May 12 (UPI) — A nonpartisan office said Tuesday that President Donald Trump‘s proposed Golden Dome missile defense system could cost $1.2 trillion over two decades – far more than the $175 billion he said it would cost last year.
The Congressional Budget Office said in a report that this analysis isn’t based on final blueprints, as full details of the system’s architecture haven’t been announced, Time reported. It said this estimate shows the price of “one illustrative approach rather than an estimate of a full Administration proposal.”
The CBO said that acquisition costs for the system would alone cost more than $1 trillion, and of that, about 70 percent of the cost would be for the interceptor layer, orbital weapons meant to destroy missiles after they’re launched, The Hill reported. This would include about 7,800 satellites.
Gen. Mike Guetlein, the Pentagon official in charge of the project, said in March that it would cost about $185 billion. The CBO report said that this difference in estimated price may mean that the “objective architecture is more limited” for the project than the system accounted for by the CBO, The Hill reported.
Congressional Republicans have earmarked $25 billion for the project in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Pentagon has asked for $17 billion more in a reconciliation bill this year.
The Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request, which includes $750 billion earmarked for the Golden Dome system, says the system “keeps Americans safe, while using innovative program management and acquisition approaches to prudently employ taxpayer dollars,” The Hill reported. Trump has said he wants the system operational by the end of his term.
The CBO said the system it used in its estimate could counter a limited attack but would be overwhelmed by a large-scale one, Time reported. Israel’s similar air-defense system, often called the Iron Dome, has intercepted missiles from Iran and other localized groups but is meant for a smaller area and shorter-range threats, as opposed to the United States’ need to defend a much larger area from long-range attacks, it said.
Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., requested the CBO report. He said Tuesday that the report shows the Golden Dome project “is nothing more than a massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans” that will “do little to advance American national security.”
Earnings Snapshot: Cronos Group beats Q1 top-line and bottom-line estimates
Source link
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (top 2-R) smiles to lawmakers before the arrival of Japan’s Emperor Naruhito at the parliament in Tokyo, Japan, 20 February 2026. File. Photo by FRANCK ROBICHON / EPA
May 8 (Asia Today) — A new political group supporting Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is set to launch within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, raising questions about the return of faction-style politics less than two years after the party formally moved to dismantle its traditional factions.
The Yomiuri Shimbun reported Thursday that the new group, called the National Power Research Association, will hold its first meeting on May 21 with participation from senior ruling party figures including former Prime Minister Taro Aso and former Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi.
The organization is being positioned as a policy study group, but analysts say it could effectively serve as a new political base for Takaichi inside the party.
The group’s abbreviated name, “JiB,” is derived from Takaichi’s campaign slogan, “Japan is Back,” used during the Liberal Democratic Party leadership race last year.
Founding documents distributed to lawmakers this week state that the government and ruling party “will work as one” to implement policy, with a focus on security, energy and resource issues.
George Glass, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, has reportedly been invited to speak at the inaugural meeting on U.S.-Japan relations and related topics.
Although Takaichi herself is not expected to attend the first gathering, the decision to feature the American ambassador highlights the group’s emphasis on the U.S.-Japan alliance, economic security and defense cooperation.
The organization was reportedly spearheaded by Hiroshi Yamada, a lawmaker close to Takaichi, along with senior party officials including Koichi Hagiuda.
Other participants include prominent ruling party lawmakers and potential future leadership contenders such as Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi and policy chief Takayuki Kobayashi.
The group is encouraging participation across current and former factions, both chambers of parliament and newly elected lawmakers.
Still, questions remain over whether the organization will be accepted as a legitimate policy forum or criticized as a de facto revival of faction politics under a different name.
The Liberal Democratic Party pledged reforms after political funding scandals triggered public backlash and accelerated efforts to dissolve traditional factions.
Critics argue that reorganizing lawmakers through policy groups risks recreating the same power structures the party had promised to dismantle.
The development is also being closely watched in South Korea because of its potential implications for regional security and economic policy.
If Takaichi strengthens her position inside the ruling party, analysts expect Japan to pursue more consistent policies on military expansion, the U.S.-Japan alliance, trilateral cooperation with the United States and South Korea, and energy and supply chain security.
At the same time, observers warn that a stronger conservative political base inside the ruling party could also affect disputes involving history, defense policy and constitutional revision.
Analysts say the launch of the new group signals that the Takaichi administration is beginning to build a longer-term organizational foundation for its security and economic agenda inside the ruling party.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.
Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260508010001815
AN EERIE silence hangs over the sleepy Majorcan town where Towie star Jake Hall tragically died this week.
The picturesque streets of Santa Margalida, a peaceful holiday retreat, appear unusually subdued following the 35-year-old’s death in a rented villa.
Investigators believe Jake died from a chest injury caused by a shard of glass.
Initial reports suggested that the reality TV star suffered devastating head injuries after he reportedly “turned aggressive,” police sources claimed.
Now, the £200-a-night luxury villa where he was staying sits sealed off behind police tape, casting a chilling presence over the rustic neighbourhood.
The Sun visited the scene to find a noticeably quiet atmosphere – with empty restaurants, hushed streets and locals speaking in low tones.
Staff at nearby eateries appeared muted, some barely present, as news of the Brit’s death rippled through the community.
A neighbour living right next door to the property appeared visibly shaken.
He glanced nervously towards the cordoned-off home before abruptly refusing to say a word.
One of the few locals out on the streets said: “It definitely feels quieter. I’m not sure if it’s because of his death but it could be.”
The villa itself – complete with two grand bedrooms, a spacious living area and traditional blue Spanish shutters – now stands at the centre of the ongoing probe.
Notably, the booking listing explicitly bans parties and events.
Despite Jake’s celebrity status, residents claim he had gone largely unnoticed during his stay – deepening the mystery surrounding his final hours.
Workers in supermarkets, cafés and restaurants said they had never seen or heard of him before the fatal incident.
A neighbour described the moment police descended on the villa, saying: “I saw a few civil guard officers come to the property and put tape across the road and doors.
“I had no idea what was going on.”
Police sources claim the reality star had been “out all night” on a “booze-filled rampage” before returning to the villa to continue partying.
One insider said: “It appears from what police have been told that he became agitated, possibly from alcohol and other substances he may have consumed.”
Locals also hinted at an undercurrent of drug activity in the area – with one resident appearing to pick up substances in an on-street deal close to Jake’s villa.
An insider added: “The hypothesis that he died after a possible combination of too much alcohol and possibly drugs is still the one that appears to be the most likely at this stage.”
Neighbours reported alarming noises in the early hours before his death – sounds so loud they shook the walls.
One told local paper Ultima Hora: “I began to hear a very loud noise, as if they were drilling something.
“They stopped after about five minutes and then I fell asleep.”
A neighbour of the villa claimed they had heard a group of people talking about drugs in English.
Meanwhile, a model who joined Jake four other men and another lady for drinks in a bar told The Sun how he seemed in more of a party mood than usual when she arrived.
She tells us: “It was a crazy night. We were out for hours and hours. We were in a number of bars and stayed until they shut.
“Jake was in the mood where he just didn’t want to stop, which normally he is like that. But he doesn’t take it overboard.
“This time he went overboard with the alcohol and drugs. And then everyone went back to the AirBnb he was staying in. Quite a few other women came back to party.”
The Sun understands this is when a real shift in mood occurred, according to the partygoer.
She added: “There was like a bunch of s** going on. There was quite a lot of tension in the air, Jake seemed in an argumentative mood.
“Most of the girls left before the police arrived. Everyone was in disbelief, it was devastating and horrifying.”
Emergency services were called to the villa at around 7.30am on Wednesday morning, where Jake was found with fatal injuries.
A police source said: “We are focusing on the theory the victim died in a tragic accident after hitting his head against the glass door but it is still too early to say definitely what happened.”
Police have questioned four men and two women who were staying at the property.
No arrests have been made as investigations continue, with a post-mortem set to take place in Palma.
Jake was no stranger to Majorca, often using the island as a base for both work and leisure.
Tan Su Shan, CEO and director of DBS Group—winner of this year’s Best Bank in Asia-Pacific—discusses the benefit of AI investments.
As global banks navigate trade fragmentation, AI disruption and volatile markets, DBS continues to distinguish itself through strong profitability and an aggressive technology strategy.
In this conversation with Deputy CEO Tan Su Shan, the bank’s leadership discusses how DBS surpassed $100 billion in market capitalization, scaled AI across hundreds of use cases and positioned itself to benefit from shifting intra-Asia trade flows.
Tan also outlines the challenges posed by tariffs, foreign-exchange swings and the accelerating evolution of generative and agentic AI as DBS looks toward 2026.
Global Finance: What factors shaped your bank’s performance in 2025?
Tan Su Shan: We delivered a solid financial performance in 2025, reflecting the resilience of our diversified franchise. Our total income and profit before tax hit new highs of S$22.9 billion ($18 billion) and S$13.1 billion, respectively. Return on equity (ROE) was 16.2%, within our medium-term target and several percentage points above our local and global peers.
A big part of our success was being well-positioned to capture structural growth opportunities arising from the shifting macro landscape, including rising intra-Asia trade and investment flows, as well as new trade and supply corridors between Asia and other regions such as Europe.
GF: What role did Al play in that performance?
Tan: We aim to sustain our leadership as an AI-enabled bank with a heart, using technology to deliver a competitive advantage while creating tangible impact for customers.
We have industrialized AI at scale, deploying more than 430 use cases—four times 2021 levels—powered by over 2,000 sophisticated models. These have delivered measurable outcomes, including stronger risk management, improved controls, and productivity gains. In 2025, our data analytics and AI/ML initiatives generated approximately S$1 billion in economic value.
Building on this foundation, we are embedding Gen AI and Agentic AI into customer journeys and internal workflows. Horizontal capabilities such as our DBS-GPT proprietary generative AI platform provide role-based access to millions of internal documents, accelerating decision-making and problem-solving. Vertical solutions such as DBS Joy, our Gen AI-enabled chatbot, deliver always-on, high-quality customer support at scale, improving customer satisfaction by 23% while handling more than 235,000 AI-powered interactions. Together, these capabilities lift productivity, decision quality, and customer experience by combining machine intelligence with human judgment.
GF: Which milestones did DBS reach in 2025?
Tan: It was a landmark year for DBS, notwithstanding global volatility, and the market’s confidence in our franchise has never been clearer. We surpassed the $100 billion market capitalization milestone in June and closed the year at $124 billion, cementing our position among the top 25 banks globally.
Moving ahead, we remain focused on building a resilient, growth-oriented, and future-ready market leader, anchored by our three strategic moats of trust, data, and culture.
GF: What was 2025’s greatest challenge for DBS?
Tan: Undoubtedly, our greatest challenge was the onset of tariffs following Liberation Day and the market volatility that followed. When you layer on headwinds from interest rates and significant FX fluctuations, you create a perfect storm we had to navigate. Despite these pressures, DBS delivered a solid financial performance. We achieved this by being proactive with our balance sheet hedging, securing record deposit inflows, and maintaining a sharp, strategic focus on high-ROE businesses such as wealth management.
At the same time, technology continued to move at a breathtaking pace, especially with the rapid shift toward Gen AI and Agentic AI. Fortunately, we weren’t starting from scratch, as we have been working with AI for more than a decade. Our early and sustained investments in data and technology gave us the robust foundation needed to industrialize AI across hundreds of meaningful use cases, positioning us to move quickly as the techno-logy evolves.
GF: Does 2026 present new challenges?
Tan: Our strategic priorities remain intact, and in 2026, we will continue leveraging our core strengths—what we term the “4 Ds”: Dependable, Diversifier, Digital, and Disruptor—to be a beacon of stability for our customers amid heightened volatility.
We have embarked on our vision to become an AI-enabled bank with a heart, transforming our operating models, leveraging machine intelligence, and preserving human empathy to reinforce the trust customers place in us. We will continue scaling our structural growth engines, which remain relevant even in a more bifurcated world.
This includes prioritizing growth in high-ROE businesses such as wealth management, transaction services, financial institutions group, and treasury customer sales. We also remain focused on our six core markets in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, China, and Indonesia) and on building connectivity between our Western and Asian clients. Strengthening resilience across every organizational layer remains a key, ongoing priority.
LAS VEGAS — “You know, I was thinking,” Gwen Stefani said, looking out at the crowd before her on Wednesday night at Sphere. The singer was maybe an hour and a half into the first show of No Doubt’s monthlong residency at the dome-shaped venue just off the Las Vegas Strip, and now the moment had come for the hit that changed everything for this once-scrappy ska-punk band from Orange County.
“I was thinking about this next song, and I was thinking about Anaheim,” she continued. “Do you know where Anaheim is?”
Share via
The song, of course, was “Just a Girl,” which Stefani said she wrote “out of pure innocence in a time where I was just becoming aware of myself and my surroundings.” She added that she’d always assumed she’d outgrow the song — that someday it would feel disconnected from the life of a woman who went on to become a pop star with a clothing line and a gig on TV. Here she was, though, about to do “Just a Girl” for 20,000 or so fans eager to sing along.
