Newsom’s ‘green’ putsch in Munich

Gavin Newsom told world leaders in Munich that President Donald Trump is “temporary” and “un-American.”

“He’ll be gone in three years,” Newsom added.

That’s true of every president. Each is in office for only four years, or eight. In our democracy, power changes hands — between people, if not always between parties.

But Newsom was making a broader point — in the context of discussions about “climate change.”

British Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, left, and California state governor Gavin Newsom shake hands after signing a clean energy agreement at the Foreign Office in London. AP

Trump had just rolled back the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called “endangerment rule,” the runaway regulation that Barack Obama decreed in 2009, and that Democrats have since used to impose climate mandates throughout the U.S. economy.

In Trump’s first term, he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, observing — correctly — that it meant huge costs for American companies, and no commitment at all from rapidly-growing nations like China.

At the time, Trump observed: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” He was fulfilling a promise to voters who were tired of the higher prices and heavier regulations that come with the left-wing “climate change” agenda.

Voters sent Trump back to the White House in 2024 with a similar mandate. He set the process of repealing the Obama-era rule in motion almost as soon as he arrived in the Oval Office. 

This is what the American people wanted.

Newsom, who is also considered a possible 2028 presidential candidate, hammered Trump in Munich over climate policy. PO2C Geoffrey Ottinger/US Navy / SWNS

What Newsom told the global elite was, in effect: never mind democracy. Never mind the will of the people. The rule of the bureaucracy will always endure. 

Once Trump is gone, we will find a way to re-impose the “climate change” agenda — with all its costs. We will be like Europe: idealistic, and stagnant; bold on saving the planet, meek on saving itself from invasion.

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That may be how government has worked for the last decade or so in California. Newsom and Jerry Brown before him simply imposed a radical “green” agenda on the state that never faced the voters.

Like Brown, Newsom has adopted the dubious practice of signing meaningless declarations with foreign governments, national and provincial. The purpose is to signal loyalty to the global environmental movement, and to express dissent against the democratically-elected administration of the United States.

That is “inappropriate,” as Trump said, in a democracy — and, in fact, it is anti-democratic.

California is the most populous state in the Union, but the American people are far larger. And most do not want to live under Newsom’s climate change mandates.

They see the rising gas and energy prices in California; the threat of electricity shortages; the regulations that have taken the Golden State’s unemployment rate to the highest in the nation — and they want no part of it.

Living in a democracy means accepting that verdict. And — who knows? — California voters might decide that the rest of the country has been right all along.