In one corner you have Gavin Newsom, who boasts regularly about California beating its goals for new electric car and truck sales. Who told a United Nations panel during New York Climate week this year that “this climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis.” Whose attorney general announced a massive lawsuit against big oil companies over climate change.
In the opposing corner sits the man from the Everglades, Ron DeSantis, who rolled out a national energy strategy in September that would repeal President Biden’s electric car subsidies. A plan that would “support Americans’ right to drive the cars they want.” A plan by a governor, who in a September Fox News interview, accused Democrats of trying to “politicize the weather.”
The differences are pretty stark.
California will ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. California has set aside $52.3 billion to prepare the state for climate change. And this year, the governor signed a first-in-the-nation climate bill that would force big companies — from Amazon to Bank of America to WalMart — to reveal their complete carbon footprint.
DeSantis, meanwhile, has pledged to “prevent California and faceless bureaucrats from setting America's environmental standards,” according to his energy policy. He signed a law eliminating “the corporatist environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) movement,” promising to do the same nationally if elected president.
While Newsom recently went on a climate change themed trip to China, DeSantis has said he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, the Global Methane Pledge and all net-zero commitments.
One talking point that Republicans in the Golden State often make: California has among the highest gasoline prices in the nation, a major drag on the state’s consumers, particularly its lower-income families.
Both states are experiencing more severe weather that experts have linked to climate change: Miami, for instance, has seen its streets flooded with seawater with more frequency, attributed to rising sea levels, and Florida has been hit with more severe hurricanes. California, meanwhile, has seen its own cycles of climate-intensified wildfires, droughts and floods.