Bee Opinionated: Newsom cuts on climate + AI is just OK + Fresno makes downtown deal | Opinion

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Hi again! It’s me, Robin Epley with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board — slidin’ into your inbox yet again on a Sunday evening, with the best opinion journalism in the state. (You’re welcome.)

But let’s start with something that’s not an opinion, it’s just a fact: The climate crisis does not care about California’s $31.5 billion budget deficit.

But in order to meet that financial shortfall, Gov. Gavin Newsom made significant reductions to climate investments after announcing the state budget plan in January.

Opinion

“Those cuts included taking away more than $1 billion in clean energy funding, more than $1 billion from the state’s zero-emission vehicle incentive programs, and $2 billion from clean transportation like transit, walking and biking funds. In all, Newsom pruned $6 billion from California’s climate agenda,” wrote The Bee’s Editorial Board.

State environmental groups were livid, and rightfully so.

Last year, California legislators and Newsom were praised for being courageous on climate change after failing to pass serious climate change legislation in the previous three years. But this year? Newsom seems to believe that a challenging budget cycle means California can economize on climate legislation when it absolutely can’t.

“We appreciate that Gov. Newsom is striving to avoid additional cuts to climate priorities, especially as California continues to face difficult financial circumstances,” said Katelyn Roedner Sutter, California State Director of the Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement. “But unlike the governor’s investment proposal, the impacts of climate (change) cannot be delayed to future years.”

But there is a potential solution: We could stop subsidizing corporate polluters. That would pour billions back into the budget, and help the state to meet its ambitious climate targets in 2030 and 2045.

California has already had to declare four separate states of emergency this year due to climate-related disasters and it’s only May. The Central Valley has flooded this spring, and the ever-threatening wildfires are yet to come this summer and autumn.

“The effects of climate change — 116-degree days, unprecedented wildfires, floods, landslides — already mark the seasons in California. The time to reverse the effects of greenhouse gasses is finite. Science doesn’t care about politics.”

AI? More Like Just OK

“The debate over the potentially catastrophic consequences of artificial intelligence has everyone up in arms, which means it will eventually eat us alive and kill us.”

Editorial cartoonist and writer Jack Ohman downloaded the ChatGPT app last week, which uses computer processing to create human-like dialogue, to varying degrees of success.

He remains unimpressed.

“In order to really test the capability of ChatGPT, my first question was this: ‘Gavin Newsom speech.’

“As an AI language model, I do not have the capability to generate a speech on behalf of Gavin Newsom. However, I can provide you with some information about his recent speeches.

“Wow. You’d think artificial intelligence would be more, you know, intelligent.

“But no. It isn’t. I mean, even I, a humble cartoon artisan and part-time editor/columnist, can do a better job at crafting a Newsom speech. Here goes:

“‘Foundationally, the hierarchy of real-time exigencies in this frame can be harnessed to literally be iterative in a delta sense, and that this deep-dive into our response metric is, in fact, as an old African adage once told us, localism is determinative.’”

As long as Jack Ohman’s brain is around, I don’t think we need fear the singularity quite yet.

New Kid On The Board

“We are delighted to announce that Philp will rejoin The Bee Editorial Board as a columnist and editorial writer on May 22.”

Tom Philp, a former associate editor of The Bee’s Editorial Board in the 1990s and early 2000s, won the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing in 2005 for a series urging the restoration of Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley.

A California native and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Philp was a decorated journalist for more than 20 years at the San Jose Mercury News and The Bee before he joined the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as a strategist in 2007.

“I feel like I’m coming home,” Philp said. “I’ve learned a lot about how the California government works for the last 16 years. I hope this makes me a better journalist in the years ahead and I can’t wait to reconnect with this community and The Bee readers who make it all possible.”

Welcome back to The Bee, Tom!

Opinion of the Week

“A conservative mayor & a liberal governor walk into a bar…” — I just really liked this headline from The Fresno Bee Editorial Board last week, all about the lunch meeting that ultimately got Fresno $250 million in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023-24 budget revision to spruce up downtown. It’s a good read.

Got thoughts? What would you like to see in this newsletter every week? Got a story tip or an opinion to tell the world? Let us know what you think about this email and our work in general by emailing us at any time via opinion@sacbee.com.

See ya later alligators,

Robin