The Copenhagen climate talks ended in bitter disappointment for many countries. The rumblings have most focused on how unproductive and complicated the U.N. negotiating process is and on how to make it easier to navigate so that a binding legal treaty, a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, can still be reached.

It looks like that platform will be a much smaller group of nations, compared to the 193 that participated at Copenhagen. Roughly 30 countries are responsible for 90 percent of greenhouse has emissions.

U.S. President Barack Obama tried rallying these nations in a series of meetings on Friday to ink a deal that starts a flow of financing for poor countries to adapt to climate change and sets up a system for major economies to monitor and report their emissions.

This smaller group of nations will meet periodically to tackle a narrower agenda of issues, like technology sharing or the merging of carbon trading market. A version of this already exists in the 17-nation Major Economies Forum, which has been a model of decorum and progress compared with what the world saw unfold at the climate talks.