With just a few years left in his marathon return tour as California governor, Jerry Brown has promised not to back down on his climate policy in the face of what could be a powerful change in priorities from above in a Donald Trump administration.

Moving to reassure his party earlier in the election season, Gov. Brown had signaled critics of his approach to environmental policy that he’d organize opposition to their agenda if they increased their political power. “In August, Brown vowed to ‘vanquish’ climate change skeptics,” the Los Angeles Times recalled. “‘Bring it on,’ Brown said at the time. ‘We’ll have more battles, and more victories.'”

Now, in his first remarks after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, Brown promised “to do his part to find common ground with the president-elect,” but “put Trump on notice that ‘as Californians, we will also stay true to our basic principles,” as the Bee also reported. “We will protect the precious rights of our people and continue to confront the existential threat of our time — devastating climate change.”

Competing interests

Although analysts have often hesitated to predict that a Trump administration will follow through on all the promises the candidate had made or qualified on the campaign trail, liberals and progressives have expressed special concern over what Trump might do on climate change, such as backing out of promises made at the recent landmark Paris talks — where a delegation of California Democrats played a high-profile role.

“Brown has repeatedly contrasted the intransigence gripping Washington with California’s progressive policy approaches, from joining other countries to address the threat of climate change to shielding the rights of unauthorized immigrants,” the Bee added. “In the statement, the fourth-term governor moved past his earlier criticism of Trump, and didn’t directly address the incoming president’s dismissal of climate change as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.”

California Democrats have braced for harder sledding ahead on the environment. Democratic strategist Steve Maviglio told the San Jose Mercury News, “Republicans now have a free hand to intervene in California’s battles over water, which often pit agribusiness against environmentalists and fisherman. Water allocations for imperiled species like Chinook salmon could be tightened. It’s one of many conflicts he foresees,” the paper noted. 

Increased anxiety

Party fears have arisen that without a supportive president, California could begin to change shape in Americans’ minds from a bellwether and vanguard state into a marginal outlier. “Trump’s stunning election threatens years of Democratic progress here and deprives the state’s ambitious social change agenda of a sure collaborator in Clinton,” as the Bee suggested. “From local concerns like affordable housing and homelessness, to statewide priorities such as climate change, health care, immigration reform, gun control and the protection of organized labor, nowhere is the nation’s embrace of Trump felt more acutely than in deep-blue California.”

But not all leadership figures popular on the west coast have fueled anxiety. Brown has worked to steer clear of what has become sometimes frantic criticism of Trump from within his party, projecting a steely-yet-relaxed demeanor reminiscent of Bernie Sanders’ recent pledge to work with the incoming administration where possible and to oppose it elsewhere. At a dinner in Sacramento for labor organizers last week, Brown joked “that if Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump wins the presidency, California would build its own wall at the state’s border — an obvious reference to Trump’s ambition to build a wall between the United States and Mexico,” as the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “If Trump were ever elected, we’d have to build a wall around California to defend ourselves from the rest of this country,” said Brown, caught on video reported by the Sacramento Bee.

A play for leadership

Gov. Brown was intent on taking the opportunity to speak more to a national and even local audience than to the planet at large. “With mayors from San Francisco, San Jose and eight other U.S. cities in the audience, Brown gave a glowing review of his own achievements in cutting emissions in California, offering it as a template for mayors around the world to follow,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

But the governor did make plain his ambition that others around the world might look to the Golden State for a blueprint, or at least an inspiration. Well-known as a former Jesuit seminarian, Brown leveraged his reputation to connect up California’s climate policy to the possible policy agenda of Catholics around the world.

“I believe what people at the Vatican are looking for is some hopeful news and reports that yes, climate change can be dealt with,” Gov. Brown told Bloomberg. “My message: that even though this is a very profound and difficult problem, California is showing a way whereby the countries of the world can actually do something very positive.”

He singled out Pope Francis for moving the Catholic church in what many observers have described as a markedly more assertive direction on economic matters. “”I’m very impressed with Pope Francis and where he’s taking the church — I see the hand of Jesuit training and inspiration in what he’s doing,” Brown told reporters with the Contra Costa Times. “The pope is engaging in moral authority and calling people to reflect on the basis of those considerations. This is desperately needed to counteract the iron logic of the marketplace, which is only dealing with profit.”

Gov. Brown emphasized that his Vatican visit was a prelude to the larger United Nations conference on climate change soon to be put on in Paris. “To achieve anything in Paris, we’ll need grass-roots efforts by religious leaders and states and provinces,” he said, “to intensify the pressure on these national leaders to get more done than is currently on their respective agendas.”

Politicking religion

Senate Democrats ensured Brown had a token of appreciation to take with him. SR37, passed with what the Los Angeles Times called near-unanimity, called upon the state to “consider the implications of the papal encyclical and climate change in their policy and fiscal actions to prevent further environmental degradation.”

The bill’s language foreshadowed what top Sacramento Democrats hoped would become a big new raft of state energy regulations. Senate leader Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, has advanced a sweeping piece of legislation drawing some fire, but not enough to blunt its progress. “Oil companies have ramped up opposition,” reported the Times, “and utilities are angling for changes in the bill that would make it easier for them to fulfill requirements to produce renewable energy. But so far, no one has been able to stop the legislation, which has passed the state Senate and is advancing in the Assembly.” De León told the Times “the world is watching what happens in Sacramento very closely.”

The remarkably — but selectively — church-friendly resolution did draw some skepticism. As the Times reported, Sen. Joel Anderson, R-San Diego, “criticized a ‘cafeteria attitude’ to the encyclical, where statements on climate change are endorsed and opposition to abortion is ignored.” As Francis has attracted increasing appreciation from those further to the political left than usually praise the Church, Catholic conservatives have often insisted that his economic views cannot be endorsed in isolation, while other  conservatives nationwide have questioned his economic credentials.