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SAN FRANCISCO — California Gov. Jerry Brown started the week by signing a pair of actions to get his state to use nothing but electric power drawn from green sources like wind and solar by 2045. He ended the week Friday by announcing that the state would launch its “own damn satellite” to track down greenhouse gas emitters who fuel global warming.
The twin actions were meant to demonstrate the power California, and other cities, states, corporations and individuals have to take action against global warming — particularly in the face of inattention or hostility from President Donald Trump and the federal government.
In the days in between the twin announcements, Brown hosted a gathering of nearly 5,000 environmentalists, elected officials, corporate chiefs and activists from five continents at the Global Climate Action Summit here. They repeatedly promised to do more to rein in global warming while trying to spur on an equal level of commitment from 195 national governments.
The week was a melange of high aspirations, escalating pledges of greater action against greenhouse gases and longtime laments about the calamities that await the world if it continues to move slowly on what Brown and others deemed an “existential” threat to humanity.
“In California, with science under attack, in fact we’re under attack by a lot of people, including Donald Trump, but the climate threat still keeps growing,” Brown told delegates assembled at Moscone Convention Center. “With science still under attack, we’re going to launch our own satellite, our own damn satellite, to figure out where the pollution is.”
Brown’s office said the satellite — to be developed in conjunction with the San Francisco-based Earth-imaging company, Planet Labs, and launched by 2021 — will allow the state to track greenhouse gas emissions.
The government could then crack down on catastrophic releases of carbon dioxide, methane and other pollutants, said Stanley Young, a spokesman for the state Air Resources Control Board. And it could use data to detect more chronic problems and develop policies to abate them, Young said.
It hasn’t yet been determined whether data from the satellite would be available to others who want to track greenhouse gas emissions, Young said.
Brown, 80, will leave office in January at the end of his fourth term in office. His first two terms spanned from 1975 to 1983, when he earned the nickname of “Governor Moonbeam.” That moniker came, at least in part, because of Brown’s proposal for the state to join in a satellite project.
Well into his second stint in office, in late 2016, Brown told a group of scientists at an event for the American Geophysical Union that some people were denying the science that made it clear humanity’s activities were warming the planet. He described rumors that Trump would even “turn off the satellites that are monitoring the climate.”
While Trump has never said he intended to cut off data from America’s climate satellites, a top adviser did say the administration intended to crack down on “politicized science” by refocusing the mission of NASA’s earth science division away from climate change.
At the time, however, Brown added: “If Trump turns off the satellites, California is going to launch our own damn satellite. We’re going to collect that data.”
It wasn’t clear then if Brown was serious about that pledge. On Friday, he made it clear that he is.