MONTREAL – Clamping down on automobile emissions and plugging city buildings into wind or solar power, U.S. governors and mayors are stepping in to help head off climate change where they say the federal government is failing.

“Together we can make a huge difference,” Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said Thursday as he and other U.S. city executives worked the corridors of the U.N. climate conference in Montreal.

They said they hoped to spur the Bush administration to take the lead. But although federal action is needed, “we cannot afford to wait for federal action,” said K.C. Golden, an environmental consultant to U.S. local governments, including Seattle.

The action is unfolding quickly in places like California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday received a task force’s proposals for meeting his goal of reducing his state’s “greenhouse gas” emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Later this month, nine northeastern states – Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont – expect to produce a regional plan for capping power-plant emissions and allowing trading in “carbon credits.” And at least nine states, including New York, have adopted or plan to adopt California’s tough new standards on automobile emissions.

Nickels, organizer of a 195-city coalition to combat global warming, said local actions accelerated after the Kyoto Protocol took effect last February without U.S. participation.

The international agreement requires 35 industrialized countries to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases that act like a greenhouse trapping heat in the atmosphere. The gases are byproducts of auto emissions, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning operations. The warming atmosphere is expected to disrupt climate and expand oceans, raising sea levels.

President Bush formally renounced the Kyoto accord in 2001, saying capping energy use would stunt the U.S. economy. Other nations hoped the Americans would agree at this annual climate conference to future talks on emissions controls after 2012, when Kyoto expires. But the U.S. delegation has made clear it is not interested.

The delegates from Washington did not disparage local U.S. efforts, however.

“It’s a strength, not a weakness, that we have states that do want to try these things,” David Garman, a U.S. undersecretary of energy, told reporters. “We all can learn a lot.”

The mayors’ reasons for acting are as varied as the American landscape.

“The rising tides of global warming could wipe out homes and businesses in Santa Monica,” explained Mayor Pam O’Connor, whose California city perches precariously beside Pacific Ocean waves. Nickels noted that the mountain snowpack on which Seattle relies for water and hydropower almost failed to materialize last winter – a symptom, scientists believe, of climate change.

“I was telling people they couldn’t shower, they couldn’t water their plants,” he said.

Nickels said his government operations have reduced their greenhouse-gas emissions by 60 percent in recent years – through motor pools of hybrid gasoline-electric cars, trucks that use biodiesel fuel and other measures. Seattle is also building an energy-saving light-rail system.

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Ryback, speaking by phone from his city, said his administration has been “greening” city buildings, by installing a solar-energy system at a police precinct, for example.

State-level actions will have deeper impact. California’s new law will require approximately a 30 percent reduction in automobile emissions by 2016. Automakers are fighting the controls in court in California and other states adopting the standard.