Gavin Newsom’s climate zeal has made him a patsy for China

It’s no secret that California Gov. Gavin Newsom hopes to win the White House in 2028. What’s strange is that he thinks his record on China and climate change will help him get there.

“China is not screwing around,” Newsom wrote in a typical helium-filled rant on X last week. “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 is Newsom’s. 

For eight years, Newsom has used his executive authority in a failed attempt to manage the global climate.

In doing so, he has become a volunteer in China’s overseas influence operations and has accelerated the destruction of California’s once-immense oil industry. 

He has bet California’s energy future on technology that doesn’t exist or that requires rare minerals over which China has a near monopoly, including graphite, the key component in electric vehicle batteries, and minerals used in semiconductors and munitions. 

Once a global energy producer, California lost a quarter of its refineries under Newsom and is now utterly dependent on imported foreign oil and Chinese strategic interests. 

Reflecting China’s interests more than California’s, Newsom led the campaign to ban by 2035 the sale in California of new gasoline-powered vehicles. 

In 2023, Newsom traveled to China to talk green energy with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Six months later, in April 2024, Newsom dispatched two cabinet secretaries to China for talks with local officials in Shanghai and the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Hainan. Remarkably, Newsom’s delegation held those talks in Hong Kong, lending California’s prestige to Beijing in the very city where, in 2020, it had crushed the democratic freedoms it once promised to respect. 

The following month, Chinese provincial officials met with their California counterparts at the University of California, Berkeley, home of the state’s California-China Climate Institute. They “announced a series of new actions to advance subnational climate cooperation and progress from the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters,” according to an institute press release.

“There has never been more urgency than now to act on the climate crisis –– and we have to act together,” Newsom said of the gathering. “California and China will continue building on our decades of climate work because this moment calls for an open hand, not a closed fist.”

No one better exemplifies Newsom’s entangling foreign alliances than Amy Tong, his secretary of state operations. She was Newsom’s emissary to the November 2023 Sister Cities International conference in Suzhou, China, and to the group’s July 2024 conference in Tacoma, Wash.

Both events were co-hosted by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. CPAFFC is “a self-styled independent nongovernmental group dedicated to telling foreigners about China,” reports National Review’s Jimmy Quinn. “But US intelligence officials allege that CPAFFC in fact operates the party’s influence operations targeting state and local officials across America.”

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California’s role in Chinese united-front programs continued when Newsom dispatched Tong again, this time to to Beijing. She was accompanied by Alameda County supervisor David Haubert. 

In a statement, California’s government operations agency told Quinn that Tong was “in China building on the state’s significant and longstanding efforts across administrations to strengthen subnational partnerships that benefit Californians.”

A photograph of the event “was disseminated . . . across Chinese Communist Party propaganda outlets calibrated for international audiences and the accounts they control on social media,” Quinn reported.

Quinn’s reporting on CPAFFC illustrates the dangers of gubernatorial foreign policies:

In a 2022 bulletin, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence characterized CPAFFC as one of “many quasi-official entities or proxies involved in united front work and foreign influence operations whose ties to the CCP or PRC government may be hidden or not readily apparent.” It cited the association’s efforts to set up “sister-city partnerships” with U.S. participants. The ODNI also accused CPAFFC of leveraging those arrangements to push Beijing’s political priorities on Taiwan and Tibet.

While California abandons fossil fuels in the name of saving the global climate, China’s carbon emissions continue to rise. 

Selling green technology to — and signing deals with — its California counterparts, China continues to build coal-fueled electricity-generation plants. Its 1,161 coal power plants account for 55% of global carbon emissions from coal.

None of this changes the governor’s practice of praising China while trash-talking the US.

In November 2025, he flew to Brazil for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, aka COP30. As in his X posts, he attacked the Trump administration for refusing to send any US official to the meeting — and then, Broadway theater-style, he begged forgiveness.

“I apologize for being so partisan here,” Newsom told an audience. “I literally came out here. I’m just stunned. I got four kids. The hell is going on in my country now? Not one person from the [Trump] administration showed any respect for any of you. Forget politics. Disrespect.”

Newsom frequently calls Trump an authoritarian. But it’s Newsom who has almost single-handedly mismanaged California into historic decline.

Some of us will remember that in 2028. 

Will Swaim is CEO of the California Policy Center and cohost of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast. A version of this column originally appeared in National Review.