Newsom blasts Trump’s climate retreat as giving China an edge

Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted President Trump’s retreat from the fight against climate change, casting it as a global embarrassment and a squandered opportunity to make domestic manufacturing gains.

“China is cleaning our clock,” Newsom said on the sidelines of the United Nations-backed climate negotiations in Antalya, Turkey. “It’s not just about environmental policy. It’s about influence, it’s about supply chains, it’s about investment. As we walk off the international stage, they’re stepping in, and they’re also stepping in with this new technology.”

Newsom, a potential Democratic contender for the U.S. presidency in 2028, was joined by a phalanx of other governors and mayors at the COP31 summit Thursday. Their presence at the talks was a show of force meant to illustrate the work that cities and states are still doing to decarbonize following the Trump administration’s rollback of emission-limiting regulations and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

The U.S. government didn’t send an official delegation to the high-level talks, which have brought together nearly 200 countries. Instead, the country was represented unofficially by other U.S. officials. On Thursday, the group included U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and a number of mayors. A coalition of some 19 U.S. House representatives also are set to participate later this week.

Newsom, however, was by far the most visible representative of the U.S., mobbed by dozens of reporters, activists and onlookers as he inched slowly through the venue Thursday, occasionally stopping for selfies and winning the same kind of acclaim showered earlier in the week on Brazil’s newly reelected President Lula da Silva. “We love you, Governor Newsom,” shouted one observer. “You must be president!” yelled another.

U.S. representatives at the climate talks said they were buoyed by the U.S. midterm elections last week, which ushered Democrats into control of the House and Senate as well as a majority of state governorships.

“We’re doing all of this in our states with no help from Washington,” Walz said, adding that Democratic control of Congress could help facilitate those efforts. Under Trump, the federal government has been “throwing barriers into place,” he said, but “it’ll be very difficult for them to do that now.”

Newsom also said he felt “renewed optimism from the midterms” but remained concerned about two more years of environmental policy under Trump. Democrats can wield fresh power to mitigate “the damage,” he said, but can only go so far.

“Trump’s head is in sand soaked with oil. He’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of big oil and we have been on the receiving end of some of the most aggressive assaults on our climate leadership in our generation,” Newsom said.

During Trump’s second term, the administration has pulled back a host of Biden-era regulations, including a mix of mandates and subsidies that encouraged electric vehicles. That’s imperiling American competitiveness, Newsom said.

“I worry about American automobile manufacturers surviving a decade from now,” Newsom said. “If you care about the future of American manufacturing and of automobile manufacturing, you should care about this issue. And so that’s the message I’m communicating here in the absence of one damn representative from the federal government. We are a footnote yet again at COP and that is a disgrace.”

Leaders of cities and states representing more than 60% of the U.S. economy have used the summit to pledge they’d keep forging forward on climate —including by formally collaborating with United Nations officials in tracking the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

That pledge came in a joint statement from America Is All In, the U.S. Climate Alliance and Climate Mayors initiatives. Collectively, they represent 24 governors with constituents making up 55% of the U.S. population as well as 350 mayors across 47 states.

The two-week COP31 summit is meant to galvanize a worldwide shift away from fossil fuels, an embrace of more emission-free renewable alternatives and additional conservation efforts. The alliances of state and local leaders committed to working with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty and institution undergirding the 2015 Paris accord, without support from the U.S. government. Under a formal process kicked off this year, the U.S. is set to officially exit the UNFCCC next February.

The new effort by cities, states and other leaders will involve elevating data on U.S. progress toward decarbonization by midcentury and ensuring engagement in a “global stocktake” exercise meant to assess how the world is doing in meeting its climate goals. A first global stocktake culminated in 2023 with a recognition the world was badly off track its key temperature target, prompting a pledge at COP29 in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels. Initial discussions are underway in Turkey on the second stocktake set to conclude in 2028.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres told Bloomberg TV Thursday that he welcomed U.S. subnational action on climate. “The U.S. is not the U.S. government,” he said. “We see the private sector in the U.S. clearly more and more investing in renewables, and we see more and more governors and more and more mayors totally committed to that. And I hope that the U.S. as a whole will become again an important part.”

U.S. state-level policy, market forces and falling technology costs can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 46% below 2005 levels by 2035, according to a report from America Is All In and the University of Maryland Center for Global Sustainability.

Dlouhy writes for Bloomberg. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the philanthropic organization of Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of the company that owns Bloomberg News, is a donor to the United Nations and efforts to support global urban climate action.