Gavin Newsom Signs Climate Bill, Celebrates Achievement, Boards Private Jet for Climate Summit

Governor’s personal carbon footprint coexists with climate leadership in way that critics note and supporters contextualise

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Bill and Its Signing

SACRAMENTO — Governor Gavin Newsom signed the California Climate Accountability and Corporate Transparency Act this week, requiring large corporations operating in California to disclose their scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions by 2027, which is the most comprehensive corporate climate disclosure requirement in the United States and which the governor signed at a ceremony that was simultaneously a genuine policy achievement and a media opportunity before his scheduled departure for a climate leadership summit in an event that the governor’s travel office describes as official business and that the governor’s critics describe as a private jet flight.

The Personal Footprint Question

The question of whether elected officials’ personal carbon footprints are relevant to their climate policy advocacy is the specific question that climate politics produces most reliably, and the answer is more complicated than either the critics who say yes it is relevant or the supporters who say no it is not. The relevant question is whether the policy achieves the emissions reductions it targets at scale, which is a question that the governor’s travel choices do not answer either way.

The Policy’s Actual Significance

The scope 3 emissions disclosure requirement is genuinely significant: scope 3 covers the emissions in a company’s supply chain and from the use of its products, which are typically the largest share of a large corporation’s total emissions impact and which have been excluded from most voluntary and mandatory disclosure frameworks because they are difficult to measure and because the companies with the largest scope 3 emissions have had the most political influence over the design of disclosure requirements. The California Air Resources Board implements the corporate climate disclosure requirement. The Cato Institute provides the libertarian critique of carbon disclosure regulation that asks whether disclosure without pricing produces the emissions reductions that are the policy’s actual goal. Both confirm the situation described, which continues.

California, Freedom, and the Surfer

The surfer as libertarian avatar — the person who wakes up early, reads the forecast, makes a decision about where to go, accepts the consequences of that decision including the rip currents, the crowds, the parking tickets, and the occasional shark, and does not require the government to make the decision or accept the consequences for them — is one of the more coherent applications of libertarian values to a recreational activity. The problem is that the California that produced the surfing culture has also produced the regulatory frameworks that the surfer navigates, and the regulatory frameworks are there because the alternative was the specific outcomes that unregulated California coastline, water, and land use produced in the period before the Coastal Act, the Clean Water Act, and the environmental regulations that the libertarian critique of California simultaneously benefits from and complains about. The Reason Foundation makes the argument. The California Coastal Commission makes the coast accessible. Both are part of the same California.

The Week and Its Structural Context

The stories documented above are specific events produced by structural conditions that predate them and that will continue after them. The journalism industry structural condition — the collapse of the commercial advertising-supported newspaper model and the incomplete emergence of the digital subscription and nonprofit models that are replacing it — has been producing the specific events documented above for approximately two decades and will continue producing them for at least another decade as the transition completes itself at the pace that industry transitions complete themselves, which is slower than the pace at which the casualties of the transition occur and faster than the pace at which the replacements reach the scale the casualties occupied.

The California structural condition — a state whose progressive politics and libertarian geography are in permanent productive tension, whose regulatory frameworks reflect the progressive politics and whose economy reflects the libertarian geography, and whose residents navigate both simultaneously — has been producing the specific events documented above since the state established itself as the primary laboratory for American regulatory innovation in both directions. The regulatory framework expands. The economy grows. The surfers park illegally. The permits take longer. The seawalls get approved while the science documents their effects. All of this is California in 2026, which is California as it has been for forty years and will be for forty more.

The Guardian California and the Los Angeles Times provide the baseline coverage of the California structural condition. The Poynter Institute provides the baseline for the journalism structural condition. The satire provides the angle on both. All three are necessary parts of the complete information environment. The column contributes what it can to each.

The week closes here. The documentation is the contribution. The contribution is imperfect. The imperfection is honest. The honesty is the standard. The standard continues next week, applied to the next week events from the same structural conditions, which continue regardless of the week or the documentation or the column that attempts to document them. The record grows. The conditions continue. Both are real. Both matter. The column returns.

More at https://www.private-eye.co.uk.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism