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U.S. global environmental policy during the Bush administration was widely considered to have fallen short of both global and national needs. Among other actions, critics faulted the administration's disparagement of scientific consensus on climate change and its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, its ideological opposition to multilateral population assistance, its failure to exercise leadership on global sustainability initiatives, and a diversity of foreign policy decisions that have cost the United States much needed political support in critical regions of the world. This paper reviews some of the most important of these policy actions and looks ahead to the challenges Barack Obama will face as the 44th U.S. president. In particular, the paper examines the unique opportunities in 2009 and over the next several years for policy reassessment in energy use and climate change, population and development assistance, and sustainable development initiatives. It also considers the key policy actors who will likely play significant roles in the design, adoption, and implementation of a new generation of policies that can better address existing and emerging global environmental and resource problems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at how sub-national policies in the United States are interacting with policymaking at the national level to address the issue of global climate change by focusing on a coordinated effort to get the national government to fund U.S. cities' efforts to address this issue. It reviews how research has looked at climate change policymaking in the United States, paying particular attention to the ways scholars have looked at climate change policymaking at different scales of governance. On the one hand, there is a large and growing literature that analyzes U.S. climate change politics at the national level, challenges to policymaking at this level, and how national politics contribute to the American position in international negotiations. On the other hand, a smaller literature analyzes climate change policies coming from the local, or sub-national, level. In contrast, I consider how policies at different levels of government interact by presenting research on national legislation to support local efforts to address climate change. Although local climate politics in the U.S. have the potential to scale-up to a meaningful national policy, I argue that a federal U.S. climate policy that has successfully passed through both houses of the U.S. Congress is not imminent. Moreover, without implementing legislation passed by the Congress, the U.S. is unable to be a party on any binding climate change treaty. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]