Ice storms in Texas, heat waves in Oregon, and wildfires in California make clear that we need new policies to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. International agreements will not save American lives, infrastructure, and communities in the face of these threats. We must stop delegating our environmental policy to toothless and vague accords. No panacea emerged from Paris, Copenhagen, or Glasgow. Future gatherings of the Conference of Parties will similarly fail to produce effective solutions that are adequately tailored to the unique features of American communities.

Immediate and substantive actions at the state and local levels have the greatest potential not only to protect our environment but to ready us for future climate change and to stave off the worst of the disasters that lie ahead.

What we don’t need are politicians looking to score points with their base by announcing meaningless initiatives that look great on Instagram but do little to make our economy, communities, and natural resources more resilient. California is a case study in these sorts of hollow policies. It is important to identify these paper tigers so that they aren’t emulated elsewhere and so that what precious political capital does exist for climate change related policies is spent on effective interventions.

The first paper tiger: paper bag bans. California voters banned the use of single-use carryout bags in 2018. Most voters probably didn’t know that a disposable plastic bag likely has fewer environmental impacts than that supposedly “green” paper bag meant to replace them. According to the Denmark Ministry of Environment and Food, Californians will have to reuse their paper bags at least 43 times for them to have equal to or less than the environmental impact of a plastic bag used once.

The next paper tiger: California’s cap-and-trade system. Under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, the state created a cap-and-trade program to substantially reduce California’s reliance on greenhouse gasses. And, it has. But there’s a huge catch. The program covers about 80 percent of the state’s electricity sector emissions, but the bill neglected to adequately consider leakage: the “shift in production and associated emissions from the region where climate regulations apply to surrounding unregulated jurisdictions.” The upshot, according to researchers from Penn State University, is that California’s scheme may result in out-of-state, dirtier sources emitting even more than they had previously, and all the while California can report reductions in its own emissions.

The final paper tiger: the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. Californians had high hopes for CEQA. It was meant to provide the public and government decisionmakers with estimates of the environmental impact of proposed projects. In reality, in too many cases, it has served as a block to the sort of development that Californians desperately need, such as the creation of additional housing.

Each of these initiatives expended substantial, non-renewable political and financial capital. As these policy failures mount, Californians grow less willing to consider future efforts to make their state more resilient. Leaders in other states should take notes. Intention does not equal impact. And impact must be the guiding principle for all environmental policy. Local and state leaders should avoid attending photo-ops at the next international climate conference, and they should refrain from merely copying and pasting legislation that’s grabbing headlines for being “green.”

Impactful efforts to adapt to climate change require hyper-local consultation with community leaders, small business owners, and residents. Local and state leaders can and should bring these folks together to identify substantive measures that may not grab headlines, but will save lives, jobs, and homes.

For an example of targeted and impactful action, look to Vermont. Governor Phil Scott, a Republican, empowered local water districts to institute projects meant to improve water quality. Municipalities were able to use state funds on projects determined to have the greatest local impact. From a $138 million investment, the state helped conserve or restore almost 2,000 acres of river corridors, floodplains, lakeshores, forests, and wetlands.

Other Republican governors have allocated substantial sums of money to local leaders for resilience efforts. These leaders won’t say they are addressing climate change (they may even deny it’s a “thing”), but funds to protect communities from hurricanes will do a lot more for the wellbeing of their constituents than banning plastic bags. It’s not that Democratic leaders haven’t made similar investments, but they seem more willing to sign onto any climate legislation that’ll impress folks on Twitter.

Ideally, governors of all persuasions will find ways to work together, where appropriate. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a “cap-and-invest” program, is a case study in effective collaboration among states, and the value of not going it alone. Made up of 11 states, the RGGI has “saved consumers hundreds of millions of dollars on energy” through a “flexible, market-based approach,” per the National Resource Defense Council.

It has taken elected officials too long to realize that grandstanding at a global conference is not a sound response to wild weather. Though an international approach to the environment sounds good on paper, there is little the U.S. can do to steer China, India, and others toward American policy preferences. Federal leaders should save the resources they planned to spend on fruitless international lobbying and send them to state and local leaders instead. That is contingent upon, of course, those leaders showing that they’ve done their homework—that they analyzed the cost and benefits of various policies, that they considered the secondary and tertiary effects of those policies, and that they consulted their constituents.

Scoring cheap political points by sipping your latte through a compostable straw belittles the severity of the threats posed to our environment and by a changing climate. It also rightfully fuels opposition to other projects supposedly meant to protect communities and to make our economy more resilient. Environmental protection and adaption demand local investment in substantive projects, not hopes and wishes that foreign leaders will suddenly see environmental issues from a particular point of view.

Kevin Frazier is a fellow at the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.