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California fears Trump’s environmental policies
Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a special legislative session to fund California’s legal defense against efforts “aimed at undermining California’s laws and policies.”
Representative Image / Pexels
Recently, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna conducted a Town Hall in Sunnyvale, California. Disappointed constituents responded with warmth and inquiries regarding consequential matters including how natural disaster-prone California prepares to battle the Trump administration on climate change.
If a natural disaster hits California, wildfire, earthquake or storm, which it is prone to having, President Trump will not allow Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA funds unless California tows the line and supports his policies. As climate change accelerates, California is the riskiest state to live in, according to a study that analyzed (FEMA) data.
“With Donald Trump some of this is campaign bluster and even as bluster it is deeply offensive,” said the Congressman. “This is one of the reasons Governor Newsom has convened the legislative session on December 2 to plan on legal strategies to push back. The President does not have the legal authority to do this. You can't, as a President unilaterally block disaster relief funds from going to a state,” he said. The Committee on Oversight and Accountability of which Congressman Khanna was the chair on the Environment Subcommittee must push back and be vocal.
Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a special legislative session to fund California’s legal defense against efforts “aimed at undermining California’s laws and policies.” Newsom wants to strengthen funding for the state Justice Department and other agencies to act swiftly through the courts to push back against an array of anticipated Trump actions, including those involving clean air and climate change.
Five years of Trump administration is when the calamitous results of climate change can lead to the brink of disaster
Project 2025 has made it very clear that that climate change policy will be one of the first targets of a Trump administration.
In the 1980s, Bill McKibben wrote The Greenhouse Effect, the first book about what we now call climate change. At the Ethnic Media Services briefing last week, he shared his deepest fears. “Things that we warned about 35 and 40 years ago are now happening every day someplace. There's no pleasure at all in saying, I told you so. There's only the understanding that we are at a point where we are very near the biggest of the tipping points that will make these changes deeper and permanent, he said. And that's very scary.”
The last eighteen months saw an unprecedented spike in the temperature of the earth and the temperature of the oceans causing extraordinary rain events like the ones that accompanied Helene in Florida, McKibben pointed out .
“In Delhi, the second biggest city on Earth, the temperature, much of the spring, was above 110 degrees day after day after day. Extraordinary heat waves in Phoenix saw the temperature above 110 late into October this year,” said McKibben. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has told us that we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 to stay on anything like the path that we agreed to in Paris just eight years ago, five years from now.
“The British think tank Carbon Brief has estimated that a Trump presidency would produce over its four years, an extra 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Again, for comparison purposes, that's equivalent to the annual emissions of the EU and Japan combined. That's what we'd be adding with a Trump presidency.”
Unfortunately for climate change and the Paris accord, the timing couldn’t be worse.
Hope for the environment
Investing in solar and wind is critical, and nuclear energy, geothermal, and clean hydrogen are critical, said the Congressman. “We must always prioritize America's economy and our national security. That means having the sources of energy to bring back manufacturing while having a moonshot in renewable energy and energy efficiency to create jobs, lower costs, end our dependence on petrostate authoritarians, and tackle the climate crisis.”.
“Is he going to make it harder? Yes, there’s no sugar coating that,” said Congressman Khanna. But he thinks there’s room for progress.
There is a cost associated with rebuilding after natural disasters, said the panelist Sissy Trinh at the Ethnic Media services briefing. A Neanderthal view of climate is not good for the economy either.
Tech leaders who supported Trump can moderate Trump on climate and help him realize climate change is a threat.
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