Meet the liberal billionaire that wants to be the next governor of California (as opposed to the liberal billionaire who wants to be president of the United States). I nicknamed Tom Steyer "King Coal" long ago because he amassed the bulk of his fortune from mining coal overseas, thus, by his avowed lights, befouling the environments of other countries with hurricanes of soot and inking their water and otherwise condemning their populations to horrible, lingering, agonizing deaths. But in America Steyer is hell-bent on eradicating fossil fuel usage of any sort, no matter how clean and "environmentally responsible" it is, and herding us all into cold, damp caves to live as our distant, primitive ancestors once did. Except for elites like King Coal, of course.
He's kicking off his gubernatorial campaign early by trying to get to the bottom of, you guessed it, why gas prices in California are fifty percent or more above those of pretty much anyplace else in the country:
He recently called on the State Senate to subpoena industry executives to explain why prices surged in California this spring.
In Anaheim on Friday, Steyer and Jamie Court, president of the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, released a memo on public opinion about two potential ballot measures.
One measure would impose a 10% oil extraction tax and dedicate the revenue “to making higher education affordable for California residents.” The other would strengthen “disclosure requirements for oil companies’ management of gasoline supplies and prices.”
“If the Legislature and the courts will not act,” he said recently, “I believe the citizens will have to take matters into their own hands. Either there is something nefarious going on here, or the structure of the market itself is unacceptable. In either case, we need to fix the problem.” [emphases added]
Y'see, this is the kind of crap that puts me squarely in the "They know exactly what they're doing" camp versus the "They're incompetent/ignorant" camp. I simply cannot believe that a man with enough on the mental ball to gain a ten- or eleven-figure fortune does not grasp that by making a commodity artificially vastly more expensive, the price of that commodity must vastly increase. If Tom Steyer's IQ was sufficiently low not to be able to connect those two dots, he'd be sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons and mumbling to himself, not preparing a grand campaign to take over the Acapulco Golden State. It's the low-information voters he's targeting that don't "get" the rudiments of Economics 101, or can even pronounce it. They're the ones that will buy into King Coal slapping double-digit extraction taxes on the oil industry, banning all but a ridiculously complicated formulation of gasoline that is horrendously costly to refine because only two refineries are equipped for it, and then blaming "Big Oil" for "price gouging" and "greedy profiteering" when they have to pass the costs onto consumers via huge price hikes at the pump in order to stay in business.
And Tom Steyer will succeed four-term (!) governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown as governor of California, while the latter rests and recuperates for his run for a fifth term in 2026.
You know why I think the bulk of Californians outside of Los Angeles and San Francisco/Oakland haven't fled America's Greece? They can't afford the gas to leave, and it's too long a walk.
Still think King Coal doesn't know what he's doing?
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