Climate Change Update: California Plans Fight Against President-Elect Donald Trump's Policies And Cabinet

California Gov. Jerry Brown isn’t taking President-elect Donald Trump’s ambivalence toward climate change and the outright hostility of some of his cabinet picks to the concept in stride, vowing the state will “launch its own damn satellite” if the incoming administration turns back efforts to contain warming temperatures.

Trump lost California by more than 3 million votes. The state has some of the strictest environmental laws and Brown is a longtime environmentalist. He was nicknamed "Governor Moonbeam"by Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko in 1976 for promoting a state-sponsored satellite.

The governor delivered a fiery speech to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco late Wednesday, saying the state is “ready to fight,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Much of the nation’s climate research is done by NASA, and Brown worried funding for the space agency might be cut.

"If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite," Brown vowed.

Trump, who once posted on Twitter that "the concept of global warming was created by the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive," has selected former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to head the Department of Energy, an agency Perry once vowed to eliminate if he won the presidency. He also has selected Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency even though (or maybe because) Pruitt has sued the EPA numerous times trying to overturn environmental regulations.

NASA currently has a $2 billion budget for Earth science and could lose half of that. Two of Trump’s advisers, former Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania and economist Peter Navarro, complained before the election the space agency is too focused on "politically correct environmental monitoring" of climate change in an op-ed published by Space News.

Walker told Scientific American last month that budgets should be realigned and environmental research would be better placed in other agencies.

"We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight. We’re ready to defend," Brown said, vowing to oppose any federal efforts to interfere with such scientific facilities as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"I am going to say, 'Keep your hands off. That laboratory is going to pursue good science,'" Brown said, adding that climate change denial is just another example of the "post-fact" or "anti-fact world" in which Trump and his followers live, the Sacramento Bee reported.