ABSTRACT
In the face of established scientific consensus that climate change is already under way (IPCC 2014), the United States has proven largely ineffectual in passing meaningful legislation to curb its own greenhouse gas emissions or to prepare its citizenry for a warming climate. This seems a cruel if perhaps carefully designed irony as the US, along with China, leads the globe as the largest contributor to carbon emissions. In the absence of action at the federal level, local governments in cities, counties, and states have taken the most consequential steps to curb climate change emissions through the advent of climate action planning (Bulkeley 2013; Ramaswami et al. 2012).
