Newsom Bets Climate Vision Paves Road To White House But Leadership Lapses Pop Tires At Home
By Matt Ferner
The only part of his recent trip to the White House that California Governor Gavin Newsom hated was when they made him board the plane back home.
Now Newsom’s betting that his climate leadership positions him as the Democratic frontrunner best able to tackle tomorrow’s biggest challenges while stitching the Obama coalition back together.
There’s just one problem.
At home, in California, the only person who seems to be inspired by Newsom’s new climate agenda is Gavin Newsom. A diverse group of one-time allies and respected climate stakeholders, everyone from the California Democratic Party to climate scientists and environmental organizations, to appointees within his own administration, are rushing to express disappointment or disgust with his leadership—or, simply, quit.
The tension boiled over recently when Max Gomberg, a senior official in the Newsom Administration having served at the agency charged with protecting and regulating the state’s water supply for over a decade, made public a letter announcing his resignation. Despite Newsom’s claims to the contrary, Gomberg wrote that “this state is not on a path towards steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions reductions” or “permanently reducing agriculture to manage the loss of water to aridification.” Gomberg also describes it as “gut wrenching” how the Newsom Administration has “nearly eviscerated” the ability of state environmental protection agencies “to tackle big challenges.”
Gomberg is not the only high profile climate-focused official to quit the Newsom Administration this summer. Just as Newsom unveiled his big climate push, Jared Blumenfeld, his chief regulator, decided to step down to take a job at a private foundation, betting the private sector is a better platform for change than the fifth largest economy in the world. Meanwhile, Politico reported that Newsom’s climate policies have “irked” Democrats and exposed “a fissure” between “Newsom and some typical allies, including the California Democratic Party.”
Left out in the cold by his party and senior members of his own administration, Newsom has found no solace from climate scientists. #FlatGavin has been trending on Twitter lately, as the California Association of Professional Scientists campaigns against what they say is a lack of “pay equity” for the scientists charged with “safeguarding our food, water, public health & the environment.” A letter from over 100 rank and file environmental scientists who work for the State of California warned that if Newsom fails to intervene it will damage the “hiring, morale, and retention” of California’s state climate scientists.
Nor are the state’s leading environmental protection organizations happy with Newsom’s leadership. Just this week, a letter from fifteen of these groups called Newsom’s plan for carbon capture—which involves capturing carbon and injecting it back into the ground—as “economically unsound, unproven, and unsafe.” Mark Schlosberg, who directs California operations for Food and Water Watch, agreed, warning of the “disastrous impact” that its implementation would have on “California’s climate future.” This isn’t hyperbole. In Mississippi a carbon pipeline ruptured recently and sickened dozens of people, as an investigation into the pipe burst described, “a rupture in this kind of pipeline sends CO2 gushing out in a dense, powdery white cloud that sinks to the ground and is cold enough to make steel so brittle it can be smashed with a sledgehammer.” Still, the community in Mississippi was lucky. Horrified neighbors watched as “birds dropped out of the sky and whole families die together in minutes” when a carbon release disaster at another site killed over 1,746 people.
Whose backing carbon capture in California? Companies like Chevron, and oil industry lobby groups like Western States Petroleum Association, are among the biggest and loudest supporters of carbon capture, which led a group of respected climate organizations to label Gavin’s carbon capture plan as, “more than anything… yet another massive subsidy to the fossil fuel industry.”
Newsom also took flak this summer for opposing a ballot measure to impose a tax on billionaires and other uber-wealthy individuals earning over $2 million per year to help fund electric vehicles in California. The measure had support from Silicon Valley and the state Democratic Party, but Newsom came out against the proposal. Why? One might find hints in the list of Newsom’s top billionaire donors and dining companions at the French Laundry. The more progressive environmental advocacy groups opposed the measure on the grounds that it, in effect, provided a public subsidy for ride-sharing giants like Lyft who, under a recently passed state law, must transition their fleet to electric vehicles over the next decade. But instead of garnering loud cheers from enviros, the way Newsom handled the situation led the CEO of one major environmental protection organization to tell Politico that she was “disgusted” and “disappointed” by “out-right lies” that Newsom spread about the measure and its backers.
Speaking of Newsom’s major donors—the governor is also taking fire from all sides for his new proposal to give PG&E—the company whose equipment failures lit the state on fire last summer—a $1.4 billion loan to keep open a nuclear power plant that the state has spent years preparing to shut down. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, a well-known physicist featured among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, accused Newsom of making “a hasty push … to extend the operations of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant [which] jeopardizes years of planning and adds huge costs and risks [upending a] plan [that] was devised in a very deliberate and analytical way, involving diverse stakeholders—including a nearly unanimous state Legislature just four years ago.”
In another editorial last week, The Los Angeles Times called out Newsom for his “dismissive attitude” towards skeptics of “keeping Diablo Canyon open” noting that the governor's plan is “full of risks and obstacles and dependent on decisions and agencies outside state lawmakers’ control.” Even the normally staid Natural Resources Defense Council expressed skepticism about Newsom’s plan last week telling state lawmakers—“You are being asked in the final days of this session to declare a very expensive winner in a competition that your electricity regulator hasn’t organized or even analyzed. You don’t know how much this will cost or who will pay.”
PG&E is also the beneficiary of another controversy engulfing Gavin Newsom. In order to side with the notorious utility company, Newson positioned himself to the right of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis a few weeks ago. PG&E has a proposal in front of state lawmakers that would kneecap the state’s rooftop solar industry. Governor Gavin Newsom has done nothing to oppose it and appears ready to let the industry wither. But, in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis acted decisively to protect solar in the state. DeSantis’ spokesperson told Golden State Grid that while Governor DeSantis “cannot speak for Governor Newsom … I would suggest looking into his history with PG&E.”
In other words, like with Diablo Canyon, and the electric vehicle ballot measure, the best way to interpret the governor’s actions might be less through an ideological or policy lens and more through the familiar adage—follow the money: Over the past two decades Newsom and his wife have accepted over $700,000 from PG&E, its foundation and its employees, as The Washington Post recently reported. Newsom received over $200,000 from PG&E during his most recent campaign for governor; and that same year, a political consultancy group that helped run Newsom’s campaign, received more than $1.1 million from PG&E, The New York Times has reported.
If Newsom’s recent experience selling his climate vision in California foretells his ability to sell that same vision as what America needs in its next president, the road ahead looks bumpy. But it’s not all bad news for the governor. His leadership has won over some new friends. The ultra-conservative National Review magazine praised Newsom’s climate chops last week, writing: “The odd and consequential news is that Gavin Newsom — yes, that Gavin Newsom — is on the right side of a political issue, both ideologically and factually.” So, that’s something. But what’s less clear is whether Newsom’s new found friends provide him with enough mileage to win a Democratic Presidential primary and ride his climate clunker all the way back to D.C.