The political debate over climate change is ratcheting up in the two notable holdouts to the Kyoto protocol – Australia and the United States. The current issue of Nature takes a look at upcoming national elections in both countries, and what role climate change is playing in each.

We got started on this special package of features knowing we wanted to flag the 24 November elections in Australia. Political experts differ, but most polls and other observations suggest that climate is a more defining factor now than at other times when Liberal prime minister John Howard has been up for re-election. In our piece, Sydney-based journalist Stephen Pincock reports on the climate moves the Howard government has been making, and whether that will be enough for him to come from behind in opinion polls that have him trailing his Labor opponent Kevin Rudd. Keep tabs on the latest with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s election site.

Once we got going on the Australian situation, we couldn’t help but start wondering about the US presidential election. It’s still nearly a year away, but the rhetoric about energy policy is flying fast and furious. Every leading candidate, for both the Democratic and Republican nominations, has a serious-sounding platform about how to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. The question, of course, is who will actually be elected and what will he (or she) actually do? Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson has spun a hypothetical piece about what the new president might be able to accomplish in leading the US in climate policy. (For a more science-fiction take on this scenario, check out Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel Sixty Days and Counting, in which a newly-elected president tries to save the world from a global-warming-triggered meltdown.)

And finally, we had been looking for other ways to tackle the complex suite of climate-related bills now moving slowly through the US Congress. We collected together a group of experts from science, industry, policy, and environmentalism to talk shop about what we might expect in terms of mandatory emissions cuts, and when. It was a lively discussion in the conference room of Nature’s Washington offices, fueled by coffee and a large number of sugary pastries from the bakery downstairs. Which, when you come to think about it, is never a bad way to go about solving the world’s problems.

Alexandra Witze, chief of correspondents for America, Nature