What these efforts will not do is (a) lead the way to higher ambition and stricter targets, (b) provide the US share of the climate finance promised for poor countries. Seattle has acknowledged the finance issue, but it’s an exception. City-to-city and state-level programmes can only do so much anyway. Fortunately, renewables are now so cheap and reliable that enough finance may be available on market terms, as with India. The big finance problem may lie on the adaptation side: giant Dutch sea walls cannot be built as commercial investments.