Climate investor Tom Steyer: ‘I’m 100% sure that bringing children into this world is still the right thing to do’

Oil and gas companies will fight tooth and nail to delay it. But even they know it can’t be reversed.
Still, as much as I would like to say that we don’t have to worry about climate change harming, and perhaps even defining, the future of a child born today, that just wouldn’t be true.

Optimism doesn’t mean blissful ignorance, and looking at the science, it’s clear that we’re far from out of the woods. In fact, we’re still making the crisis worse. Each year that we pump more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than we can sequester, we further disrupt natural systems that human beings have depended on for millennia, unleashing even more extreme weather events—from heat and drought to hurricanes and wildfires—that have already become frighteningly routine. To put it simply, the longer we continue to burn fossil fuels on a massive scale, the worse our future will be.

And not just for as-yet-unborn generations. Recently, I had a conversation with a friend about my age. He said, in essence, that climate change is real, and caused by human beings, but that it’s going to be the next generation’s problem. All I could think was, seriously? Tell that to people in Arizona, Texas, Vermont, and Hawaii. Or Libya, Greece, Pakistan, and Canada. A warming earth claimed victims in each of those places last year alone—and the full list of such places would be far longer. Climate change is here, and even if it doesn’t kill you or drive you from your home, it’s going to affect you no matter where you live.

At the same time, however, the global nature of the threat also means that there’s a worldwide opportunity to help defeat it. Nowhere is the adage that “anyone can make a difference, and everyone should try” truer than in climate.

Which brings me to the other reason I’m 100% sure that bringing children into this world is still the right thing to do. Embedded in the idea that the best response to a warming world is to abstain from having kids is the assumption that a human life must, by definition, be a burden on our planet. But that’s just not true. Every day, I work with people who will leave the earth far better than they found it. Earth, and the 8 billion human beings who inhabit it, are very lucky that these people exist and that they’ve chosen to spend their time in the way that they have.

Throughout this book, I’ve highlighted some of the people who have devoted their lives—often after a mid-career change in focus—to fighting climate change. Their activism, ideas, and businesses are making the clean energy revolution possible. But while their stories should give us hope, they can’t be cause for complacency. We’re doing more to stabilize our planet than most people thought possible just a few years ago. And at the same time, the honest truth is that we’re still not doing nearly enough.

While a growing number of brilliant scientists, engineers, business people, activists, and political leaders are devoting themselves to protecting our planet, I would never want you to think we’re going to win on climate because of people who are smarter than you. We’re going to win on climate because of you.
Perhaps you read that last sentence and wondered if that’s really true. Can you personally make a meaningful difference? Trust me. You can. In fact, now is the perfect time to change your life in a way that reflects the realities of our changing world. Stabilizing the planet is the fight of our lifetimes—and it’s a fight we need you to join.

How, specifically, can you have the greatest impact? I think it comes down to three areas: personal choices, active citizenship, and purpose-driven careers. By “choices,” I mean the individual actions we take as consumers. There are a lot of small ways you can help reduce humanity’s overall emissions. In its document Actions for a Healthy Planet, the United Nations suggests a dozen ways you can help the world meet the Sustainable Development Goals laid out in 2015. They include everything from buying an electric vehicle to installing an electric heat pump in your house to throwing away less food.
These are all good ideas. In many cases, despite the reams of fossil fuel propaganda trying to convince you that doing your part on climate will be expensive, making climate-conscious choices will both save you money and improve your quality of life. Also, the choices you make as an individual do have impacts on overall markets, even in small ways. If you’re an early adopter of cleantech, you’re helping start-ups grow more quickly. If your neighbors see you driving an electric car, putting solar panels on the roof, or saving money with a heat pump, they’re more likely to do the same. For all these reasons, if you want to become a climate person, an easy first step is to ask yourself, “How can I, personally, get closer to net-zero emissions?”

But as I’ve said, while reducing your carbon footprint can be the beginning of the change you make to your life, it can’t be the end. I worry that it’s naïve, and perhaps even counterproductive, to suggest that solving climate starts at home—it makes it seem like climate is purely a matter of personal responsibility, shifting blame to consumers and letting the fossil fuel industry off the hook.

Focusing on individual choices would be like saying, 30 years ago, “Lung cancer is a worldwide public health crisis, so you need to quit smoking.” Quitting smoking is a good thing to do. But it’s not a solution to a global problem, and it’s no match for corporations who make billions of dollars perpetuating that problem for as long as possible.

