Mother Jones; Jack Kurtz/ZUMA; Spiegel & Grau
Tom Steyer is skeptical of human kindness—at least as a means to positive global change. As he describes in his new book, Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War, the billionaire climate activist argues that to address an issue as “complex” and “rife with self-interest” as the transition away from fossil fuels, the world can’t rely on companies and organizations to act out of sheer altruism. “I’m skeptical of any solution that requires humanity’s collective heart to grow three sizes,” he writes.
Instead, he points to another tool: capitalism.
It’s a force he’s intimately familiar with, and one he has clearly benefited from. You may remember Steyer from his recent bid for president—or maybe you don’t, because he dropped out in early 2020 after earning just 11 percent of the Democratic vote in the South Carolina primaries—but before that, Steyer earned a fortune as the founder of Farallon Capital, a hedge fund that under his leadership he says grew from $6 million to more than $20 billion over two and a half decades.
“I’m skeptical of any solution that requires humanity’s collective heart to grow three sizes.”
In 2012, after some self-reflection and an especially impactful meet-up in the Adirondacks with environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, Steyer left Farallon to pursue climate advocacy. (McKibben had just published an article in Rolling Stone titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” and Steyer heard him on the radio. “I cold-called him,” Steyer recalls, “and said, ‘You want to go on a hike?'”) In 2021, Steyer co-founded Galvanize Climate Solutions, a climate investment firm.
Still a “proud and committed” capitalist, he argues that “markets are the quickest way for human beings to change things at scale,” whether that applies to oil and tobacco or clean drinking water and vaccines. Markets, he writes, are amoral. And for a long time, fossil fuels ruled. But now, Steyer sees the world at a turning point. As he told me over Zoom in April, “cleaner is cheaper.” And for wealthy investors, himself included, doing the “right thing” by funding green solutions can also be profitable.
“Part business book, part climate manifesto, part memoir,” as his marketing team described it, Cheaper, Faster, Better reads as one long monologue in which Steyer argues that readers should become, like him, “climate people” and incorporate climate into “every big decision you make.” Throughout, he compares our fight against climate change to World War II: The........