When Margaret Beckett, the new British foreign secretary, announced last month that promoting international action against climate change would be one of her top priorities, she probably did not have Raleigh, North Carolina, in mind as the best place to start.

Yet, for more than a year, British officials have been quietly engaging with a commission set up by the North Carolina General Assembly to consider how the state should respond to global warming. "We've provided them with British research on climate change and talked about our experience of emissions trading in the EU," says Martin Rickerd, British consul-general in Atlanta.