The 25,000 delegates who have flown to Madrid, Spain, for the COP25 climate conference look set to leave after two weeks of talking with nothing to show for their efforts aside from bitterness and chaos over the simple question: who – apart from the United States – will be called upon to pay the bills.

This follows angry accusations from Third World delegates at what they see as attempts to block progress on a range of issues because of the actions of some large emitters.

Carlos Fuller from Belize told the BBC that Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India and China were “part of the problem” because of their refusal to guarantee any payments for their climate “sins.”

The only agreement amongst representatives is that the U.S. alone might be left with a multi-billion dollar tab.

As Breitbart News reported, the United States was warned Wednesday it cannot avoid compensating poorer nations hit by climate change, despite Donald Trump honoring his election promise of leaving the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Delegates and observers at the COP25 negotiations told AFP that Washington seeks a change to the U.N. climate convention that could release it from punitive “loss and damage” funding for developing nations which is predicted to run into the billions of dollars.

Now other emitters are trying to limit the scale of what can be achieved while they push all demands for reparations back across the table and demand the U.S. alone pays the bills of the many.

“There’s an effort right now to block the words ‘climate urgency’ in text from Brazil and Saudi Arabia, saying we haven’t used these words before in the U.N., so we can’t use them now,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International.

“This gap between what’s happening on the outside and what’s happening in the science, and this ‘U.N. speak’ that won’t react and drive something is very frustrating.”

Negotiators have told the BBC that the obstinacy of some countries was limiting agreement on non-contentious questions.

“I am very disturbed and angry,” said Carlos Fuller, the chief negotiator for the small island developing states group of countries.

“At 2.30 this morning we couldn’t agree to continue working on a transparency framework, that tells the world what each country is doing, we couldn’t agree to keep working on it. That is ridiculous”

If the two weeks of climate wrangling fail to come up with any workable solution, the only guarantee is that the whole process will begin again in 12 months time.

That’s when 25,00 people from 200 countries will again fly in from around the world to seek ways to achieve the United Nations’ demand for global “climate solutions.”