Gov. Jerry Brown’s second term is starting to resemble Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in one way: Brown, like his successor, seems to be finding more and more time for speechifying on climate change, out of state or out of the country.
There are some good reasons for this. Climate change is a threat to California, and the governor’s job is to protect the state. And California’s approach to climate change, particularly via cap and trade, requires that we convince other states and countries to join with us. Indeed, that’s the premise of our anti-climate change regime: that California’s actions will inspire the world. Otherwise, the planet will be worse off – and California will have imposed costly rules on itself without a return.
But gubernatorial time and attention are limited resources. And the heart of the governor’s job is run the state, and the state’s primary functions are three: educate, medicate and incarcerate. A governor who strays too far from those duties lacks focus.
The right gubernatorial approach to climate change is through these three duties. How do we adapt our education system to make us a leader in climate change? What things in our massive health sector should we be changing because of the climate crisis? Can prisoners be educated and trained and even employed in ways that would advance climate goals?
When governors go afield, they should be more directly addressing structural democratic and constitutional problems that Gov. Schwarzenegger failed to fix, and that Gov. Brown has failed to address.
And so it’s fair to be skeptical of these second term turns. It’s worrisome that Gov. Brown, for all his talk of fiscal responsibility, has failed to make any progress on retiree health liabilities, which are unfunded (and hard to defend in an era of Medicare and Obamacare).