SerpApi.Org
California has become a model for other states and the world as climate change has made wildfires a year-round occurrence across North America, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday.
Since he took office in 2019, the Golden State has almost doubled the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s budget from $2 billion to $3.8 billion and acquired multiple military air tankers, allowing it to become the “largest civilian aerial firefighting fleet in the world,” Newsom told reporters during a news conference at an airplane hangar in McClellan Park.
The state also recently began using AI-guided drones to identify and suppress wildfires that can spray water and retardant using a predictive intelligence technology made by a company called TechnoSylva. Those combined efforts have allowed California to “pre-position assets, the likes of which few jurisdictions in the country are able to do,” Newsom said.
The governor, believed to be running for president in 2028, framed the state’s firefighting efforts as a bulwark against the federal government, which still has not fulfilled California’s request to be reimbursed for $40 billion after wildfires devastated Los Angeles last year.
This summer, wildfires have raged in Spain and France, and Europe has suffered withering heat waves as it becomes the fast-warming continent on the planet. Smoke from ongoing wildfires in Canada has drifted into the northeast U.S., worsening air quality in states from Michigan to Maine.
“It is not lost on me that the president of the United States has just imposed a 50% tariff (on Canadian goods) to increase your costs because he said that Canada didn’t do enough to rake their forests,” Newsom said. “That was just promoted by the president yesterday. You can’t make that up.”
Climate change is now an economic problem, as well as a geopolitical one, he said, pointing to how the U.S.’s ongoing war with Iran has sent oil prices soaring to above $90 a barrel, and China has positioned itself as a climate leader while the Trump administration has begun rolling back emission standards for the U.S.
“Climate risk is financial risk,” Newsom said. “You can’t insure it, and so I hope people start connecting dots, not just to the fires, not just the acuity of the crisis as it relates to the impacts we’re feeling - the heat, the stress - but also to the economy, to a geopolitical future where we don’t have to be dependent on the Gulf somewhere or a Strait somewhere else.”
In the U.S., opposition to AI-powering data centers has grown as people fear the technology’s potential to supplant jobs and extractive demands on natural resources like water, for cooling.
Newsom said California was “leading” other states like New York and Illinois looking to put guardrails on the technology, which also plays an outsize role in propping up the Golden State’s budget.
“As you know, we’re the first state in the nation to lead with regulating frontier models, large language models. ... We still need to do more,” he said. “The Trump administration’s approach is ‘let it rip.’ Ours is a little bit more cautious. At the same time, we’re trying to find that balance, always striking that balance, but also talking about its promise and promoting the promise of what AI is delivering in this space and across the spectrum ... as it relates to creating more autonomy in terms of opportunities and access to information and the tools that this technology promotes.”
