Governor Gavin Newsom’s ambitions are undeniable. He titled his recently published autobiography Young Man in a Hurry. He lives up to that aspect of his self-description. Several news outlets have presented him as the front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination in 2028, and he appears quite happy with that assessment.
Smiles Don’t Correct Problems
However, Gov. Newsom has a problem—and it is monumental. He is the epitome of a ‘woke’ politician at just the time that ‘wokeness’ is losing both momentum and popularity. He appears to know that. National Review recently debunked his attempts to present himself as a warrior for free speech, gun rights and the right to life.
Major economic issues exist as well. California’s massive economy is showing signs of imminent demise. As of this writing, AAA pegs the average gas price in California at $5.79 per gallon, nearly $2.00 above the national average. Rebuilding from the catastrophic Palisades fires in Los Angeles County, which consumed the homes of some of America’s wealthiest people, has barely begun—largely due to bureaucratic obstruction. By its own figures, California has twenty-eight percent of the nation’s homeless population, and these people have made central areas of California’s wealthiest cities virtually uninhabitable.
Thus far, the governor’s response has been to flash a million-watt smile and adopt a flippant attitude. For example, a recent California Post article discussed Internet reporter Nick Shirley’s exposing alleged day care and Medicare fraud in California. In response, the article continued, Governor Newsom’s press office posted a mocking photo of Mr. Shirley. It depicted the reporter in ghoulish makeup, grinning as if he were a pedophile and decked out with multiple cameras, trying to enter a schoolroom door. The caption read, “Hey, can I see your kids?”
Climate Warrior
However, when someone reaches the age of fifty-eight and aspires to the presidency, such adolescent carelessness is most unattractive. So, the governor turned to a well-used liberal stalking horse, Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Climate Change.
According to USA Today, “Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta announced on March 19 that California’s attorney general—along with 24 attorneys general, the Pennsylvania governor, and 12 cities and counties—filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration regarding its recent decision to repeal the EPA’s ’endangerment finding’, which has been the legal foundation for regulations targeting man-made greenhouse gases for nearly the last two decades.”
Despite the left’s emphasis on it, Global Climate Change was always more a campaign issue than a scientific theory. Starting out in the seventies as “Global Cooling,” the catch phrase became “Global Warming” when the actual climate didn’t cooperate with the gloom-and-doomers. Then, the ever-capricious weather didn’t fulfill this second set of hopes, either. So, once again, the nomenclature shifted to meet the needs of the doomsayers, taking on the preferred modern usage.
Cracks in the Climate Change Façade
For its promoters, Global Climate Change had three great advantages. First, the projected day of doom is sufficiently distant that few people living today will see it. Second, carried a wall of scientific evidence that appeared unshakable. Third—and overwhelmingly the most important—it augmented an existing environmental bureaucracy with a reputation for success, funneling these theories into governmental power.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez violated the first assumption on January 21, 2019, when she warned that “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” As of this writing, seven of those twelve years have passed, and there is no discernible difference in the climate, nor does the world appear to be speeding toward destruction. Predicting the end of everything in a dozen years is a lot riskier than warning that a calamity will come to fruition a hundred years hence.
The wall of evidence is also generating cracks. First, other scientists have found evidence that similarly warm conditions existed twice before, during the height of the Roman Empire and the Medieval period. Humans flourished both times. Other scientists examined the computer models used by climate alarmists and found them faulty. Last—and perhaps most effective—Climate Change theories have been trumpeted for the last fifty years, but there has been no appreciable change. The polar bears still thrive, crops still grow and the edges of landmasses remain largely where they were on the first reliable maps three hundred years ago.
Popping the Bubble
However, as The Wall Street Journal reports, Governor Newsom often refers to California as “the tip of the spear of climate change.” Such alarms grow more shrill when he attempts to excuse his own lethargy in preventing wildfires. Indeed, he asserts that Climate Change caused the January 2025 Palisades Fire. However, the science is against him. NASA satellites have tracked a significant decrease in global wildfire patterns over the last twenty-five years. The year of the Palisades fire was the second-lowest on record. Perhaps allowing property owners to clear brush from their land and maintaining reservoir levels would have helped 2025 be THE lowest.
Only the bureaucratic structures remain as strong as they were a half-century ago. They still pump money into pseudo-scientific research that sustains the ever-larger government mechanisms that turn those theories into ever-more-intrusive policies.
However, Gavin Newsom’s California may have inflated that bubble as far as it can before the people pull out their trusty needle and pop it. Commentary magazine provides an example connecting two environmentally inspired sets of policy—water use and electrical generation.
Authoritarianism—California Style
“California has periodically drafted its citizens into the work of policing their neighbor’s water consumption. Citizens are encouraged to engage in ‘drought-shaming’ in an effort to conserve the state’s dwindling water supplies. The real shortages that necessitate policies like these might be alleviated by constructing desalinization plants, which make seawater potable. But these are power-intensive projects. In a state plagued by planned, rolling blackouts due to its efforts to mothball nuclear and fossil-fuel-powered plants, desalination is not an option.”
What is next? Will California, inspired by Fidel Castro’s Cuba, organize Committees for the Defense of State Environmental Policies? Will Governor Newson’s agents recruit someone on every block who will, in return for an extra allocation of water and power, write monthly reports in which they inform on their neighbors?
Perhaps, to some, this last bit of rambling will sound extreme. However, what is the entire woke movement but an exercise in determining how much state authoritarianism the people will tolerate? Hopefully, Gavin Newsom’s California will serve as a warning to the rest of America, rather than a model.
First published on TFP.org.