Faced with a government dragging its feet over climate change, the celebrity governor of a country's most populous territory decides to go it alone by imposing strict curbs on local greenhouse gas emissions. In doing so, he risks clashing with a national administration run by his own conservative political party.

This is not California but Tokyo, which will impose Japan's first mandatory carbon cap-and-trade scheme from 2010 as part of a plan to cut local emissions by a quarter by 2020.