The most unusual thing about last month’s United Nations conference in Montreal on how best to implement the Kyoto Protocol on global warming was the erratic behavior of the official American delegation.

The low-level group was led by Harlan L. Watson, a midlevel State Department official who spent most of his career on the staff of the House Science Committee. He left a late-night session in a huff when the Europeans and Canadians called for some future non-binding discussions on the subject. Suspecting that they really wanted negotiations on new and tougher standards, he used an Americanism that evidently was completely lost on other delegates.

“If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck,” Watson proclaimed. According to The Washington Post, one of the befuddled delegates asked: “What about this document is like a duck?”

At the last moment, the Americans reversed themselves, agreeing to some innocuous, non-binding discussions on what to do next. But it’s now clear to foreign leaders that the United States will not really discuss the issue seriously until there is a change of administrations, if then.

What may not be so clear to them, though, is that Washington’s recalcitrance doesn’t mean that the United States is not forming a strategy on global warming — because slowly, awkwardly, it is. As with so many policies these days, it’s percolating from the bottom up in a process that foreign leaders often don’t quite appreciate, in large part because the national press doesn’t either.

Only a week after the Montreal conference adjourned, the governors of seven Northeastern states, following two and a half years of difficult negotiations, signed a regional agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent by 2019 using a market-based system for about 180 power plants in the region to trade carbon “allowances.”

There originally had been nine states in the compact, but Massachusetts and Rhode Island pulled out at the last minute because of concerns that the program would inflate energy prices. Two other states and the District of Columbia, plus five Canadian provinces, also participated in the negotiations and may join the program later. California, Oregon and Washington are working on a similar compact and other states have set caps on carbon emissions.

The withdrawal of Massachusetts led to speculation that Gov. Mitt Romney may be trying to distance himself from two potential competitors for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination: New York Gov. George E. Pataki, who took the lead in negotiating the agreement, and Arizona Sen. John McCain, an outspoken advocate for strong action on global warming. Romney denies a political motive, and in fairness, the Bay State has tough regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from its utilities, and is taking action on those from autos.

Just two weeks ago, Massachusetts joined seven other states in adopting California’s tough standards for greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, which after power plants are the other significant source of carbon dioxide emissions. Those standards, which call for a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gases in the next decade, are being challenged in court by the auto industry (joined by the federal government), which claims they would result in “marketplace chaos.”

I’m guessing that the feds will prevail, either legally or procedurally, on the immediate issue of whether California may set a separate standard on carbon dioxide. But the underlying current is flowing in the direction of the states. New allies include the insurance industry, large multinationals like General Electric and Hewlett Packard, the health care community and even some strains of the evangelical movement, not to mention nearly 200 cities that have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

This is hardly an ideal situation. Unquestionably it will be harder on domestic businesses to operate in such a patchwork world of laws and regulations. And no doubt the Kyoto treaty was flawed. But it was the best the world could come up with — 157 nations have signed on since 1997. Now it’s only in the first stage of implementation. In one respect, it can easily be dismissed as a failure since the United States, responsible for almost a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, refused to sign it, and the largest developing nations, such as China, India and Brazil, weren’t required to meet any targets.

But in another sense, Kyoto clearly is the beginning of a politically tortuous process in which the countries of the world must decide on a framework for changing more than a century’s worth of dangerously bad habits. It will involve sacrifice and compromise, for no immediate reward.

It would be best if the federal government abandoned its ostrich imitation and started to lead on what the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 called a “real” and significant dilemma that could have a “serious adverse” effect on weather patterns and sea levels. That warning came in the same year that the Bush administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol — and four years before Hurricane Katrina.

Peter Harkness is the editor and publisher of Governing magazine, published by Congressional Quarterly Inc. Next week: Futurist, by Mike Mills.