Although current regional air-quality modeling systems have been used with great success for improving local and urban air pollution, they have not been designed for assessing issues such as the intercontinental transport of pollutants or the interactions between air pollution and the global climate system. Recognizing that air quality and climate are linked, the EPA's chemical transport model, the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model, is being coupled with a global icosohedral atmospheric model. The atmospheric model uses a finite-volume method to cover the earth with a regular triangular or hexagonal grid and allows seamless refinement to much higher resolution over regions of interest in one continuous nest. The telescoping mesh allows us to keep our current capabilities to represent regional and urban air quality with very high resolution, while at the same time allows us to extend our domain to represent the entire global climate system. This will allow us to address emerging issues in air quality modeling such as representing long-range transport of pollutants, representing aerosol and other short-term climate forcings, and addressing how local air quality behaves with a changing global climate.