“You tell me if you think it’s still relevant,” she said.
In a built-to-please town where old hits are welcome on any stage — not least Sphere’s, which these days also hosts the Eagles and the Backstreet Boys — the crowd’s verdict was no surprise. Yet this was a more committed look back than might have been expected, with a loose narrative arc tracing No Doubt’s ascent (rather than its peak) and a set list filled with deep cuts well beyond the catchy singles that once blanketed KROQ and MTV.
Beneath a massive wraparound screen that flickered with vintage camcorder-style footage from the early 1990s, the group played “Excuse Me Mr.” and “New” and “Total Hate ’95”; Stefani and her bandmates — guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal and drummer Adrian Young — did “Trapped in a Box,” “End It on This” and “The Climb,” which No Doubt heads on the internet say they hadn’t performed live in nearly three decades.
Then again, for one of those decades, No Doubt wasn’t performing at all. The band made its ballyhooed comeback in 2024 at Coachella, where it delivered a punchy, compact set of hits and brought out Olivia Rodrigo for a guest spot that demonstrated Stefani’s influence — musical, attitudinal, sartorial — on the generation of female pop stars that came after her. (At Sphere, Stefani’s taste in plaids and animal prints was clearly still casting a spell among her admirers.)
No Doubt’s Sphere residency is scheduled to run through mid-June.
(John Shearer)
The takeaway from Coachella was that the band had worked itself back into fighting shape; Stefani, in particular, seemed eager to prove that her years doling out niceties on “The Voice” and dabbling in country music with her husband, Blake Shelton, hadn’t dulled her edge. Here, the band went further, using Sphere’s state-of-the-art environs to imagine itself back in a dingy club or student union.
There were big visual moments, including a simulated trip through a crumbling amusement park — the “Tragic Kingdom” of the group’s breakout 1995 LP — and a bit with a stories-tall cartoon Stefani towering over the room in her fishnets and combat boots. And even with all of the obscurities, it’s not as though No Doubt skipped its best-known songs: “Bathwater” and “Spiderwebs” were bouncy yet propulsive, while “Underneath It All” and “Hella Good” showcased the players’ nimble rhythmic interplay. Stefani’s voice was at its pleading best in “Don’t Speak,” one of the great pop ballads of the last 30 years, and “Simple Kind of Life,” which was accompanied by a video starring Stefani and Kanal acting out some episode from their ancient romance.
Before “Ex-Girlfriend,” which Stefani wrote amid her doomed marriage to Gavin Rossdale of Bush, the singer said, “It gives me — what is it? The PTSD. But because I absolutely adore you guys, I’m gonna suffer.”
Yet this was the chapter of No Doubt’s story — basically the apex of its popularity — that the band seemed least interested in exploring on Wednesday. The impression you got was that Stefani and her pals hadn’t come to Vegas to cruise or to gloat or even to soak up the easy adulation that’s always on offer here; weirdly, they’d come to remember the struggle.
Tom Steyer is trying to sell himself to voters as an agent of change.
He has vowed to take on entrenched political and economic forces to create affordable housing, make the wealthy pay more in taxes, lower energy bills and protect the environment.
But perhaps the biggest change he is selling is his own.
The hedge-fund billionaire turned climate activist has faced criticism throughout his campaign for past investments in coal plants and private prisons, to name a few, that helped build his fortune and gave him the means to spend more than $150 million of his own money in his quest for the governor’s mansion.
Steyer’s prolific spending has blanketed the airwaves with television ads and helped propel him near the top of an unsettled gubernatorial field in the polls.
The 68-year-old San Franciscan has helped put many Democratic candidates in office as one of the party’s biggest political donors in the past two decades, but has never held public office himself.
He spent more than $340 million in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but dropped out after placing third in the primary in South Carolina, where he had invested heavily.
There is a long tradition of wealthy, self-funding candidates, and the results are mixed at best. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg spent more than $260 million to win three terms as New York City mayor. But he spent more than $1 billion on a 2020 presidential bid and lasted only four days longer in the race than Steyer. Two years later, real estate developer Rick Caruso spent more than $100 million in an effort to become Los Angeles mayor but lost handily to Karen Bass.
Hoping for a better result in his current race, Steyer has staked out a position as the most progressive candidate in the field — touting an endorsement from the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution. He’s picked up other key endorsements, too, from the California Teachers Assn., California Nurses Assn. and numerous environmental groups.
