POLITICS: Gavin Newsom preens in Brazil — while California drowns

Gov. Gavin Newsom is prancing around abroad while Californians suffer through a natural disaster — and not for the first time. 

The well-coiffed presidential hopeful has a habit of being out of the state during major storms.

In 2023, he left during a deadly blizzard for a vacation in Mexico. While residents of California’s high country were trapped in their homes, Newsom was sunning himself on a beach in Baja on a “personal trip” he wouldn’t cancel.

This time, Newsom is away at the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil, hobnobbing with foreign leaders.

His goal: to pose as president for a week, attacking the Trump administration for its absence while signing toothless agreements to save the planet. 

On Saturday, as Californians were evacuating their homes and dodging “catastrophic” flash floods, Newsom was posting excitedly on X about meeting the vice mayor of Rio de Janeiro.

It’s not that he was unaware of the danger: His official “CAGovernor” account reposted several warnings from federal, state and local government agencies back home about the imminent danger posed by the storm. 

These posts alternated with videos of Newsom hiking into the Amazon to visit an indigenous community, and to see a 15-story weather-monitoring tower. 

Apparently, Newsom cares less about the weather at home than the weather in the rainforest.

Not that he cares about the rainforest all that much.

As Newsom lamented the Brazilian ecosystem’s destruction, his own policies have accelerated it.

California imports more oil from Brazil — 20% of its total supply — than from any country other than Iraq. 

That’s because Newsom and his Democrats have restricted production in oil-rich California.

While pretending to eliminate fossil fuels, California has become more dependent on foreign oil, including offshore oil in Brazil, where drilling will soon begin near the mouth of the Amazon..

That is just one example of California’s climate hypocrisy. 

Newsom and his party have dragged their feet in clearing brush from state land, and have prevented the logging industry from doing so — again, supposedly to save the planet.

The result: massive wildfires that, in just one year, erased all of the emissions gains from nearly two decades of “green” policies in the state. 

The recent Palisades Fire began on state land, partly due to Newsom’s environmentalist extremism.

Newsom has another explanation: the Palisades Fire, he told a gathering in Brazil, was due to climate change.

“We’re on the tip of the spear of climate change,” he said. “Simultaneous droughts and simultaneous floods.” 

That is a shift from Newsom’s other recent explanation, when faced with a lawsuit from devastated residents: He blamed the arsonist who allegedly started a New Year’s Day blaze that reignited as the Palisades Fire in high winds on Jan. 7.

At the time, Newsom claimed that he had pre-deployed firefighting resources across Southern California in anticipation of the danger.

But he did not send crews to the site of the New Year’s Day fire, where the danger was most acute — and where state land was involved.

Newsom did not make sure the state’s emergency response was prepared for the worst, his most important responsibility as governor. 

And with these latest storms, Newsom is literally phoning it in from Brazil.

Newsom has attacked Republicans — often — for leaving their states during disasters.

One of his favorite targets is Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who was infamously caught leaving his state for Cancún, Mexico, during a deadly winter freeze. 

“To be fair, he knows a lot about fleeing,” the governor posted in August, above a photo of Cruz at the airport. 

With that history in mind, Newsom ought to have been on the first flight home to California to lead the storm response.

But no — as of Sunday, Newsom was still in Brazil.

He stayed because he knows the media — especially in California — will never apply the same standards to him as it does to Republicans.

And he stayed because he is betting that Democratic presidential primary voters care less about a candidate’s performance than about how hard he or she fought Donald Trump.

It’s why Newsom has put $40 billion in fire aid at risk by attacking the president instead of working with him.

Climate change is also a useful excuse for Newsom and for other Democrats to shirk basic governing responsibilities. 

If fires and floods threaten California communities, that’s because of fossil fuels and the nasty Republicans who support them — not because Democrats have refused to clear the brush or to build new dams. 

If no one is in charge during disasters, forcing residents to face danger alone, so much the better: Disaster drives home the climate-hysteria point.

Newsom’s goal in Brazil goes beyond typical green ideology: He is pursuing his own personal political ambitions.

Fresh from his Proposition 50 victory, he wants the “B-roll” footage for future presidential campaign ads, showing him pressing the flesh on the world stage. 

If Californians have to endure torrential rainfall, flash floods and mudslides on their own, so be it.

After all, he has bigger, global problems to solve on his way to the Democratic nomination.

Joel Pollak is The California Post’s Opinion Editor. The California Post, a sister publication to The New York Post, will be launching early in 2026.