Newsom advances cross-border climate, clean energy partnership with Sonora, Mexico

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and his counterpart in Sonora, Mexico, have cemented a bilateral partnership with the aim of bolstering clean energy development and supply chain resilience for both states.

The four-year memorandum of understanding, announced Monday by Newsom and Sonora Gov. Alfonso Durazo Montaño, outlines opportunities for the two parties to advance their collaborative leadership in transnational climate action.

“The hot is getting hotter, the dry is getting drier, the wets getting wetter, as it relates to these atmospheric rivers, this nature of extremes — extremes in our politics, certainly, but also the extremes as it relates to the realities of climate,” Newsom said at a Monday signing ceremony.

Newsom also took the opportunity to offer the Trump administration a poetry slam, by means of a William Butler Yeats line: “Wisdom is a butterfly, not a gloomy bird of prey.”

He contrasted the relationship between Sonora and California to their collective “relationship to the moments that are being advanced in Washington, D.C.”

“There couldn’t be a greater contrast — the wisdom butterfly, not the gloomy,” Newsom said.

Durazo Montaño offered a similar, if less poetic, perspective, stressing the need for the two states to “join forces fighting against climate change” and in “doing this work for the future generations.”

The memorandum of understanding, signed by energy and sustainable development officials, highlighted a series of shared objectives, including an increase in clean energy development, the maintenance of electric system reliability and the expansion of regional access to renewables.

Also on the list is a focus on improving energy efficiency in buildings, strengthening resiliency of the supply chain for parts critical to the clean energy transition, and supporting research and innovation in clean energy and electric mobility.

That commitment to fortifying the cross-border supply chain comes amid the Trump administration’s on-again, off-again threats to tariffs on certain Mexican and Canadian imports.

The memorandum also called for meetings between California Energy Commission experts and their Sonora counterparts, while laying the groundwork for California government entities “to aid the State of Sonora in exploring exporting renewable energy in the United States.”

“Despite the border that divides us, California and Sonora share the common challenge of adapting to a hotter, drier world,” Newsom said in a statement following the ceremony. “But we also share a common drive to advance real solutions.” 

The document also specifies the need for meetings initiated by California economics officials “on supply chain development,” as well as the promotion of a binational research center for electric mobility.

“Sonora and California share a border and challenges,” Durazo Montaño said in a statement. “Today we establish an agreement with this state, a leader in economic growth and actions against climate change, to join forces and ensure that families live in a prosperous region.”