California Governor Sticks Up for Climate Change

California Governor Jerry Brown issued a statement on Thursday in which he vowed to continue to fight climate change despite president-elect Donald Trump’s potential legislation against it. Trump has stated he believes climate change is not a concern—tweeting in 2012 that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”—and revealed that one of his first actions in office will be to withdraw funds from The Paris Agreement, which saw the United Nations band together to create policies that would limit the warming of the planet to dangerous levels. Trump also announced plans to appoint Myron Ebell—a known critic of climate change—as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. “We will protect the precious rights of our people and continue to confront the existential threat of our time—devastating climate change,” Brown wrote in last week’s statement. The governor signed several climate change-oriented bills into legislation during his term, including a state law requiring that by 2030, dairy farmers must cut methane emissions to 40-percent below what they were in 1990. Over the weekend, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders took to Twitter to express his views about the future of climate change legislation, stating, “Millions of people are going to have to say: Mr. Trump, you are dead wrong.”