In summary
Seldom missing an opportunity to upstage President Trump, Gov. Brown tonight will announce a global climate action summit, which he will lead in San Francisco in September.
Seldom missing an opportunity to upstage President Trump, Gov. Brown tonight will announce a global climate action summit, which he will lead in San Francisco in September of 2018.
With Trump in Europe—facing the ire of Western allies for announcing his intention to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord—Brown will beam a video message to the Global Citizen Festival in Hamburg, Germany, inviting “entrepreneurs, singers, musicians, mathematicians, professors” to the Bay Area conference.
“Look, it’s up to you and it’s up to me and tens of millions of other people to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat the existential threat of climate change,” Brown says in the video. “Yes, I know President Trump is trying to get out of the Paris agreement, but he doesn’t speak for the rest of America. We in California and in states all across America believe it’s time to act.”
As it happens, Trump and the U.S. delegation are in Hamburg meeting with leaders of the G20 nations. Among other items on the agenda is the difficult work of hammering out language on unified policy toward global climate change, which the president has described as a hoax.
Brown’s brief video offered little detail about the fall conference, but he’s clearly signaled —frequently— that he will steer a singular path for California, making independent carbon-trading agreements with Canadian provinces and setting strict statewide greenhouse gas reduction goals.
Most recently, Brown was appointed a special advisor to the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Bonn, Germany in November.