By ALEX NIEVES
Excerpt:
The progressive megadonor is back to talking about climate policy after an unsuccessful run for governor.
Billionaire investor and climate activist Tom Steyer came up short in his run for governor, placing third in the state’s June primary.
Now he’s back — and going on the climate offensive.
Steyer ran as a progressive, promising to break up utility company “oligarchies,” take on oil companies and redistribute wealth in the country’s richest state. That message wasn’t enough to vault him over fellow Democrat Xavier Becerra or Trump-backed Republican Steve Hilton. But Steyer isn’t changing course.
POLITICO spoke with Steyer, in his first major interview after the primary, about California’s climate goals, a billionaire tax on the November ballot and a wave of progressive campaign victories that has skipped over the Golden State.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You focused a lot on the issue of climate change during your campaign. Now that the primary is behind you, what are your next steps in this arena?
I started and co-run a company called Galvanize Climate Solutions, which is about investing across a range of verticals in the energy transition. I’ve done that for years. I took a one-week vacation in Tahoe and then started doing that again.
The climate statistics are terrible. We are getting hotter much faster than people expected. The impacts of that heat are much greater than people expected. It is hitting Californians specifically. It’s hitting us in terms of home insurance because of fires. It’s hitting us in terms of electricity rates. It’s hitting us in terms of the water coming off the Colorado River. It is hitting us in terms of the price of gasoline because there’s war in Iran, and the supply of oil around the world is curtailed, and the companies that sell gasoline to Californians are selling it at a price which has nothing to do with their costs. They’re making record profits at the expense of California.
…
Steyer: “The price of clean energy has plummeted and continues to plummet. So, what we’re seeing around the world is that virtually all new electricity generation is renewable. The adoption of EVs is going gangbusters. The adoption of solar is gangbusters. Batteries are going crazy. So, the technology is here to turn this around.” …
“That narrative that Trump’s telling, that oil is black gold, he took that from “The Beverly Hillbillies” show in the 1960s. That is incredibly stupid. Our future, the future of the world, is moving very definitively and irreversibly to renewables, to batteries, to new technologies, to heat pumps, to electric vehicles.”
