Gavin Newsom’s climate zeal has made him a patsy – Latest News
It’s no secret that California Gov. Gavin Newsom hopes to win the White House in 2028. What’s unusual is that he thinks his report on China and climate change will help him get there.
“China is not screwing around,” Newsom wrote in a typical helium-filled rant on X final week. “The United States has become a footnote. Supply chains, manufacturing, influence — China is flooding the zone all across the globe. As California doubles down on our low-carbon green growth efforts, the Trump admin is doubling down on stupid.”
The actual stupidity is Newsom’s.
For eight years, Newsom has used his govt authority in a failed attempt to handle the worldwide climate.
It’s no secret that California Gov. Gavin Newsom hopes to win the White House in 2028. What’s unusual is that he thinks his report on China and climate change will help him get there. AP
A Valero refinery is seen on Monday, March 25, 2024, in Benicia, California. Valero Energy Corp. is anticipated to release earnings figures on April 25. (Bloomberg) Bloomberg through Getty Images
In doing so, he has turn into a volunteer in China’s abroad affect operations and has accelerated the destruction of California’s once-immense oil industry.
He has wager California’s vitality future on technology that doesn’t exist or that requires uncommon minerals over which China has a close to monopoly, together with graphite, the key part in electric vehicle batteries, and minerals utilized in semiconductors and munitions.
Once a world vitality producer, California misplaced a quarter of its refineries below Newsom and is now completely depending on imported overseas oil and Chinese strategic pursuits.
Sign up for the California Morning Report publication
California’s prime information, sports activities and leisure delivered to your inbox day-after-day.
Thanks for signing up!
Reflecting China’s pursuits more than California’s, Newsom led the marketing campaign to ban by 2035 the sale in California of new gasoline-powered automobiles.
In 2023, Newsom traveled to China to speak inexperienced vitality with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Six months later, in April 2024, Newsom dispatched two cupboard secretaries to China for talks with native officers in Shanghai and the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Hainan. Remarkably, Newsom’s delegation held these talks in Hong Kong, lending California’s status to Beijing within the very metropolis the place, in 2020, it had crushed the democratic freedoms it as soon as promised to respect.
The following month, Chinese provincial officers met with their California counterparts on the University of California, Berkeley, home of the state’s California-China Climate Institute. They “announced a series of new actions to advance subnational climate cooperation and progress from the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters,” in response to an institute press release.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, proper, stands by Beijing Party Secretary Yin Li during a assembly in Beijing on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023. Newsom is on a weeklong tour of China the place he’s pushing for climate cooperation. (AP) AP
“There has never been more urgency than now to act on the climate crisis –– and we have to act together,” Newsom mentioned of the gathering. “California and China will continue building on our decades of climate work because this moment calls for an open hand, not a closed fist.”
No one higher exemplifies Newsom’s entangling overseas alliances than Amy Tong, his secretary of state operations. She was Newsom’s emissary to the November 2023 Sister Cities International convention in Suzhou, China, and to the group’s July 2024 convention in Tacoma, Wash.
Both occasions had been co-hosted by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. CPAFFC is “a self-styled independent nongovernmental group dedicated to telling foreigners about China,” stories National Review’s Jimmy Quinn. “But US intelligence officials allege that CPAFFC in fact operates the party’s influence operations targeting state and local officials across America.”
Download The California Post App, comply with us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters
California Post News: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn
California Post Sports Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X
California Post Opinion
California Post Newsletters: Sign up right here!
California Post App: Download right here!
Home supply: Sign up right here!
Page Six Hollywood: Sign up right here!
California’s position in Chinese united-front applications continued when Newsom dispatched Tong again, this time to Beijing. She was accompanied by Alameda County supervisor David Haubert.
In a assertion, California’s authorities operations company advised Quinn that Tong was “in China building on the state’s significant and longstanding efforts across administrations to strengthen subnational partnerships that benefit Californians.”
{A photograph} of the occasion “was disseminated . . . across Chinese Communist Party propaganda outlets calibrated for international audiences and the accounts they control on social media,” Quinn reported.
California’s position in Chinese united-front applications continued when Newsom dispatched Tong again, this time to to Beijing. She was accompanied by Alameda County supervisor David Haubert. AP
Quinn’s reporting on CPAFFC illustrates the risks of gubernatorial overseas insurance policies:
In a 2022 bulletin, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence characterised CPAFFC as one of “many quasi-official entities or proxies involved in united front work and foreign influence operations whose ties to the CCP or PRC government may be hidden or not readily apparent.” It cited the affiliation’s efforts to set up “sister-city partnerships” with U.S. individuals. The ODNI additionally accused CPAFFC of leveraging these preparations to push Beijing’s political priorities on Taiwan and Tibet.
While California abandons fossil fuels within the identify of saving the worldwide climate, China’s carbon emissions proceed to rise.
Selling inexperienced technology to — and signing offers with — its California counterparts, China continues to construct coal-fueled electricity-generation plants. Its 1,161 coal energy plants account for 55% of world carbon emissions from coal.
None of this adjustments the governor’s apply of praising China whereas trash-talking the US.
In November 2025, he flew to Brazil for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, aka COP30. As in his X posts, he attacked the Trump administration for refusing to ship any US official to the assembly — after which, Broadway theater-style, he begged forgiveness.
“I apologize for being so partisan here,” Newsom advised an viewers. “I literally came out here. I’m just stunned. I got four kids. The hell is going on in my country now? Not one person from the [Trump] administration showed any respect for any of you. Forget politics. Disrespect.”
Newsom incessantly calls Trump an authoritarian. But it’s Newsom who has virtually single-handedly mismanaged California into historic decline.
Some of us will keep in mind that in 2028.
Will Swaim is CEO of the California Policy Center and cohost of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast. A model of this column initially appeared in National Review.
