As the United Nations’ annual climate conference in Madrid winds to a close, it has become clear that climate summits are stuck in a rut. The job of cutting global emissions is actually getting harder, and not just because the planet keeps warming.

Climate summits have become festivals at which leaders talk about leadership. But leadership doesn’t matter without followership. And that’s the problem in addressing the climate crisis. There aren’t enough followers.

In 1990, when the United Nations first began diplomatic talks on climate change, the countries, cities, states and provinces poised to become leaders in climate policy accounted for about 34 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and industrial operations, according to my research. That group included essentially all of today’s Europe (minus Poland, which is heavily powered with coal and seems keen to stick with it), about one-third of the states in the United States, most of Canada’s provinces, Japan, Korea and a few other countries. Those leaders mattered because through their own actions, they could make a big dent in the climate problem.

Today, reliable climate leaders account for just about 20 percent of global emissions, a share that keeps shrinking as they make further cuts while emissions from the rest of the world keep growing. The more the leaders lead, the less direct relevance they have to the climate problem. Worse, emissions from countries that have often blocked action on climate change — Russia, plus Saudi Arabia and other members of OPEC, the oil exporting cartel, now stand at 12.4 percent and are rising. The rest of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, two-thirds of the total, come from countries that may care about climate change but care a lot more about other issues, like poverty and local air pollution.