The next president of the United States will take office on
January 20, 2009. By that point, half of the two years allotted
by last December’s Bali conference “roadmap” for negotiating a
new international climate treaty will have passed. Meanwhile, of
the decade that NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said
remains for avoiding a commitment to “dangerous” warming, four-
tenths will have ticked by. (Hansen laid out this timetable in
2005.) All three remaining major candidates have signaled that
they would pursue very different policies on global warming than
the Bush administration has. But can a new U.S. administration
act swiftly enough to compensate for two terms of inaction? And
if so, what must it do? Though the fall campaign has not yet
begun, several groups have already turned their attention to
these questions. One, the Presidential Climate Action Project
(PCAP), has already produced a “first-one-hundred-days” plan for
whoever wins the November election. “A president has to define
their administrati