Gavin Newsom’s climate change chicanery  

Gavin Newsom doesn’t really care about climate change — and I can prove it.  

Despite his rhetoric, Newsom is loudly backing a massive, state-funded project that will pump millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Of course, I am referring to the colossal boondoggle known as California High Speed Rail — a project so onerous, it’s caught the attention of President Trump. 

To date, more than $11 billion has been spent developing this train, with $3.4 billion coming from carbon fees generated by the state. The segment under construction is 171 miles through the Central Valley. That means thousands of tons of steel and millions of tons of cement — commodities with very large carbon footprints, estimated at 1.4 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of steel and 0.88 tons per ton of concrete.

The project’s carbon impact doesn’t end there. Wiring, plastic, earth-moving equipment and deliveries ramp up the carbon budget even more. 

All this for a project that may never be completed. The current projected cost is $135 billion, with no identified source for anywhere close to the funds needed to complete it (not to mention that the price keeps going up). The segment under construction is the easiest stretch. The line still must tunnel through mountains to the north and south, including the longest tunnel in the U.S., which, if built, will traverse an active earthquake fault.

Newsom’s California Air Resources Board has committed 25 percent of its revenue to California High Speed Rail. That money, from carbon permit auctions, is intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions putting $3.4 billion toward the rail project thus far. 

Here is where we see Newsom’s insincerity. Instead of pouring billions down high-speed rail’s bottomless pit, that $3.4 billion could have gone to real greenhouse emissions reductions that would also help middle- and low-income Californians.  

For example, climate change warriors have targeted the dreaded gas stove for extinction. Old stoves do leak methane and nitrous oxide (300 times more potent than carbon dioxide). Newsom and the California Air Resources Board could replace 2 million of these malevolent monsters for under $1.4 billion. 

Old window air conditioners, energy inefficient and leaking potent hydrofluorocarbons, could be replaced with modern Energy Star units. Replacing 3 million of those units would cost up to $1.8 billion. That’s $3.2 billion for much more efficient appliances that emit far fewer greenhouse emissions and cost less to operate, yielding financial benefits to low- and middle-income households. And that is paying full retail price; asking consumers to put a bit of their own cash into the till could expand the program significantly. 

But if California is determined to do something about rail, there is already a passenger rail project ideal for investment: an existing rail route from San Diego to Santa Barbara via Los Angeles.  

The route is a sometimes single-track, diesel route full of at-grade intersections, making it a slow, polluting train. An upgraded rail line, double-tracked, electrified and grade separated, would efficiently serve over 10 million people in one of the most car-congested parts of the country. And it would require no tunneling, nor significant land purchases. Projected improvements for the corridor could have been completed for less than what has been spent thus far on a high-speed line that currently goes from nowhere to nowhere. 

But the problem is that upgrading existing infrastructure is relatively boring compared to a brand-new white elephant. 

Like the rest of the loud California climate change crowd, Newsom is not interested in actually helping people or truly reducing greenhouse emissions. They want big shiny projects with massive contracts, news stories, photo ops and dramatic drone videos. Three million air conditioners get a brief moment in the sun, but interminable megaprojects are the gift that keeps giving (and taking).  

That’s the real priority for the odious Newsom: popularity and power. 

Newsom’s preference for preening and publicity took a dark turn with the January southern California wildfires. Thoroughly uninterested in dull and unremarkable preventive acts — controlled burns, fire breaks, burying electrical lines, allowing new fire-resistant homes to replace old tinderboxes, not to mention ramping up firefighting capacity — the Los Angeles region was primed for catastrophic wildfires, regardless of the extent of climate change. 

Newsom is not fully at fault, but he and the rest of the California political establishment deserve a solid portion of the blame for the multibillion-dollar catastrophe and its 4.4 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Of course, Newsom won’t take the blame at all, casting it on oil companies, insurance companies and anyone else who doesn’t move in lockstep with his ideology.

The bottom line is simple: if there is a climate emergency, individuals, governments, nonprofits and companies should be doing everything they can do now to reduce emissions. Maybe a new air conditioner only cuts emissions a small amount or perhaps switching from diesel fuel to natural gas is not perfect, but in an emergency, you do what you can with what you have. 

For politicians like Newsom, his words and alarmism say climate emergency, but his actions say it’s a big fraud.  

Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.