Thanks to the highest gas and electricity prices in the nation, California faces structural budget deficits that will bankrupt it if there is even a slight economic downturn. California’s fiscal frailty and energy dependence are no accident. They are a trap designed by the Chinese Communist Party, and the state’s Democrats have eagerly fallen into it.
In a new report, the National Association of Scholars details Beijing’s efforts over decades to exploit the Left’s obsession with and exaggeration of climate change. This weakens the United States and its allies by creating political pressure to reduce oil, gas, and coal production. It also makes nations more dependent on China-controlled supply chains for electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and rare-earth minerals.
China controls more than half of the world’s rare-earth mining capacity and roughly 90% of refining capacity. The minerals are essential for technologies that Western governments mandate in the name of climate policy. China also produces more than 70% of the world’s electric vehicles. A forced transition away from fossil fuels, therefore, does not free the West from China’s dependence. It merely shifts that dependence from domestic oil and gas producers to Chinese-dominated minerals and manufacturing.
China has no intention of disarming itself in a similar manner. While Western politicians lecture their own citizens about the evils of fossil fuels and say they should be left in the ground, China builds coal capacity. Construction began on 94.5 gigawatts of new coal power in China in 2024 alone, the highest level in a decade.
Beijing’s strategy is clear. Encourage the West to strangle itself. Let willing dupes in the West mandate technologies that China dominates. Let the West call this “climate leadership.” Then sell the West what it can no longer produce itself.
Nowhere has fallen harder for this con than California.
The National Association of Scholars report documents how the state’s relationship with China’s climate bureaucracy began long before Gavin Newsom became governor. The California Air Resources Board began working with Beijing’s Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau in 2005. In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s National Development and Reform Commission to cooperate on carbon emissions, methane standards, carbon trading, building energy use, electric vehicles, and green-energy markets.
In 2017, Brown went further. He signed agreements with the provinces of Jiangsu and Sichuan, as well as a deal with China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, after President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. The Sichuan agreement involved representative offices, green-energy cooperation, technology transfer through an “Energy Internet Demonstration Project,” and the California-China Clean Technology Partnership Fund. The Jiangsu agreement focused on energy storage, grid modernization, new-energy and zero-emission vehicles, low-carbon urban development, emissions trading systems, and joint information-technology development.
Then came the universities.
Brown helped launch the California-China Climate Institute, a partnership between UC Berkeley and China’s Tsinghua University, which launders China’s climate agenda through California’s universities, bureaucracy, and elite political class.
Newsom continued the project, signing another memorandum of understanding with China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment in 2022 and another with Hainan Province in 2023. These did not make California more energy independent. They pushed the state further along the same path toward less domestic production, more imported oil, higher energy costs, and greater dependence on green technologies controlled by Beijing. For China, the payoff is obvious. For California, it is not. It becomes a showroom for policies that weaken U.S. energy security while strengthening our enemy’s industrial power.
The result is that California is not cleaner and stronger but weaker and more dependent.
The state imports 64% of its oil. Imports of Brazilian oil alone rose from 8.3% of all imports in 2021 to 20.4% in 2024. Other major suppliers include Iraq, Guyana, and Saudi Arabia. California’s climate rulers have not ended fossil fuel use. They have merely outsourced it.
THE DATA CENTER DOOMERS MUST BE DEFEATED
That is precisely the vulnerability China wants to create in our most populous state. California Democrats shut down domestic production, mandate Chinese technologies, partner with Communist Party-controlled institutions, and then congratulate themselves for moral leadership. Beijing gets richer, California gets more expensive, and America gets weaker.
By falling into China’s climate trap, California Democrats have not just made their own state poorer. They have made the entire U.S. weaker.