But he faces the challenge of convincing enough liberal voters to support a billionaire with controversial past investments the same year a tax on billionaires, currently enjoying strong support, is poised to be on the November ballot.
“This election is about who you can trust to fight for you,” former Rep. Katie Porter said during an April 22 gubernatorial debate in San Francisco. “One candidate is a billionaire who got rich off polluters and ICE prisons and is now using that money to fund his election.”
Steyer said he understands the broad concerns about his wealth and is willing to vote for the billionaires’ tax in November.
“I know that people are skeptical of billionaires, and I’m skeptical of billionaires,” Steyer said Tuesday in an interview with The Times. “But if you look at this race, I’m the only progressive in the race. I’m the person who’s taking on the corporate special interests.”
He pointed to the millions spent by a super PAC supported by the real estate industry and Pacific Gas & Electric — which Steyer has pledged to break up to bring down utility costs — as evidence that he is the candidate most feared by moneyed interests in the state.
“The companies that are running up the costs are fighting like hell, because that’s how they make their money,” he said. “But somebody’s got to stand up to them.”
The departure of former Rep. Eric Swalwell from the race last month after sexual assault allegations doesn’t appear to have resulted in a major surge of support for Steyer. Rather, it is Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary, who seems to have gained momentum.
But veteran California pollster Mark Baldassare said that he hasn’t counted out Steyer yet.
Tom Steyer, in 2013, as he was campaigning against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
(David Paul Morris / Bloomberg)
“It would be easy to say that he’s reached his peak, except for the fact that there are so many undecideds and Steyer has so many resources at his disposal,” said Baldassare, the statewide survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California.
Steyer has poured at least $875 million into federal and state political committees since 2010, according to an analysis conducted for The Times by OpenSecrets, and federal and state campaign finance records. That total includes the nearly half a billion dollars he has spent on his two races.
In 2013, Steyer left his investment firm and launched NextGen Climate, a progressive political action group geared toward addressing climate change. He has given nearly $270 million to a super PAC affiliated with the group, which was later renamed NextGen America.
The committee has spent tens of millions of dollars on campaigns opposing fossil fuel interests and supporting progressive candidates, though Steyer’s financial support for the group has decreased as he has run for office.
The billionaire also established his climate bona fides by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline during the Obama administration, which became a national proxy fight over climate policy, and by backing environmental ballot measures in California.
Among them was a $5-million investment in 2010’s “No on Prop. 23” campaign, which defeated a conservative effort to overturn California’s greenhouse gas emission reduction law.
Two years later, Steyer invested about $29.5 million in Proposition 39, a winning measure to recoup money from corporate tax breaks to help pay for clean energy projects.
Steyer’s unconventional path to politics began with a privileged upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He studied at the elite Buckley School and Philips Exeter Academy before attending college at Yale University, where he captained the men’s soccer team and graduated in 1979.
After a brief stint on Wall Street, he got a master’s degree in business administration at Stanford University, where he met his future wife, Kat Taylor. They wed on the Stanford campus in 1986.
Steyer worked hard — very hard — at making money.
He was one of several “Wall Street Prodigies” featured in a Wall Street Journal profile from the same year he was married.
Steyer’s work began at 5 a.m. in the office and he seldom took days off — he fretted he wouldn’t have time for a honeymoon.
He eschewed the trappings of wealth — driving an eight-year-old Honda — motivated instead by a “desire to compete, excel and keep struggling to do better.”
Steyer began cutting political checks soon after, but his real emergence as a major political donor came during the 2004 presidential campaign, when he pledged to raise more than $100,000 for John Kerry’s campaign and was talked about as a potential political appointee at the U.S. Treasury Department in a Kerry administration.
Steyer hired Kerry to join his sustainable investment company Galvanize in 2024. Steyer stepped down from the company before entering the governor’s race.
The year 2004 was pivotal for another reason.
A group of students at his two alma maters, Yale and Stanford, along with those at a handful of other elite universities, began a campaign to pressure the endowments at their institutions to stop investing with Steyer’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management.
They cited concerns about some of the firm’s investments, including a coal burning plant in Indonesia and a joint venture between Farallon and Yale to pump out water from an aquifer in Colorado adjacent to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
“Stated simply, we do not want our universities to profit from investments that harm other communities,” the students wrote in an open letter to Steyer. “We are concerned about the impact some of Farallon’s recent investments have had.”
Steyer told the students he appreciated “the importance of the issues that you raise,” but defended his firm’s work, saying that it acted “responsibly and ethically.”
