When it’s all over, and every last lobster and tin of caviar and magnum of vintage champagne has been consumed, the delegates to the Johannesburg Earth Summit will have generated between 300 and 400 tons of garbage, of which only 20% will be recycled. They will have consumed 5 million sheets of paper to produce mountains of pamphlets, press statements and brochures. There are 45,000 delegates, and each one is using an average of 53 gallons of water a day. Flying all these people to Johannesburg and chauffeuring them around the city will generate nearly 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

So are all these NGOs and governments going to help clean up?

The Johannesburg Climate Legacy project hopes to offset this by raising nearly $3 million from participating countries, corporations and individuals, and using it to implement 16 projects to reduce carbon emissions.

Only $300,000 has been raised, and only seven of the 192 countries at the summit have pledged donations.