Gov. Gavin Newsom is counterprogramming Biden’s trip to Israel by flying off to China.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) will tour China next week on a climate-focused trip that will include stops at a Shanghai Tesla factory and Hong Kong University, his administration announced Tuesday.
Newsom administration officials said he would steer clear of engaging on hot-button issues like technology transfers, trade subsidies and human rights issues in Hong Kong and China’s Xinjiang province, even as he plans facility tours in the type of renewable energy and clean transportation industries that have figured in trade conflicts.
So what is this about beyond the photo ops for a guy who wants to be a future president?
Newsom also plans to renew four climate-related agreements established by former Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and will sign a fresh one of his own with Shanghai, where he traveled with the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in 2005 when he was mayor of San Francisco.
Since when do states sign agreements with enemy nations? But California makes its own rules. Or China makes them for it.
He’ll also renew an MOU with China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s agency in charge of macroeconomic planning, and another from 2013 with Beijing on air quality, which facilitated collaboration between California Air Resources Board officials and Chinese regulators to reduce the city’s smog.
What that means is that Hotel California has an adjunct in the PRC where no one checks out at all.
In particular, the cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou, located in the Guangdong Province near Hong Kong, showed interest in the state’s then-burgeoning cap-and-trade program, and in testing similar market-based carbon emissions programs. Newsom is expected to visit the region and sign an agreement with local officials about decarbonizing industry and promoting clean energy.
Chinese officials have been studying California’s approach to reducing smog as part of their work to clean up the air, including visits to meet with the state’s Air Resources Board, Newsom aides said.
“It’s not strictly a one-way street,” said Mary Nichols, vice chair at the California-China Climate Institute and former chair of the California Air Resources Board. “There really is collaboration that goes on.”
Collaboration is an interesting term for it.
Indeed, Newsom’s trip comes only months after he signed his own memorandum of understanding with the Chinese province of Hainan outlining collaborative goals including cutting air pollution, advancing clean energy, accelerating zero-emission vehicles and developing carbon neutrality plans.
The previous year, the governor signed an even broader MOU expanding the state’s partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment, equivalent to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Experts said it’s unusual for a state to have that kind of agreement with a large central government, but that it speaks to the value of such an exchange for both sides trying to meet their own domestic climate goals.
Unusual is one word for it. Here’s some of that memorandum.
The Participants respectively designate the Department of International Cooperation of the MEE and California Environmental Protection Agency along with California Natural Resources Agency, California Air Resources Board and California Energy Commission to establish the creation of an action plan to implement the objectives of this Memorandum of Understanding.
The Participants will each designate a point of contact (or Secretariat) that will serve as the primary liaison for communication and information exchange, as well as for any notice required to be submitted under this Memorandum of Understanding. The California-China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Center of MEE are designated as points of contact for California and MEE respectively under this MOU.
China gets so help shape California’s environmental policies. And California’s environmental policies, because of its size and wealth, shape America’s policies.
California is the backdoor for the PRC manipulation of the United States economy. Global warming is just the tool.