Gavin Newsom wants the White House in 2028. He thinks his climate record and his dealings with Beijing will get him there. That belief alone should disqualify him.
Last week the California governor took to X with the usual self-congratulation. “China is not screwing around,” he wrote. “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 real stupidity sits in Sacramento. For nearly eight years Newsom has used the power of the governor’s office to try managing the planet’s thermostat from one state. In the process he has gutted California’s energy industry, made the state dependent on foreign oil, and handed the Chinese Communist Party exactly what it wants.
California once refined fuel for the nation. Under Newsom the state has lost roughly a quarter of its refinery capacity. Phillips 66 shuttered its Los Angeles plant. Valero moved to idle Benicia. The result is predictable.
California now imports the majority of its crude and refined products while residents pay some of the highest energy prices in America. Meanwhile the governor lectures the rest of the country about “low-carbon green growth.”
He has bet the state’s future on electric vehicles and batteries that rely on minerals China dominates. Graphite for EV batteries is the clearest example. China controls the processing of nearly all battery-grade material.
The same pattern holds for other critical minerals used in semiconductors and advanced systems. Newsom’s 2035 ban on new gasoline-powered cars does not create American manufacturing. It creates guaranteed demand for Chinese supply chains.
In 2023 Newsom flew to Beijing and sat down with Xi Jinping to talk climate. Six months later he sent cabinet secretaries to Shanghai, Guangdong, and Hainan. The meetings took place in Hong Kong, the same city where Beijing had crushed the last remnants of political freedom.
California’s prestige was used to launder the Chinese regime’s image. Later Chinese provincial officials met California counterparts at the University of California Berkeley’s California-China Climate Institute.
Newsom declared, “There has never been more urgency than now to act on the climate crisis — and we have to act together. California and China will continue building on our decades of climate work because this moment calls for an open hand, not a closed fist.”
An open hand to a regime that runs a surveillance state, harvests organs from prisoners, and persecutes Christians is not diplomacy. It is surrender dressed up as virtue.
No one illustrates the entanglement better than Amy Tong, who served as Newsom’s secretary of government operations and later senior counselor. Tong represented California at Sister Cities events co-hosted by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. U.S. intelligence has identified CPAFFC as a vehicle for Chinese Communist Party influence operations aimed at state and local officials.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has warned that these groups push Beijing’s priorities on Taiwan and Tibet while presenting themselves as friendly cultural exchanges. Newsom’s administration kept sending people anyway.
While California throttles its own oil and gas industry in the name of the climate, China keeps building coal plants. The country operates more than a thousand of them and still accounts for the majority of global coal emissions. Beijing sells California the “green” technology and then burns more coal. Newsom pretends this is partnership.
At the COP30 climate conference in Brazil in 2025, Newsom again attacked the Trump administration for skipping the event. He apologized for sounding partisan, then immediately returned to the same partisan script. The man who calls Trump an authoritarian has spent years aligning California with an actual authoritarian regime that runs concentration camps.
Scripture cuts through the self-deception. “Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.” That is Romans 1:25.
Climate ideology has become a substitute religion for many on the left. Creation is elevated above the Creator. The result is not stewardship. It is the destruction of reliable energy, the transfer of industrial power to a hostile power, and the impoverishment of ordinary Americans.
Newsom’s record is not leadership. It is the story of a politician so captive to green orthodoxy that he became a useful instrument for Beijing. California’s energy independence has been traded for photo ops and memorandums of understanding. The state’s once-mighty refining sector has been sacrificed on the altar of net-zero timelines that China has no intention of meeting.
Voters in 2028 will decide whether this is the kind of “vision” the country needs. Some of us already know the answer.
