A growing number of US municipalities are making plans and adopting policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in their communities. In this paper we explore some of the obstacles that municipalities encounter in these community climate protection planning efforts. While previous works have focused on ‘pioneer’ cities, we focus on municipalities that are still in the early stages of climate protection planning. We describe the evolution of local energy and climate protection planning from the 1980s to the present and summarize the experiences of public officials and environmental advocates who are currently engaged in local climate protection planning efforts. The primary obstacles to preparing a community climate protection plan are found to be a lack of reliable data, methodological uncertainties, and funding and resource constraints. Furthermore, a number of political and institutional conditions are found to limit the ability of local governments to achieve community-wide GHG emission reductions.
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