Above, highly recommended interview with Gavin Newsom at Climate Week in New York.
Below, lying sack Energy Secretary Chris Wright immediately followed Newsom.
The Moderator David Gelles did a crap job of checking him.
If you follow this page, you will be able to spot Wright’s distortions and lies. Too many to go through here, but perhaps we can discuss in comments.
Below, I spoke to retired NOAA expert and IPCC Lead Author Jim Kossin about Wright’s distortions of his work.
Have to give Wright credit for fronting up in front of a hostile audience (as stated by the moderator), and for making a lot more of a cogent argument than his Dear Leader – admittedly, that’s a remarkably low bar. He’s a lot stronger on energy and pricing than he is on climate – the crew he picked for his ‘red team’ are professional low-ballers from way back. He does admit that heat waves and extreme rain events have gone up, which is not a minor point for those living through them. Land-falling hurricanes are more of a crapshoot – sooner or later, they’ll land, and when they do, they’ll make it worth their while. His defence of natural gas as a climate saviour ignores fugitive methane emissions, which the Trump administration is helping him ignore by not recording them any more.
Other hand, Newsom’s California, despite its record wind, solar and battery rollouts, still had steadily rising CO2 emissions from power for the five years before 2024 – when they fell back almost to where they were in 2019. Gas was 29.6% of California Independent System Operator’s power in 2018, in 2024 it was still 27.5%, despite grid solar almost doubling. Batteries stored 0.52%. Methane emissions, it’s hard to say.
Some Democrats had a lot to do with the closure of San Onofre nuclear plant, which used to make nearly ten percent of the State’s power (it had a faulty steam generator upgrade, and lawfare from NRDC, Sierra Club etc made it too onerous to fix.) Newsome switched position in 2022, preventing the early closure of Diablo Canyon, California’s other main source of fossil free, weather-independent power. (Geothermal 2.8% in 2024, Diablo Canyon 7.7%.) Biden, with the IRA, was trying to kickstart American nuclear again – one of the rare points of agreement in Washington. Whether Trump’s crew can do any better seems dubious – Presidential fiat doesn’t build a plant overnight, it takes some consistency.