Jerry Brown on Why The U.S. Needs China -- And China Needs Us to Fight the Climate Crisis

WASHINGTON — Jerry Brown doesn’t want to talk about impeachment.

He won’t say if he has a preferred candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential field and professes not to be following the race all that closely.

At a time when it can feel like Donald Trump and the nonstop coverage of him can blot out the sun, Brown urges people not to obsess so much over Trump and to reject a view of the world that sees the United States as the world’s superpower at odds with China and Russia. “We’re pointing fingers now — pointing at Putin, pointing at Trump,” Brown said during a recent talk at the Center for American Progress think tank. “We have to find a more mutual way to join hands. The environment is all shared. Whatever we do, we’re doing to ourselves as well as to the other.”

After four decades in politics — four terms as California governor, stints as the mayor of Oakland and the state’s attorney general, three failed presidential runs — Brown is throwing his weight behind the cause he deems just as important, if not more so, than impeachment or the presidential race: strengthening the relationship between California, the U.S., and China in the fight against the climate crisis. There’s perhaps no American politician alive today with a better track record and more credibility on climate than Brown. In his last eight years as governor, he instituted a statewide cap-and-trade system, invested heavily in renewable energy sources and electric cars, and took big steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some of this he did with the support of Republican officials. After Trump’s election in 2016, Brown traveled the globe as a sort of alt-president, assuring the rest of the world that the U.S. intended to keep its climate commitments despite the new president’s denialist vitriol.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jerry-brown-climate-crisis-china-945304/