Although cities often are touted as climate change policy leaders, a close look at politically conservative Texas cities finds many lagging or faltering

As the recent Supreme Court decision on Obama’s climate regulations have illustrated, climate action at the national level in the US is a fraught affair. US cities often are touted as leading on climate, however — or at least some of them are. Ann W. Foss and Jeff Howard argue that most cities leading on climate are politically liberal, and they use the Dallas- Fort Worth area as a case study to examine a range of communities at the opposite end of the political spectrum. In this conservative region, they find far more laggard cities than leaders, and cities that have begun to emerge as leaders often have backslidden. Political aversion to climate action, they write, often means that when laggard cities pursue energy efficiency and renewable energy strategies, they do so as cost saving rather than environmental measures.