Why this enviro is blaming California for Trump’s tech allies
By ALEX NIEVES
11/08/2024 07:29 PM EST
TECHNO PESSIMIST: President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House is poised to turn California’s climate policy agenda on its head.
Craig Segall, a former top California air quality official, thinks Gov. Gavin Newsom is partly to blame.
Segall, who spent a decade as a deputy executive officer and attorney at the California Air Resources Board, argues California’s policies and economic incentives that benefit the tech industry have contributed to the rise of figures like Elon Musk who’ve gravitated to far-right politics.
The vice president at environmental group Evergreen Action spoke with POLITICO about the fallout from Trump’s victory and how California can defend its climate goals from a hostile administration.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
During the first Trump administration, Newsom and Attorney General Xavier Becerra played a national role as blue-state defenders. How do you see California straddling that role and being focused on its in-state needs this time?
California is a gigantic part of the national economy. So I tend to think that there’s a really strong overlap between California’s interests and the national interest in a lot of different regards.
I do think there is a real question, and an acute question for Gavin Newsom, about whether he finally takes on the cancer of the tech industry in the state. The fact that we’ve just seen an alliance between billionaire techno-fascists and the Trump administration is on him.
So I guess the challenge I would put out there for him and his administration is not simple, easy hashtag-resistance stuff, but actually to deal with the crushing economic inequality in his own state that’s created plutocratic billionaires who are undermining democracy.
The question here is will he finally, having personally opposed raising taxes on his wealthy buddies, support stripping the wealth of fascists like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
How exactly has Newsom contributed to this problem?
The fact of the matter is that California is focused on protecting business. Yes, that supported this clean technology boom, but its failure to address the democratic implications of that has now put the nation on track for at least a light version of fascism, and that is on Gavin Newsom. And the question is whether he’ll take responsibility for ushering the nation in that direction or not?
Will Elon Musk being in Trump’s orbit and having the president’s ear actually benefit California’s electrification policies?
It could, but I don’t trust him for a second. He’s really more obsessed with robot taxis on Mars, or whatever the fuck he’s thinking about. I don’t think there’s any reason to rely on him for anything coherent, other than his alliance with weird anti-vaxxers and his impossibly doomed Mars project.
With Trump winning the popular vote, will California be less adversarial because he’s been handed this mandate, and how will the state defend its policies?
I don’t think there’s any world in which California welcomes a chance to have worse public health for its people or a worse economy.
California can’t comply with binding federal health standards without the zero-emission vehicle rules. You’re talking about federal sanctions in LA, federal sanctions in the Central Valley. The story is in part about defense of public health and defense of the economy, and part about the fact that federal law continues to require a lot of this stuff and will continue to.
Those are some of the things I think about, along with the ongoing need for the auto industry not to be a permanent global pariah and fall badly behind the rest of the world. So I think California has a lot of tools here to shape the future in positive ways. But of course, it remains a real challenge.
We’re waiting on eight Clean Air Act waivers. Now that it’s clear Biden’s EPA is finished soon, are we going to see these waivers finalized?
I would hope they’d heavily prioritize that for the reasons I’ve already mentioned around them being necessary to meet federal Clean Air Act compliance.
I think they could grant them on those grounds, which would also make them more resilient to reversal, because that’s directly throwing the gauntlet down to the Trump people and telling them, what are you going to do? Reducing these tons of pollution is necessary. We can have whatever fight we want to have about climate policy, but on just basic clean air requirements, that’s a pretty big deal.
Is there anything else California can do to prepare for what’s probably going to be a hostile Supreme Court?
I think it should strike as many deals as it can with key industries to stay the course. It’s in California’s interest. And this is an area where Newsom’s interests do overlap, the business interests to align industry here. California has twice struck such deals; this would be a great time to do that again.