secretary C. Dasgupta of India and Ambassador Quamrul Islam Chowdhury of Bangladesh, the take-home message was clear: Nobody has moved from the stalemated positions that have kept international negotiations seized up since the Bali accord in 2007.

Rumors of dissent and discord are just so much froth and foment, these men agreed. China and the 130 less-developed countries of the G-77 remain in lock-step. The origins of various texts – be they Danish, Chinese or South African – is a non-issue.

The EU and developed countries want binding targets for everyone. The developing countries don't. That's the bottom line.

Everyone seems to be looking for the ministers or the heads-of-state to arrive and somehow cut through the knots. Or for what we might as well call the Bali ex machina – where in the middle of the night, well past the 11th hour, a solution somehow emerges from the ether, as it did in Bali in 2007.

I'm not going to stay up. It appears – at least right now – that we're headed for a federated approach where ministers arrive, announce their national mitigation goals and head home to cut emissions as best they can.

It seems pretty clear, based on the science, that such an approach won't produce the reductions scientists say we need to avert the worst impact. But it seems equally clear, based on the politics, that the developing world is looking for the rich to carry through on earlier promises to reduce emissions before they're willing to ink any sort of an agreement.

Ambassador Yu summed the matter succinctly Friday morning:

Despite all this broad range of proposals ... it boils down to one issue quite clearly: this emissions space – whether as human beings we are all entitled to the same amount of emissions space. For developed countries, when it comes to emissions space, their fundamental position is 'what's mine is mine. What I've taken from you I've got to keep.' For us, the developing countries, our position is our emissions space is under occupation, and we want it back.

The freshness of the Bella Center at 8 a.m. has, by midday Friday, given way to that stale smell of a crush of humanity - mostly body odor, a bit of perfume, an oh-so-faint hint of coffee and lunch. Even the protesters seem a bit sapped, tired of fighting to be noticed above the din.

Until the West has a way to refute Yu's logic, it's hard to see how an international political agreement can emerge.