Personally, I don’t believe that Tom Steyer, who spent more than $300 million of his own money running for president in 2020 and just spent another $216 million on his campaign for governor, is driven by ego or vanity or some deep psychological need to hear trumpets play when he enters the room.
I think it’s possible that the Steyer campaign was a business decision, a “Hail Mary” pass to try to save climate alarmism from being destroyed by a panic over affordability.
If you haven’t noticed, climate alarmism is fading, even in California. Everyone has noticed that gas prices are higher in this state than in neighboring states, not to mention oil-producing states, a club that California is eligible to join.
Everyone has also noticed that electricity rates have roughly doubled in California over the last ten years, driven in part by the ever-tightening Renewables Portfolio Standard, mandates that force utilities to sign costly long-term contracts to source 60% of the electricity they sell from renewable, mostly solar and wind, energy by 2030, and 100% by 2045. Utilities also have to pay for electricity that’s still on when the sun is down and the wind isn’t blowing. The costs are passed to ratepayers, and the costs are very high. Approximately 20% of utility customers are behind on paying their electricity bills.
While the state is pretending to run on wind and solar energy, California imports electricity from other states that are not so precious about how it’s generated. California also imports oil and now gasoline, due to refinery closures driven by new laws and regulations that have turned an essential industry into a piñata for politicians.
Maybe that’s why Xavier Becerra could take large campaign contributions from Chevron and Tom Steyer could not convince many voters to be angry about it, despite spending nearly the GDP of a small nation to get his message out.
Now Tom Steyer is out, and the state’s costly climate regime of mandates, subsidies, bans and penalties could be on its way out, too.
The California Air Resources Board ran into a buzz-saw of opposition over the latest regulatory amendments to its cap-and-invest program, previously called cap-and-trade. It’s designed to enforce greenhouse gas reductions by requiring refineries, utilities, manufacturers and other facilities to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases produced by their operations. The money from the sale of the permits goes into a special fund in the state treasury, where politicians somberly cash it out to special interests and boondoggle projects like the bullet train, now slated to get $1 billion per year through 2045.
CARB encountered opposition from all sides when it tried to make adjustments both to the cap on permits and to the division of loot from selling them. The program, first authorized in 2006 by the Global Warming Solutions Act, stands exposed as just one more tax on productive enterprise to subsidize unproductive enterprise. Carbon emissions serve as the excuse to transfer the money.
California’s greenhouse gas reduction targets, often described as “aggressive” or “ambitious,” have forced all kinds of costly and unproductive investments in “green” technologies and projects, investments that wouldn’t be necessary if not for the government making them necessary.
This has contributed to the high and rising cost of living in California, and elected officials are finally showing signs of backing away. Some have grilled CARB officials at hearings, and others have signed stern letters to the regulators, reminding them of their legal obligation “to design regulations that minimize ratepayer impacts.”
Adding to this new zeitgeist is the pummeling from Washington, D.C., where officials are changing regulations in a way that undercuts California’s climate policies, making it difficult for the state to ban gas-powered engines, build new wind and solar energy projects, and pile fees and charges onto the use of oil and gas.
There’s also trouble within climate-policy-world. A dire climate “scenario” forecast that activists have waved around for years was declared “implausible” by an international team of scientists and was quietly retired last month. And in December, the journal Nature retracted a paper that had claimed climate change would result in costs in the high trillions of dollars. The publication cited problems with the data and methodology.
Data and methodology are the problem with the entire climate agenda. Based on computer models fed terrifying assumptions, “the science” has reliably projected climate doom that justifies any level of spending, no matter how destructive to human lives today. California has been its laboratory.
Can you guess Tom Steyer’s business? That’s right, he’s in the business of investing in green technologies and services that possibly no one on earth would buy without government mandates, subsidies, bans and penalties.
In 2021, Steyer co-founded Galvanize, a climate investment firm focused on financial opportunities from the “energy transition” away from fossil fuels and toward such things as government-mandated electrification of buildings and transportation, carbon removal and storage projects, and complex financial engineering in a landscape of tax credits and carbon credits.
“Structural change in energy, industry, and intelligence is not a niche theme, but a defining force in the 21st century economy,” the founders state on the company website.
But it might be changing back. President Trump won re-election promising to increase oil production while ridiculing wind energy, and Steve Hilton just knocked Steyer out of the governor’s race. Hilton is running on a platform that includes increasing in-state oil production and eliminating some of CARB’s climate regulations in order to lower the price of gas.
With affordability a top concern of voters and five months to make the case, Hilton’s candidacy could mark the beginning of the end of the climate alarmism that has dominated energy, transportation and housing policy in California for two decades.
Did Tom Steyer invest $216 million in order to get into power, just to ensure that his multi-billion-dollar portfolio of climate investments would float on eight more years of mandates, subsidies, bans and penalties?
If you were him, would you?
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley