Gavin Newsom is coming for your car, and he wants you to know it

SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom is taking California’s climate story — with its big ambitions and political risks — on the road.

The Democratic governor, Biden surrogate and potential presidential contender is pushing aggressive climate action in appearances from China to the Vatican, selling it as a winning issue beyond the borders of his deep-blue state.

His pitch: The effects of climate change are upon us and the world — including California — ignores them at their peril.

California is “meeting the moment head-on as the hots get hotter, the dries get drier, the wets get wetter, simultaneous droughts and rain bombs,” Newsom said last month in a Central Valley orchard outfitted with solar panels and batteries. “We have to address these issues with a ferocity that is required of us.”

He’s heading to the Vatican next week to meet with Pope Francis and other leaders, where he’ll highlight what’s at stake with “global temperatures hurtling towards alarming new heights.” The trip comes after a swing through China last fall, where he touted California’s sharing of climate policy and technology.

Newsom’s moves to promote electric vehicles and renewable energy while phasing out gas-powered cars, trying to recoup climate-related damages from oil giants and going after refiners’ profits have won strong support in California, but his efforts face a reliable line of attack from the industry and Republicans who say it’s all too expensive.

He’s used to the criticism. A key part of his strategy has been to ascribe high gas prices and utility bills to corporate greed and gouging while beating back proposals that he believes go too far like Proposition 30, which would have raised taxes on the rich in 2022 to funnel money to electric vehicles.

“He wants to make the claim when he runs for president that he’s fixing climate without raising taxes,” said RL Miller, a California-based Democratic National Committee member and founder of the Climate Hawks Vote PAC. (Newsom insists he’s not interested in being president.)

The strategy is untested on a national level and in fossil fuel-rich swing states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Democrats in those places are already planning to go on the offensive with new Federal Trade Commission allegations that a Texas-based oil producer colluded with OPEC to raise prices.

He leaned into his role as climate governor in 2020, one of the worst in a series of climate-aggravated wildfire years for the state, when residents were holed up during the Covid pandemic and skies turned orange with smoke amid a deep drought. Newsom was touring burned-down towns while headlines linked the devastation to oil drilling. Rolling blackouts hit the state’s grid in August of that year.

Advisers say the deadly wildfires marked a turning point for Newsom, who is a father of four.

Juan Rodriguez, a partner at California political consulting firm Bearstar Strategies who worked on Newsom’s election campaigns, compared his wildfire response to the way former President Barack Obama reacted to the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012.

“There are these moments for electeds that really become central to how you begin to see the issues that you end up becoming more forceful on,” Rodriguez said.

That September he announced the gas-powered car phaseout. In 2021 he initiated a fracking ban and proposed a ban on new wells within 3,200 feet of most occupied buildings.

By 2022 Newsom was accusing Big Oil of lying to Californians and “gouging” them on gas prices as he pursued legislation that could lead to a cap on refiners’ profits.

“Big Oil has played us for fools for decades and decades, buying off politicians of all political stripes, lying to you, delaying science,” he reiterated at a March rally in Los Angeles to support the setback law, alongside Jane Fonda and former Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Some state and national polls support Newsom’s tactics: Three quarters of respondents in a survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress said oil companies that misled the public on fossil fuel pollution should be held accountable. In a recent California poll, 59 percent of likely voters said the state’s stricter environmental laws are worth the cost — up from 46 percent a decade ago.

“We are paving the way for a political shift in other states and around the nation,” said Lauren Sanchez, Newsom’s top climate adviser. “We can’t do this alone.”

But the approach carries risks for both Newsom and the Biden campaign, exposing them to accusations — true or not — of killing jobs, jeopardizing electricity reliability and raising prices.

“It’s the cost of what it takes to live in this state — it’s becoming problematic,” Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of California’s main oil industry trade group, the Western States Petroleum Association, said in an interview.

The petroleum group got involved in Newsom’s cross-country spat with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, when the organization ran ads in the state calling attention to California energy costs that included the message, “California can’t afford Gavin Newsom’s ambition. Can Florida?”

California’s gas is usually the most expensive in the nation averaging $4.88 per gallon last year. Electricity rates have gone up as much as 127 percent over the last 10 years (although California’s residential utility bills are still lower than Florida’s). Natural gas prices are volatile. And the state’s grid, while gaining reliability since the rolling blackouts of 2020, isn’t in the clear yet.

Former President Donald Trump, Republicans and the Wall Street Journal opinion page have tried to associate Biden with the most strident parts of Newsom’s agenda, including California’s phaseout of new gas-powered car sales.

While the state has made huge strides in sales of electric and hybrid vehicles, reaching nearly a quarter of new car sales in 2024, it’s still one of the nation’s biggest gasoline consumers and producers.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom breaks ground at a new California state park on April 22, 2024, at the Dos Rios property, in Modesto, California. The announcement comes as the state sets targets for cutting planet-warming emissions on natural lands.

Even at home, the results of Newsom’s climate push are still coming in.

The state Energy Commission plans to decide by the end of the year whether to impose a cap on oil refiner profits. Newsom pushed for a cap after the state’s gas reached an average $6.44 per gallon in 2022.

The state’s taxes and cleaner-burning environmental standards add about $1 per gallon, but those costs don’t fully account for the difference between gas prices in California and other states. Newsom compromised with legislators in passing a law a year ago that charged the Energy Commission with investigating the market and imposing a cap if it decides one is warranted.

The industry says the effort will backfire, driving prices higher.

California voters could decide in November whether to keep or reject the 2022 law Newsom championed to prohibit new oil and gas drilling within 3,200 feet of most occupied buildings. The California Independent Petroleum Association challenged the law using the state’s referendum process, qualifying it for a vote this year. The vote could show how sympathetic Californians are to the industry message that the ban could raise prices at the pump.

The Newsom administration also has not issued a single new drilling permit this year, but there are more than 700 applications for new wells in the queue, according to state data. Environmentalists are eager to give Newsom credit for the pause, but his administration blames a lawsuit in conservative Kern County, where almost all extraction in the state takes place.

Next year will bring even more consequential decisions for Newsom and legislators on whether to further tighten the state’s grip on carbon credits, which would raise gas prices.

“This will all either cement his place in history or diminish his place in history,” said Jamie Court, director of Consumer Watchdog, an organization that has pressed Newsom since he took office in 2019 to go for the industry’s throat.

Court and environmentalists never convinced his predecessor, climate warrior Jerry Brown, to be as aggressive as Newsom. Brown, who made his own unsuccessful runs at the presidency and the U.S. Senate, tightened environmental standards but shot down a severance tax and didn’t support well setbacks.

Newsom rejected oil money during his campaign, but environmentalists in his first couple years were unimpressed, saying he had abandoned pledges to ban fracking and speed the closure of a natural gas storage site that sprung the worst methane leak on record in 2015.

Today, following the string of aggressive pronouncements, environmentalists are optimistic Newsom is demonstrating that Democrats can take on fossil fuels and win.

“He’s really going on the offense against Big Oil and that has national and international implications, and it’s really bringing Big Oil’s villainy to the fore in a very important way,” said Kassie Siegel, climate political director for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.

Reheis-Boyd, from the petroleum group WSPA, doesn’t buy it.

“I don’t think it resonates,” she said. “I think what resonates right now, for people who are really feeling the pain of their daily lives, are their choices being taken away, their costs going through the roof, their ability to just take care of their families and have a prosperous life.”

It could come down to — if and when Newsom runs for president — whether climate change starts to impact life in the rest of the country as much as it has in California.

“As the climate crisis gets worse, it’ll look good for someone like Newsom, who stood up and tried to do something,” said Gil Duran, a former Jerry Brown spokesperson who also worked on the setbacks campaign.