Gov. Gavin Newsom put California’s climate policy in the international spotlight in his speech to the United Nations last month. But when he goes to China this month to meet with officials on the same subject, he will have to listen as much as he speaks.

California has long led by example on environmental issues, and the world’s biggest polluters, including China, have looked to the Golden State for ideas on reducing air pollution and increasing clean energy production. And California has a leading climate action plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

At the same time, California has seen its position as a leader in solar energy, energy efficient construction and the stability of the home insurance market. Newsom likes to say the future happens here first, but it would be a mistake for him to focus solely on what China needs to learn from California. If California wants to continue to lead the world in this area, Newsom must learn from China.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, China has accomplished something truly remarkable in the past decade in clean energy and transportation, deploying both on a staggering scale. According to a researchToday, China generates enough electricity from clean sources to power Germany

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times more than twice ten years ago. And in just a few years, clean energy generation will equal all U.S. electricity consumption. Although China remains overly dependent on coal-fired power stations, this has not prevented the explosion of its renewable energy sector.

On a recent visit to Beijing, my first since the pandemic, I saw the electric vehicle landscape completely transformed. The city taxi fleet had become almost entirely electric and zero-emission vehicles from numerous brands (mainly Chinese) were everywhere. By last year, Chinese drivers had purchased a total of 13.8 million electric vehicles, with sales accounting for 29% of all car sales in China by 2022.

This is well ahead of the United States, where electric vehicles represented just 8% of sales in 2022. California has done much better, with electric vehicles representing 24.3% of cars sold in the first half of this year. But we can still learn from China on this front, especially given Newsom’s goal to phase out sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035.

So what should Newsom listen to? California’s climate ambitions can only be achieved by deploying clean energy and transportation on an unprecedented scale, and China has much to offer in that regard. Strong industrial policies and fiscal support for renewable energy, combined with increasingly ambitious targets for clean energy deployment, have brought the country to this point. China is also a world leader in offshore wind energy production, an area Newsom has wanted to emphasize in California.

In addition, China has promoted a variety of consumer incentives and tightened regulations that make it easier to buy and drive electric vehicles than gas guzzlers. Not all of the Chinese government’s approaches will be palatable in California, but many of them will.

Not that China can’t learn from California, too: despite its rapid success in deploying clean energy technologies, China still has a long way to go to reach its own goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. Newsom would do well to look for opportunities to collaborate in areas where California plans to aggressively move forward, including methane mitigation, energy efficiency, industry decarbonization, hydrogen development, cap-and-trade and climate adaptation.

Methane mitigation should be an especially rich area for collaboration. Methane is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. And while methane emissions have been a special focus of the Biden administration, Washington has been limited for political reasons in its own ability to work with Beijing on climate or otherwise.

Newsom announced a new Subnational Methane Action Initiative last month, aiming to enlist states and provinces around the world to commit to reducing emissions of the gas. China was conspicuously absent from the signatories and is undoubtedly a target for Newsom. Winning any kind of pledge to reduce methane emissions from abandoned Chinese coal mines would be a way for Beijing to answer international criticism of its reliance on the dirty fossil fuel. California, meanwhile, has its own methane reduction challenges, which can only be solved through international cooperation.

Perhaps the best outcome of continued climate cooperation between California and China would be that they push each other to do better on methane and other climate issues. This is an area where every state and country has room for improvement and reason to do so quickly.

Alex Wang is faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and professor of law at the UCLA School of Law.