Greg Dalton, Club vice president and director of its Climate One program, is in Cancun this week for the climate conference taking place there. He blogs:

With international negotiations stuck in the sand and the political climate in Washington DC hostile to the reality of "global weirding," much of the discussion at the Cancun climate conference is about what states and cities can do to keep moving forward. Seen in that light, the United States looks firm around the edges and is starting to appear flabby in the middle.

California has been a bright spot at these conferences for the past several years and it's aura is shining even stronger these days following the results of this fall's election. Lauren Faber, Assistant Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, crowed that more people (nearly 6 million) cast ballots to sustain the state's core clean energy policy (AB 32) than voted for or against any other candidate or issue around the United States.