The president of urban America, California Gov. Jerry Brown, gave a speech at the recent American Geophysical Union conference that not only declared war on the backward climate policies of the president of rural America, Donald Trump, but made it very clear that his state has the economic will and power ($2.5 trillion GDP) to pursue its own programs and policies. The things is this: Trump wants to shutdown NASA's 58-year earth-monitoring project, which includes a set of satellites that observe our planet's lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. This information is used to track not just climate change (check out the new and terrifying data on Antarctica) but also "hurricanes, coastal erosion... land use, wildfires, and even the approach of solar storms."

This is, to use the words of the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, the age of reality. And Trump is determined not to face the data provided by the technologies that give this age its name. Brown's response? He boldly told the scientists at the conference that "[i]f Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite." Hillary won California by a 2-1 ratio, and if the state was properly represented in the electoral process, it should have placed her in the White House comfortably. The combined economic activity of deep blue California, Washington, and Oregon is $3 trillion, which if separated from the US economy would form the fifth-largest economy in the world.