California governor Jerry Brown, photographed at the California State Capitol, in Sacramento. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Do not ask Governor Jerry Brown about his legacy. On a day in June, a reporter made this mistake and paid dearly for it. Brown was at a podium in the California state office complex in San Francisco, standing next to Barbara Hendricks, the German minister for environment. Together, they had just announced Germany and California’s shared commitment to addressing climate change via the Under2 Coalition—an alliance of 175 cities, states, and jurisdictions representing 35 countries and more than 1.2 billion people, all of them dedicated to reducing carbon emissions, with or without the Paris accords.

The press conference was going swimmingly until someone mentioned the word “legacy.” “I don’t have a legacy,” Brown told her. “I don’t know what a legacy is. In the minds of certain media types, legacy is the central organizing principle of governmental activity. But it’s not my organizing principle.”

Jerry Brown has been in public office for almost 40 years. He was the governor of California from 1975 to 1983. Then he became mayor of Oakland. Then attorney general. In a remarkable third (fourth?) act, he was elected governor of California again in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014. Somewhere in there he ran for president. “I liked running for president,” he says. “That’s why I did it three times.”

We’re sitting in his San Francisco office, high above the city. “Did you just move in?,” I ask, half joking. Besides the most standard objects—desk, shelf, chair—there are no decorations in the room. No pictures, nothing. “Just move in?” he roars. “I’ve been here seven and a half years!”

Brown has 16 months left in office; he will turn 80 next April. But he shows no evidence of tiring. Instead, he seems galvanized by his role as the opposite-coast antagonist to President Trump. Brown just got back from China, where he announced a partnership with President Xi Jinping to reduce carbon emissions; today he heralded the German partnership. It’s as if, in the absence of rational climate leadership from Washington, it’s up to Brown, who, after all, presides over the planet’s sixth-largest economy, to tell the world that there is still intellectually sound leadership in America.

“With President Trump taking such an outlandish position,” Brown says, “he’s actually heightened the focus on climate change. He’s given climate denial such a bad name that he’s given the climate-action movement a thrust that it would never have generated on its own.”

The conversation returns to legacy. I swear I did not bring it up. Again he pounces.

“When the enemy’s firing, you have to fire back,” he says. “You have no time to sit on your petard pontificating, thinking about legacy. We’re on the field of battle here. Climate is changing. Global warming is occurring. Later, when you’re ready for your dotage and have nothing else to do, invent a legacy—I guess. But we’re in the middle of doing things here.”

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