That’s where citizenship comes in. I’m not referring to the kind of citizenship that comes with a passport. Instead, I use citizenship in the sense of active, engaged participation in your community. Citizenship is what drives collective action, especially in democracies. Which means that harnessing your power as a citizen is one of the most effective things you can do to help stabilize our planet.

Citizenship takes many forms. Among the most direct is to get involved in politics. Party politics has a bad reputation these days—and believe me, I can see why. But as the saying goes, elections have consequences. Consider the most recent presidential race. Joe Biden wasn’t my first choice for his party’s nomination, in no small part because I was running against him. As president, he’s made some climate-related decisions, such as approving the Willow oil project, that I definitely wouldn’t have made.
But it’s hard to overstate the impact that American voters had when they elected Joe Biden in 2020—and could have again this year. A bipartisan infrastructure bill that helps modernize everything from mass transit to our power grid. The Inflation Reduction Act, the single biggest investment in cleantech in world history. Denying fossil fuel companies the right to drill on millions of acres in the Arctic, including on public land leased for drilling by the Trump Administration. All this, and so much more, would never have happened if the outcome of the last presidential election had been different. President Biden and his administration have been the strongest proponents of a robust climate response in history. By far.
And in this coming election, the difference between two presidential candidates on climate has never more clear. On one hand, you have a president, and a party, determined to build on the successes of a first term—bringing down energy costs, supporting new technologies, and helping get them into the hands of consumers nationwide. On the other, you have a candidate just ready and waiting to put Project 2025 into practice, throttling clean energy, and putting the full weight of the federal government into propping up oil and gas. Donald Trump was the worst climate president in history. He’s promised, proudly, to be even worse if he gets another shot—and the Republican Party is determined to help keep that promise even if Trump himself doesn’t wind up back in office.

Today, you don’t have to love politics to get involved in politics. You just need to care about preserving a livable planet. We can’t afford a four-year-long pause in the clean energy revolution, let alone a giant, fossil fuel–funded step backward. Whether it’s encouraging friends and family to vote, knocking on doors, donating money, using your social media (including the original social media—having conversations) to counter misinformation, or amplifying climate news that helps people understand what’s at stake, there are so many ways to be an active citizen in an election that, in many ways, could be the fossil fuel companies’ last stand.

Also, while presidential politics gets most of the attention, that’s far from the only place where citizenship makes an enormous difference. In some ways, oil and gas has even more influence over statehouses than they do in Congress, because they can hire lobbyists to pursue their interests with less public scrutiny than they’d receive at the federal level. You can help change that. Help cast a light on what’s happening in state government by writing an opinion piece or a letter to the editor. Get involved with a local campaign. Or even run for office yourself.

Nor is citizenship limited to electoral politics. Take my home state of California. These days, we’re a reliably blue state, but putting into place new laws and programs to help stabilize the planet still requires political will. Just last year, our legislature was debating a bill that would require businesses operating in California to disclose its Scope 3 emissions— emissions from every piece of the supply chain. Because just about any company that wants to operate at scale has to do business in California, passing this bill represented a huge potential win for climate measurement not just in the Golden State but around the world.

As usual, the oil and gas industry fought against this initiative with everything they had. What made the difference was the grassroots movement on the other side. Ordinary people, some acting on their own, some through organizations, encouraged local lawmakers to go big. They made sure assembly members and state senators knew that they’d be held accountable if they sided with fossil fuels over their constituents, and that if they did the right thing, a grassroots army would have their back. And while the fossil fuel industry and its allies like to pretend that climate is an issue that only rich, overeducated white yuppies care about, the polling showed that in California—just like in the rest of the country—African Americans and Latinos care more about taking action on climate than any other group.

At the same time, some of the biggest companies in the world stepped up to provide a business counterweight to oil and gas. They understood that being on the right side of this issue isn’t just good for the planet or for future generations—it’s hugely important to their customers and employees. Together, California demonstrated how change happens. These kinds of efforts are taking place around the country and the world. No matter where you live, they’re something you can be part of.

Finally, citizenship frequently doesn’t involve politics and government at all. While small-scale initiatives within a community don’t have the same influence as nationwide or statewide laws, often an effort that begins in just one neighborhood can be the start of something that changes the entire country, or even the world. Whether it’s protesting or organizing in person, or using your platform on social media, there are always opportunities for climate people to be engaged citizens.

Excerpted from Cheaper, Faster, Better © 2024 by Tom Steyer. Published with permission of Spiegel & Grau.

Tom Steyer is the founder of Farallon, co-founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions, and the author of Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War.