Looking back on that time now, Steyer said it was a turning point.
“I think that experience really was a wake-up call to me,” he said. “It’s when I started to very seriously consider leaving Farallon. I really felt like if I was going to be the person with my values, I was going to have to leave and be independent and do what was right.”
Three years later, Steyer and his wife began their initial pivot to public service, opening a bank in Oakland that would cater to low-income customers
Tom Steyer, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, greets people at an event in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2019.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
But this initial venture highlighted the inevitable collision course between Steyer’s burgeoning activism and his firm’s investments.
At an event that year with then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Steyer and Taylor pledged $1 million in loans to support vulnerable people in Oakland facing foreclosure in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Left unsaid was the fact that Steyer’s firm had extensive financial ties to San Diego’s Accredited Home Lenders, one of the biggest subprime mortgage lenders in the country.
Steyer and his wife began writing bigger philanthropic checks and in 2010 took the Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least half of their wealth before they died.
In 2009, they gave $40 million to endow the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford, the first of several multimillion-dollar gifts to Stanford and Yale to support climate-focused ventures. They pledged $7 million to create the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, also at Stanford, in 2010. It closed last year after its endowment came to an end.
And in 2011, the couple donated $25 million to Yale to help establish an Energy Sciences Institute focused on developing sustainable energy solutions.
But even as Steyer undertook his public transformation from investor to climate activist, his firm continued to make decisions out of step with his newfound commitment.
In 2011, for example, the firm purchased 1.8 million shares of BP, a year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which a BP-operated project dumped nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Steyer resigned from the firm at the end of 2012, though he still has millions of dollars invested in the firm .
Environmentalists have largely been willing to forgive Steyer’s past investments.
“There’s no question he’d be the most knowledgeable and committed climate advocate that’s ever held really high office in America,” climate activist and author Bill McKibben recently told Politico.
While the nonprofit California Environmental Voters has endorsed both Katie Porter and Tom Steyer in the race, Steyer, in particular, has “taken on Big Oil dollar for dollar, toe to toe, and beaten them,” said Mary Creasman, the group’s chief executive.
“He has made this his career and his investment and his passion, so it’s authentic, and voters see that,” she said.
Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, said she’s impressed by Steyer’s climate track record and progressive campaign platform, noting that he’s been an active presence in California’s climate movement for more than 15 years.
That includes not only his work on ballot initiatives and clean energy technology, but also his focus on biodiversity loss and carbon sequestration at his 1,800-acre TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, where researchers are studying regenerative agriculture.
But Steyer has also played a role in elevating climate into a national political issue — including in the early 2010s when it wasn’t a “politically hot topic,” Stokes said.
“He has been willing to spend an enormous amount of his personal money on elections on climate — whether it’s propositions, whether it’s himself running for president on basically a climate platform, whether it’s the Next Gen giant voter turnout campaign,” she said. “I think he has recognized … that politics is where we have to invest our time if we want to make a difference on the climate crisis.”
Despite concerns raised about Steyer’s early investments into fossil fuels through Farallon, Stokes said she’s more apt to criticize candidates who are taking money from oil companies today, such as Becerra, who accepted a $39,200 donation from Chevron for his gubernatorial campaign.
She was also heartened by the fact that Pacific Gas & Electric has funded a $10-million PAC opposing Steyer, because she said it indicates that he aims to hold utility companies accountable for skyrocketing electricity prices amid soaring profits.
“We could actually have a shot here at having somebody who cares about climate change, who wants to hold utilities accountable, who wants to hold big polluters accountable,” Stokes said. “That would just be transformative.”
Steyer’s focus on climate issues and energy affordability could also be a strategic boon in the governor’s race.
Sixty percent of voters in the state see climate change as a major threat to the country and believe that the government is not doing enough to address it, according to polling from the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Californians connect the dots between what’s going on with extreme climate and wildfires and climate,” said Baldassare, the institute’s survey director.
Recent polling has also shown that voters are very concerned about energy affordability and rising utility costs, with 13% of Americans naming it as the most important financial problem facing their family — a 10-point increase from last year, according to an April Gallup poll.
Overall, energy costs tied housing costs as the second-biggest concern following the high cost of living, the poll found.
In November, Democrats who campaigned heavily around energy affordability swept the field in key races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia. Residential electric prices increased nearly 11% between January 2025 and this February, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“Voters are supporting candidates who are leaning into these issues,” Creasman said.
Wieder reported from Washington and Smith from Los Angeles.
