Back home in the United States, I’ve been thinking a lot about how domestic legislation impacts the UNFCCC negotiations. Working on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, I spend a lot of time immersed in national legislation and observing and strategizing about what Congress will do next, which probably gives me a bit of a bias in my thinking on the importance of national legislation. Yet in the US-China tensions that flared in Tianjin, national domestic energy and emissions reduction legislation became an essential issue.