Brown said the new institute is an outgrowth of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2017, as well as with Xie and other academics at China's Tsinghua University. | Getty Images Brown launches California-China climate think tank

SAN FRANCISCO — Jerry Brown is still sounding his signature alarm on climate change — and doing an end run around the federal government.

The former California governor on Monday announced the launch of a climate-focused think tank at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with China's top climate official, Xie Zhenhua.


The California-China Climate Institute will conduct research; train Chinese and Californian scientists, experts and policymakers; and hold a series of "subnational climate dialogues" to advance climate policy in the absence of national leadership, Brown said. It will be housed at Berkeley's School of Law and College of Natural Resources.

Never one to mince words, Brown has been vocal in his post-gubernatorial condemnations of the White House’s ongoing campaign to roll back climate regulations and strip away California’s environmental autonomy.

In a series of colorful tweets, Brown has assailed the federal government investigating carmakers that made an emissions deal with California as “bureaucratic thuggery” that “smacks of Stalinism”; said “We need to turn the lights out on” Trump, “pronto”; and responded to the administration weakening the Endangered Species Act by saying President Donald Trump has “done dumb things, and now you’re doing something utterly dangerous — unforgivable!”

“He thinks of himself as kind of a potentate, and if the auto companies don’t follow the whim of the potentate, they can be tortured by the forces of justice,” Brown told POLITICO in describing the administration targeting car companies. “So that’s an abuse of power in addition to being a bad idea.”

True to form, Brown turned philosophical when describing his new institute, calling it a "a holding action in the face of Trump’s continued assault, but also a catalytic function of stimulation." He paused an interview to retrieve a book by John Maynard Keynes and relay the economist’s adage that “the world is governed by little else than the outdated or defunct ideas of economic and social philosophers.”

“We’re not defunct yet, but we’re going to create some ideas that I’m hoping the practical men will be influenced by,” Brown added.

Brown made climate change his personal mission while in office, traveling the world and signing agreements with hundreds of national and subnational governments to work on emissions-reducing policies. His Under 2 Coalition, aimed at keeping emissions below 2 metric tons per capita, now includes 220 governments in 43 countries.

Gov. Gavin Newsom lauded Brown for his climate activism as he spoke Monday in New York City at the city's annual Climate Week events pegged to the U.N. General Assembly. “The leadership emanating out of California is also a point of pride," Newsom said. "I’ve never seen it at the level and scale we’ve experienced it in the past five or six years."

Brown said the new institute is an outgrowth of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2017, as well as with Xie and other academics at China's Tsinghua University. Despite the United States' rapidly chilling relations with China on the national level, he said the group would be able to keep the lines of communication open.

"We’re totally committed to the kinds of open communication that are closing down virtually everywhere else,” he said. “California, the University of California, China and Beijing together are not chopped liver. We’re somebody. And we’re going to make something happen.”

Xie, a former vice chair of China's main economic planning agency, is now head of the Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University.

Brown, who became a visiting professor at Berkeley earlier this year, said the institute will have ties to Chinese national and provincial governments as well as California agencies, including the California Public Utilities Commission, Air Resources Board and the California Independent System Operator.