After two grueling weeks of negotiations, late in 2009 the Copenhagen conference on global warming ended with a whimper. On nearly every major agenda item, including the need for a new treaty to replace the aging Kyoto Protocol, the meeting failed to produce a useful agreement. Diplomats did the easy things, such as making bold proclamations that global warming should be stopped at 2 degrees and promising huge new sums of money to help developing countries control their emissions and adapt to the changing climate. They also invited countries to make pledges for how they would contribute to these planetary goals. In the months since Copenhagen, analysts have shown that those national pledges won't come close to stopping global warming at 2 degrees. Many of the pledges are missing serious plans for how they will be fulfilled. And the new financial promises for developing countries are also slipping away. Even worse, while everyone agrees that more formal global talks are needed, there is little consensus on the best strategy.

As global talks have become stuck in gridlock, the picture inside the countries whose policies will matter most in determining the future of global warming isn't any more encouraging. Of the industrialized countries, for many years the members of European Union (EU) and Japan have made the biggest policy efforts.