Gavin Newsom is raising alarms on climate change again—and getting basic facts wrong. The California governor vows to sue the federal government over the Trump administration’s repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” the main legal basis under the Clean Air Act for mandating reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions. Mr. Newsom claims the reversal will trigger “more deadly wildfires” and “more extreme heat deaths.”
Age-adjusted heat-related death risk in California has risen modestly in recent decades—enough to account for 90 additional annual deaths likely linked to higher temperatures. But he omits the other side: Warming has helped reduce age-adjusted cold-related deaths by more than 5,000 a year. Citing only the tiny heat increase while ignoring the large decrease in cold-related deaths is misleading.
As for wildfires, Mr. Newsom has long wrongly focused on California and the Western U.S. while ignoring that global warming is global. He has repeatedly referred to California as “the tip of the spear of climate change,” including after last January’s Palisades Fire. Years earlier, amid West Coast wildfires, he said climate change’s role “cannot be denied,” that the science was “absolute” and the data “self-evident.”
Global data contradict this. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s satellites have tracked fires globally for more than 25 years. In the early 2000s, about 3% of the world’s land burned annually—in total acreage, an area about twice Mexico’s size. The trend since has been downward: 2022 hit a record low of 2.169%, and 2025 nearly matched it at 2.198%, the second-lowest. That’s a reduction of over 25%, sparing an area of land larger than Texas and California combined each year. North America is the only continent where burned area is increasing, but it accounts for only 2.2% of the global total.
Despite Mr. Newsom’s pronouncements, global warming isn’t the main driver of fires in North America. Poor planning puts more houses in extreme fire-risk zones. California’s surge in wildfires stems overwhelmingly from poor forest management: decades of fire suppression that built up fuels, with almost no prescribed burns. Studies indicate nearly 20% of the state needs controlled burns to reduce risk, yet only 0.1% to 0.3% receives them annually.
Wildfire CO2 emissions have also plummeted globally, hitting a satellite-era low last year—down 3 billion tons from early-2000s levels. This undercuts claims of supercharged fires and feedback loops of carbon release. Because less of the world’s landscape is burning, the result is less air pollution, especially in heavily populated areas in Africa. A 2024 Lancet study found that deaths from fire-related air pollution declined between 2000 and 2019, even as the global population increased over 26%. Adjusted to today’s population, this means about two million people would have died from such pollution in 2000. Toward the end of the study period, 400,000 fewer people died each year because of the reduction in fire-driven air pollution.
The wildfire decline is a centurylong pattern driven by human adaptation. In the early 1900s, nearly 4% of global land burned yearly. Last year, only 2.2% did. Better land management, farming practices and suppression have tamed global fires.
Some claim that “intense” fires are worsening, citing a 2024 Nature paper that declared extreme fire events doubled globally from 2003 to 2023. But a subsequent Nature review demolished that claim: The original study inflated trends by clustering fire hot spots and measuring their “radiative power” as intensity. Properly analyzed, extreme fire didn’t burn more; its frequency decreased by about 35%. Yet NASA’s fire homepage still prominently features the original study’s claim.
Mr. Newsom’s push for aggressive mandates and lawsuits to preserve federal climate rules ignores these facts and gives priority to high-cost, low-benefit policies. According to United Nations models, even if the world’s wealthiest nations made major emissions reductions, far exceeding what California or the U.S. could do, the effect would be negligible: It would avert less than 0.2 degree Fahrenheit of warming at significant cost. Emerging economies will drive most future emissions. Policies like California’s vehicle mandates have imposed economic pain for negligible global effect, a trade-off voters elsewhere have rejected.
Global fires are dramatically declining in extent, emissions, pollution death risk and intensity. Mr. Newsom’s rhetoric may energize his supporters, but Americans deserve evidence-based policies, not cherry-picked alarm