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Tom Steyer’s New Campaign Runs on Old Hypocrisy
Billionaire activist Tom Steyer is back — this time running for governor of California — and he has wasted no time launching his campaign with a claim that is already misleading. His opening message to voters is that California’s crushing energy costs are the fault of monopolistic private utilities — a storyline he is using to cast himself as a champion of affordability. We will get to that claim in detail below. But first, it’s worth pausing on the irony at the center of Steyer’s public persona: after making his fortune investing in and promoting fossil-fuel industries, he has reinvented himself as a frontline environmental crusader, joining the modern jihad against carbon emissions. Now he is blaming California’s energy costs on everything except the policies he spent years promoting.
From Oil Profits to Climate Crusader
For years, Steyer built enormous wealth through hedge-fund investments that included oil, coal, and other carbon-intensive industries. That fortune later financed his political reinvention as a climate activist. As I detailed previously in a Thanksgiving Day [ [link removed] ]New York Post [ [link removed] ] column [ [link removed] ] examining his record, Steyer made billions from fossil fuels before deciding to use that money to attack the industry that funded his rise. It was a remarkable political makeover — one that won him applause on the left only by quietly setting aside how his fortune was made.
When Steyer took this activism to the national stage in his failed run for president, he spent hundreds of millions of his own dollars and disappeared from the race almost as quickly as he entered it. The lesson was unmistakable: unlimited personal spending could not manufacture public trust. Now he is trying again, this time in California, and the money is flowing even faster. He dropped roughly $12 million into the Yes on Proposition 50 campaign, underwriting an ad blitz that elevated his own profile as much as the ballot measure itself. Days later, reports surfaced that he had written a $20 million check to launch his gubernatorial campaign, with little doubt that more was to come.
Money is not his obstacle. Credibility is.
Trying to Purchase an Affordability Message
Steyer has suddenly repositioned himself as a crusader for affordability in a state already buckling under the cost of housing, fuel, electricity, and everyday necessities. His newest move is an attempt to persuade Californians that their sky-high power bills are the product of “monopolistic” investor-owned utilities. He has leaned heavily into the idea that utility monopolies are the central reason electricity is so expensive here, promising to “break up monopolistic power” and deliver dramatic rate reductions.
That argument does not survive even a cursory look at the numbers.
California’s three major investor-owned utilities now post the highest residential electricity prices in the continental United States. Pacific Gas & Electric’s bundled non-CARE residential customers have been paying average rates in the low-to-mid-40-cent-per-kilowatt-hour range in recent months. Southern California Edison reports average residential rates just above 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, climbing into the mid-30s with recent increases. San Diego Gas & Electric’s residential rates have hovered in the high-30-cent range and have pushed up toward 40 cents per kilowatt-hour — among the most expensive of any large utility in the country.
How Other Investor-Owned Utility States Compare
Now compare that to other states that also rely on investor-owned utilities.
Florida Power & Light customers typically pay around 15 cents per kilowatt-hour — less than half of California’s average. Texas, served by large investor-owned utilities such as Oncor in a competitive market, also averages in the mid-teens, roughly 15 cents per kilowatt-hour. Even New York, often cited as a high-cost energy state, averages in the mid-20s per kilowatt-hour — still far below California’s statewide average, which now sits a little above 32 cents.
All of these states rely on investor-owned utilities. The business structure Steyer attacks exists nationwide. The price explosion does not.
Something else is at work.
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The Real Drivers of California’s Energy Costs
Here is the inconvenient truth Steyer prefers not to discuss: California’s electricity prices are primarily driven by layers of taxes, fees, mandates, and regulatory experiments born of the state’s aggressive climate agenda.
Utilities are required to meet some of the world’s most stringent renewable-energy mandates. They must purchase power from favored “clean” sources regardless of relative cost. They must absorb billions in grid-hardening projects ordered by regulators. They must comply with carbon-trading rules, cap-and-trade fees, renewable portfolio standards, battery-storage requirements, transmission upgrades, and regional emissions-reduction targets — all of them. At the same time, the state presses toward a 100-percent clean-energy mandate by 2045.
Every mandate carries a cost. Every cost ends up on the monthly bill.
In Texas, electricity pricing reflects competition, energy abundance, and a more restrained regulatory regime. In Florida, energy policy prioritizes reliability and affordability while upholding environmental standards. In California, energy policy has become a never-ending laboratory for ideological climate experiments — regardless of the cost to consumers.
Yet Steyer would have voters believe the real culprits are private utilities, as if state regulators do not sign off on every rate hike, every capital project, and every new cost layered onto the system.
He spent years — and tens of millions of dollars — helping to build the very regulatory framework that now makes California electricity unaffordable. Now he is running for governor as if this system appeared out of thin air.
A Campaign Drenched in Cash, Not Candor
Steyer’s political strategy is familiar: flood the airwaves, redefine the past, and try to purchase moral authority through repetition. What he cannot buy is a new record.
He championed the same climate mandates now woven into California law. He financed ballot measures expanding regulatory authority. He promoted carbon-reduction strategies that explicitly accepted higher energy prices in the name of “changing behavior.” He celebrated aggressive government management of the energy sector — and now professes surprise at the predictable result.
His entry into the governor’s race guarantees one thing: Californians will spend the next year and a half watching a billionaire present himself as an outsider battling a system he helped construct.
So, Does It Matter?
California is entering one of the longest and most heavily financed campaign seasons in its modern history. Tom Steyer will spend freely, shape narratives aggressively, and attempt to recast himself as a champion of affordability in a state desperate for relief. But money cannot repeal cause and effect. The policies he spent years advancing are the same ones driving California’s energy costs upward.
Progressive policy experiments, piled one on top of another, have made nearly everything in California more expensive. Energy is simply the most visible example. On this issue, Steyer is not correcting misinformation — he is manufacturing it. And the character of this opening argument all but guarantees the tone of the campaign to come.
Of course, Steyer is not the only upwardly mobile California politico trying to put “lipstick on a pig” and declare that draconian climate policies are actually making things more affordable. Gavin Newsom tried this spin last month in Brazil [ [link removed] ]. No one is buying it.

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