title:  WATCH: CA Governor Gives SCATHING Speech That Openly Defies Trump On A Major Issue
text: Even though Trump appears to have softened his own position on the idea that climate change is a  hoax perpetrated by the Chinese,  some of his cabinet picks suggest he s still very much a climate denier, and he himself has targeted the fossil fuel industry as ripe for repealing environmental regulations. But California has made a lot of progress of its own on the environment, and Governor Jerry Brown will not let Trump or a Republican Congress change that.He plans to act in direct defiance of anything Trump does. At the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco, he flat-out said: We re ready to ride the backlash back to sanity, sustainability, and truth! Scientific truth is such an alien concept to Trump that it s ridiculous. Then again, pretty much any type of truth is an alien concept to Trump.Brown wasn t done after that, either. He also said: We will set the stage. We ll set the example. And whatever Washington thinks they re doing, California is the future. If Trump turns off his satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite. We re going to collect that data. California does have facilities capable of launching satellites, so that s not necessarily an empty promise. In fact, Vandenberg Air Force Base has seven rocket launches scheduled for 2017 already. One launch will put a weather satellite in orbit, while another will put several Earth observation satellites in space.Trump s behavior on climate change since winning the election is alarming to anyone who trusts science over conspiracy theories and religious dogma, and California is no exception. If Trump puts laws into place, or repeals laws that California needs, Brown says: We ve got the scientists, we ve got the lawyers, and we re ready to fight. We re ready to defend. California is no stranger to this fight. It s not immediately clear how Brown will pay for his defiance of Trump and the GOP on something like launching satellites, because Vandenberg is a federal facility (obviously), and dependent on both its military budget and NASA s budget, the latter of which is at the whim of a Congress hostile to action climate change.Regardless, it s clear that he will do his best to push forward however he can, Trump s climate-denialism be damned. Judging by the response he got from scientists at the conference, they plan to help him out in any way they can, too.Watch him shred Trump to ribbons below:Featured image by Justin Sullivan via Getty Images