SACRAMENTO, California — Donald Trump is coming for California’s signature climate policies — and so is California.
Stung by the party’s sweeping losses in November and desperate to win back working-class voters, the Democratic Party is in retreat on climate change. Nowhere is that retrenchment more jarring than in the nation’s most populous state, a longtime bastion of progressive politics on the environment.
In the past two weeks alone, California Democrats have retrenched on environmental reviews for construction projects, a cap on oil industry profits and clean fuel mandates. Elected officials are warning that ambitious laws and mandates are driving up the state’s onerous cost of living, echoing longstanding Republican arguments and frustrating some allies who say Democrats are capitulating to political pressure.
“California was the vocal climate leader during the first Trump administration,” said Chris Chavez, deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air. “It’s questionable whether or not that leadership is still there.”
California leaders are still positioning themselves as the vanguard of the resistance to the president’s environmental rollbacks, and polls still consistently find voters believe addressing climate change is worth the cost. Gov. Gavin Newsom has sued to block Trump’s removal of California’s permission to enforce its clean car standards and vowed to extend a landmark cap-and-trade program imperiled by Trump.
But they’re in a far different position than during Trump’s first term, when they were signing deals with automakers to keep the state’s emissions rules afloat — and even two years ago, when they were taking on oil companies by threatening to cap their profits. It’s a reversal that is dismaying to climate activists, an outspoken part of the Democratic Party’s base. And it’s a tradeoff — freighted with significant and potentially long-lasting policy implications — that party leaders are making in an effort to regain political strength.
“We’ve got some challenges, and so it just requires some new considerations,” Newsom told reporters last week, after his administration proposed steering clear of the oil-profits cap as a way to keep refineries open. “It’s not rolling back anything — that’s actually marching forward in a way that is thoughtful and considered.”
Other parts of the country are pulling back on climate policies in the name of affordability, too. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is delaying plans for a carbon-trading system and slowing enforcement of the state’s rules for clean cars and trucks, which follow California’s. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is similarly pausing on carbon trading. And in Congress, some 36 Democrats — including two from California — signed on to the effort to overturn California’s vehicle rules.
But California, as the state with the strongest suite of climate policies and a decades-long reputation of stalwart environmentalism, is now becoming an unlikely leader in Democrats’ pivot as they try to respond to cost-of-living concerns that they fret may have cost them the election.
“This is part of the Democrats’ doing some soul-searching and really trying to figure out what they stand for,” said Marie Liu, California director at the Energy Foundation and a former top climate adviser to legislative Democrats.
Housing reviews, fuel standards, plastic rules targeted
Newsom and other Democrats last week infuriated environmentalists by punching exemptions for housing developments and other projects like health clinics and high-speed rail into a decades-old law requiring a wide range of projects to clear environmental reviews.
A separate push in the state Senate to dilute the state’s stringent fuel rules drew a rebuke from the head of California’s powerful Air Resources Board, who called it “irresponsible” in the face of a federal onslaught.
And Newsom in March ordered his recycling regulator to rewrite plastic waste reduction rules to lessen costs for businesses, which upset the state lawmakers and environmental groups who originally negotiated the waste reduction deal but energized business groups opposing similar rules in New York.
The backtracking reflects a pervasive sense that once-popular climate policies are exacting a political price by pushing up energy and housing costs, draining support from both Democratic candidates and climate policies themselves.
“For a lot of Democrats, the 2024 election was a reality check about the importance of cost-of-living issues and affordability for Californians,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California. “That’s given policymakers some pause about what is actually workable in terms of environmental policy.”
From Sacramento to Washington
Newsom and allies are retrenching in Sacramento as Republicans in Washington take aim at core California climate planks, like its longstanding ability to set tougher pollution limits.
Yet even on Capitol Hill, Democrats who typically decry Trump’s agenda have sided with Republicans who call California’s policies unsustainable. Rep. Lou Correa, who has said the 2024 election showed Democrats must heed cost-strained voters, and Rep. George Whitesides, who flipped a commuter-heavy Los Angeles district last cycle, voted to block Newsom’s order phasing out the sale of new entirely gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
Climate change has dominated Sacramento’s agenda in recent years. Newsom spent substantial political capital in 2022 to muscle through a sweeping set of environmental laws, reviving efforts that had formerly succumbed to resistance from the oil industry and its union allies. Newsom followed up by pushing to cap industry profits.
