Ten months after the Kyoto Protocol took effect, bleary-eyed delegates to UN climate talks here left the sprawling Palais des Congres early Saturday with firm protocol rules and a blueprint - if blurry - for negotiating future commitments.

What they didn't get was deeper participation from Washington. The Bush administration withdrew from Kyoto negotiations in 2001 and adopted its own program to reduce greenhouse gas "intensity" 18 percent by 2012 through voluntary adoption of new, energy- efficient technologies.

Nearly everyone agrees that no global regime to curb emissions will be successful without US involvement. Yet some hold that merely getting delegates to agree to more talks constitutes progress - though the conference closed with fewer specifics about the future than many had hoped for.

Major players such as Japan, Russia, and Europe signaled a readiness "to move forward without the United States," notes Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

Several factors appear to have influenced that decision. Developing countries, he says, now see the protocol's financial tools as benefiting them in several ways. In the US, state and local governments are enacting their own reduction agreements, albeit with fits and starts. And in June, the Senate adopted a nonbinding resolution 54-43 that backs mandatory reduction targets, to be achieved with market methods.

Atmospheric scientists hold that carbon-dioxide emissions have triggered a long-term warming trend that will accelerate if heat-trapping gases from burning coal, oil, and natural gas aren't curbed.

The talks here followed two tracks. On Track 1, delegates put the finishing touches on implementing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which 157 countries have ratified. Under Kyoto, industrial countries must reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions by an average of just over 5 percent between 2008 and 2012.

Participating countries strengthened market mechanisms for achieving targets. They anted up money for a fund to help developing countries that may confront rising sea levels or changes in rainfall patterns. And they laid the foundation for talks on a new set of targets to take effect in 2013 and on new ways to achieve those targets.

On Track 2, the US remained hitched to a broader, less-rigorous climate agreement - which gave rise to the protocol - by a slender thread. It was thin enough to please the White House, which avoided any talks it perceived as leading to mandatory targets and timetables. Yet the thread let the rest of the world claim that the US, the world's largest single source of industrial carbon-dioxide emissions, remains engaged in talks about future action.

This was seen as critical to drawing developing countries into talks about how they can increase their efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Under the terms of both agreements, developing countries have no initial obligations, although some countries, such as China, are adopting aggressive pollution standards that many here say will help them move into more-formal agreements later.

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