When Jonathan Cannon, Michael Vandenbergh, and I started planning this conference last summer, we planned to call it "Implementing Climate Change Legislation." We assumed that by today a new law aimed at addressing climate change would be in place, or at least would be in the final polishing stage, in the United States. We even imagined that the federal agencies would be rolling up their sleeves to implement not only the new U.S. climate law but also our part of the comprehensive climate pact that the nations of the world had agreed to in Copenhagen.

What foolish optimists we were. The national and international situations today are much less settled than we thought they would be, and multiple possible pathways in the United States for addressing climate change lie ahead--some of them straight lines, some winding roads, and some with cliffs or tigers or brick walls along the way. Thus, we changed the program's name to "Implementing Climate Change Policy," which is still a bit rosy in its implication of a coherent "policy," and we kept our original subheading, which is still valid: "Looking Forward to the Hard Part."

During this conference, we are going to discuss the implementation challenges posed by several pathways to climate regulation. We will address what those challenges will be, and how they might be faced by a wide variety of actors--the White House, the agencies, the U.S. Congress, the courts, state governments, local governments, corporations, and individuals. We have assembled an impressive array of speakers from the governmental, academic, private, and nongovernmental organization sectors.