Not in 2025. “Affordability” has become the watchword for Democrats who saw inflation woes drive votes to Republicans across the 2024 ballot. In a poll presented to Assembly Democrats during a caucus meeting, cost of living led voters’ stated priorities. Climate change sat in last place.
Yet Liu warned Democrats were learning the wrong lesson by focusing narrowly on immediate concerns like gas prices at the expense of a larger effort to shift from fossil fuels.
“It’s easy to focus on the very short-term responses but not take the longer-term view,” Liu said, which would require “not just playing around on ten cents a gallon, but looking at the actual transition to cleaner alternatives.”
Oil industry pressure
In-state oil producers have maintained political pressure on Democrats, spending more than $15 million over the last two years on a sustained campaign of mailers and advertisements blaming the state’s climate policies for high prices. Signs at gas stations urge voters to put pressure on their elected officials.
Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president and CEO of the Western States Petroleum Association, said she was heartened by regulators’ recent recommendations to pause a refinery profit margin cap and streamline permitting for in-state crude oil production.
“I had no idea that it would sort of come to fruition this year, but I am encouraged by it,” she said.
Republicans have pummeled Newsom and Democrats over the state gas tax’s annual increase and a tightening of the state’s fuel standards. To some GOP leaders in California, Democrats’ recent backtracking validates years of Republican warnings about cost-inflating climate policies.
”Of course Democrats are on the defensive and scrambling on climate policies — they’re losing,” Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones said in a statement. “Californians love the environment and rightly expect clean air, clean water, and clean streets. What they don’t love are out-of-touch policies that destroy livelihoods in the name of climate change.”
State laws explicitly direct California to move away from fossil fuels, which would mean putting the state’s historically large and politically powerful oil industry out of business.
Yet the threat of plummeting production — with two refineries announcing their plans to close within the past year — has rattled elected officials, who fear plunging capacity could lead to a price spike. The California Energy Commission’s plan to keep refineries operating specifically seeks to avoid that scenario.
“We always knew this was going to be a really tough time, where we’ve made enough progress that refineries have to make tough business decisions but you still have a majority of Californians relying on gasoline,” said Daniel Barad, western states policy senior manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “You have to do things in this mid-transition point that’s going to make your stomach hurt a bit but is going to stabilize gas prices in the near term.”
Cap-and-trade clash
The shifting dynamics are spilling into the debate over the state’s landmark cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions, which both state lawmakers and Newsom have endorsed extending beyond its 2030 expiration date. But Newsom upset environmentalists — and cheered business groups — by declining to endorse fixes to the program aimed at further reducing emissions.
The politics have moved markedly since California reauthorized the program in 2017. At the time, then-Republican Assembly leader Chad Mayes persuaded a handful of fellow Republicans to vote for it, arguing it was a more market-friendly option. He lost his job as a result.
Mayes said progressive Democrats explicitly told him at the time that they wanted a more aggressive set of rules in part because they would push up oil prices, hastening a shift to alternative energy. Now, he said, Democrats are responding to the “very clear signal voters are sending to their elected officials” that “it’s just too much right now.”
“If you’re going to talk about affordability then you have to be honest about the policies you’ve put in place and what those costs are,” said Mayes, who left the Republican Party in 2019 and now oversees climate policy for a lobbying firm whose clients include renewable energy companies. “It’s appropriate for people to take a second look and say: ‘How expensive are we going to allow our energy costs to be?’”
But to many climate activists, that kind of calculation reads more like a surrender.
“It’s one of the more disappointing turnabouts,” said Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court, whose group has advocated tougher oil industry rules. “We have backed down, and we may not be flying a white handkerchief, but it’s pretty close to white.”
Marie J. French, Alex Nieves and Jordan Wolman contributed to this report.