In the months leading up to this week’s United Nations Climate Action Summit, UN Secretary General António Guterres traveled the planet urging heads of state to “bring plans, not speeches” to the New York City gathering of world leaders.

But by the time the summit was over, speeches—or one speech in particular—ended up eclipsing almost all of the climate commitments that were announced at the summit. On Monday, Swedish youth climate activist Greta Thunberg nearly broke the internet with her impassioned condemnation of the adults in the room. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she thundered. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”

Thunberg’s denunciation of world leaders was “not according to the usual flow of these summits,” says Nathan Hultman, a climate policy expert with the University of Maryland and the Brookings Institution who was part of the Obama-era diplomatic team that negotiated the Paris Agreement. “Generally, you don’t get up and say in a diplomatic context, ‘Thanks for joining this, but your coal policy sucks.’ She was there to speak her truth, and we all know she’s right.”

But despite Thunberg’s electrifying appearance, the summit ultimately hewed to the standard script of international climate meetings: Small countries and island nations made bold commitments to slash their greenhouse gas emissions, multinational corporations trotted out a bunch of nonbinding promises, philanthropists announced some big donations—and the major emitters were either no-shows or conspicuously silent.

The summit that opened with Thunberg’s big bang ended with a whimper.

The event was “significantly underwhelming,” says Jake Schmidt, managing director of the International Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The pledges and plans that Guterres managed to wrangle in time for the summit, Schmidt says, were “clearly not what the youth were calling for or what the science demands.”

Some progress was made during the summit. According to the UN, 70 countries made pledges to cut their emissions beyond what they committed to under the Paris Agreement—including regional powers like Norway, Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia. And 77 nations said they would reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

“There was a lot of excitement at the summit, generated mainly by the youth movement and the leader of the youth movement,” says Lois Young, Belize’s ambassador to the United Nations and a representative of the Alliance of Small Island States. 

The AOSIS nations came away from the summit “pleased and grateful,” Young says, for one positive outcome: billions of dollars in new contributions to the Green Climate Fund, which is the pool of money created by the wealthy nations most responsible for climate change to help pay for clean energy and climate adaptation projects in poorer nations. But the small island countries, which are already grappling with rising sea levels and more devastating tropical storms, were left waiting for the biggest polluters to commit to steep carbon cuts.

“As is so often the case, this is a glass that is simultaneously half empty and half full,” says John Holdren, who served as President Obama’s senior science and technology advisor. The half empty? “Progress is coming about 25 years too late.”

Neither China nor India (the first- and third-biggest carbon polluters today) brought deeper or faster emissions cuts to the summit. Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, the world’s top per capita greenhouse gas emitter, skipped the summit entirely, then used his time in front of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday to troll Thunberg.

As for the United States, the world’s second-greatest carbon polluter, President Trump’s unexpected visit to the summit only underscored his renunciation of US global climate leadership. Trump sat silently for 15 minutes listening to speeches from other leaders before departing for a UN religious freedom event.

“The single most important absence [at the summit] was the absence of the US federal administration,” Holdren says. “It is a disaster that President Trump announced that he would withdraw from Paris.” 

The Brookings Institution’s Hultman agrees. “The US did a lot for ambition raising in the Paris cycle,” and so far no other nation has filled the void.

Some other modest glimmers of good news did emerge from the summit.

Holdren says he sees evidence of “an increased sense of urgency and commitment from large numbers of countries,” as well as business and finance. The shipping, cement, and steel industries showed up with plans to slash their carbon emissions, and the European Investment Bank committed to stopping financing fossil fuel projects as early as next year. A group of pension funds and insurance companies promised to stop funding carbon-intensive companies by 2050. And Bill Gates pledged $310 million in funding to help small farmers adapt to climate change.

Russia, a major oil and gas producer, announced that it would formally join the Paris accord, although the move came with no new emissions commitments. German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a $59 billion plan to halve carbon emissions by 2030—a move that Holdren described as “quite extraordinary,” though German climate activists criticized the pledge as too weak.

While resisting pressure to ratchet up India’s pledged emissions cuts under the Paris Agreement, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new renewable energy target of 450 gigawatts of clean energy by 2022 did make something of a splash. “That’s big,” Schmidt of NRDC says. “We’re talking about India going from nearly no renewables a few years ago to having one of the biggest renewable grids in the world.” Still, the announcement came just a few days after Modi inked a $2.5 billion liquified natural gas deal in Houston. 

Many nations and groups at the summit also pledged to protect Indigenous land rights, said Tuntiak Katan, a Shuar of Ecuador and coordinator of the Indigenous Organization of the Amazon River Basin. Indigenous-managed tropical forests are estimated to store close to 300,000 billion tons of carbon, which equates to about three decades of human-driven greenhouse emissions.

“We got promises from a lot of different people: political leaders, international organizations,” says Katan, the sole Indigenous leader to speak at the climate summit. “It’s very pretty words, [but] I’m very skeptical that anything is going to happen,” he says, despite the recent international outcry over ranchers’ renewed burning of the Brazilian Amazon.

The Trump administration’s hostility to climate action has had one upside: More US cities, states, and businesses are stepping onto the international stage with raised climate ambitions. California governor Gavin Newsom appeared at the summit to underscore the Golden State’s leadership on cutting emissions (as well as challenging Trump administration environmental rollbacks). Maine governor Janet Mills announced that her state will have a plan in place by late 2020 to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 across transportation, heating, and energy—a 180-degree policy turnaround after eight years with climate-change denier Paul LePage in the governor’s seat. It’s proof that elections matter, says Karen James, an independent climate researcher based on Maine. “We knocked on doors and talked to our neighbors and got Janet Mills elected and now look: Our new governor is siding with Greta Thunberg at the UN, and we’re on the path to carbon neutrality. “

Despite the early negative reviews of the climate summit, Hultman thinks it’s too soon to tell if it will ultimately be looked back on as a failure or a success. “A summit like this is a broader ambition generator, not a legal part of the Paris Agreement,” he says. But the summit’s unimpressive results also signal that nations are not ready for the official Paris pact check-in in 2020, Hultman warns—and that’s where grassroots action like the historic September 20 climate strike comes into play.   

“If people recognize and understand the urgency that’s being highlighted by the climate strikers,” Hultman says, “then it’s imperative for us not just to support the initiatives that are coming out of this summit, but to pressure our governments at all levels.”