Overview: Four of California’s leading candidates for governor, including Javier Becerra, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, and Eric Swalwell, discussed how the state can continue to lead on climate amid shrinking federal support and rising costs of living at a climate-focused forum. The candidates shared their perspectives on who should pay for climate resilience, how to rein in utilities and insurers, and what environmental justice should look like in practice. The forum highlighted the affordability crisis facing Californians, which is driven by the climate crisis and involves many moving parts. The candidates offered different theories of governance, implying a different definition of accountability.
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Just a year after the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, four of California’s leading candidates for governor gathered in Pasadena for a climate-focused forum ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The forum brought together candidates Xavier Becerra, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, and Eric Swalwell. Three other top contenders – Tony Thurmond, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Betty Yee – were invited to submit video responses. Candidates focused on answering one key question: how can the state continue to lead on climate amid shrinking federal support and rising costs of living.
Hosted by California Environmental Voters, UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, The Climate Center Action Fund, and Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, the event was moderated by Sammy Roth and Louise Bedsworth.
The forum highlighted a plain truth that impacts residents across the state: Californians face an affordability crisis — one that is driven by the climate crisis and involves many moving parts. The conversation positioned the state as a global climate leader, whose next moves decide how to fund resilience, protect vulnerable communities, and stay innovative even without federal support.
A simple, but contentious question highlighted the candidates’ first divide: who pays the bill for climate resilience and clean energy? For Becerra, the answer began with those at the top of the income ladder. He repeatedly returned to the idea that billionaires and large corporations are not paying their “fair share.”
“We have billionaires who are paying tax rates that are lower than those hardest working, lowest paid,” Becerra said. “No one who’s making a billion dollars… should be paid at tax rates that are lower than the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher in California.”
Steyer agreed, but cast the issue as a larger systematic issue, calling it “a justice issue” in a state that is simultaneously the richest, but has the highest percentage of people in poverty. His most aggressive proposal targeted oil companies directly.
“They owe the state of California hundreds of billions of dollars for the damage that they did,” Steyer said. “It’s not hard to figure out… Do the math. That’s what we’re owed.”
Porter shared the sentiment that big industry should be the one to pay up, but she focused on a new high-energy user: AI and data centers.
“AI has the potential to make society much more wealthy, and we need to capture that wealth to address the… environmental challenges that we face,” Porter said. “We need to change direction… asking taxpayers and communities to subsidize very large, very profitable industries is what we have done too often.”
Porter asserted that AI will undoubtedly generate massive amounts of wealth, but those benefiting from it, by “using more energy than ever before,” must foot the bill.
Becerra echoed Porter’s point, but also called out data center reliance on diesel generators when the grid is strained, naming diesel as something to move away from.
Swalwell touched less upon taxes, but focused more on investment. He spoke of creating a California Research Fund seeded by global investments.
“I’m going to stand up a California Research Fund, and I’m going to go around the world with the best of California as our ambassadors to seek investments in California,” Swalwell said. The returns, he promised, would “go to energy infrastructure… wildfire management… [and] bringing down the damn costs.”
With questions like these, the four candidates quickly described the map with the fault lines that will likely define the race: tax and sue versus invest and innovate as the primary model of the state’s climate finances.
Following the discussion of who pays, came the question of who protects Californians.
Becerra took the most substantial position, pledging an immediate freeze on utility rates and home insurance premiums in his first 100 days. He maintained that the state could “pull back the curtain” and explain why costs have risen so high before moving forward.
Porter focused on the modernization of what insurance actually covers in what she described as an age of year‑round fire season.
“We also have to recognize that some of the kinds of harms that [the] wildfire victim described are not harms that are clearly covered by insurance policies,” she said, referencing smoke damage and contamination. “This goes to modernizing what is covered, to modernizing how we process and pay claims.”
Steyer pointed to corporate greed and called for legal actions.
“FEMA is not paying the money to the people of California for the damages. The insurance companies are stonewalling people,” he said. “That is absolutely shameful. It should be brought up in court.”
In a one-on one-interview with Black Voice News, when asked specifically about the air quality crisis here in the Inland Empire, Steyer framed the issue squarely as one of environmental injustice and political power. He called it “the classic issue in California,” where large logistics operators often deliberately target “unincorporated communities where they face virtually no opposition.”
For Steyer, the concentration of warehouses and truck routes in these areas is “not a coincidence,” but a structural choice that leaves minority communities bearing the heaviest pollution burden.
He tied that burden directly to health outcomes, especially for children in San Bernardino County.
“That pollution, you’ve got to be paying for that, and you’ve got to be reducing it,” he said, noting that the children who live in San Bernardino County must have vastly disproportionate asthma rates,” he said.
The problem, he emphasized, is not just trucks on highways in general, but their proximity to vulnerable sites. “It’s one thing to have a truck going down a highway. It’s another [to] have a truck going down a highway next to a school,” he said.
Steyer proposed an approach centered on accountability and restitution. He described the real concern as how to be “measuring it, charging for it, and putting the money back” into affected neighborhoods.
Under a “polluter pays” model, Steyer argued that companies should be required to fund mitigation in the same communities they harm:
“Polluter pays, money goes back to community,” Steyer said, while insisting that California must “restrict pollution because it’s always gone to communities like this, and it’s always been unfair.”
While all four gubernatorial candidates agreed fossil fuel companies should pay for climate damages, their respective remedies for utilities and insurers reveal real differences: short‑term freezes versus structural modernization versus litigation and enforcement.
The wider topic of environmental justice as a whole highlighted candidates’ preferences of enforcement versus structural change – they shared the same goals but offered different paths to reach them.
Porter framed justice as both policy and political independence, and argued that enforcement starts with refusing fossil-fuel influence and advancing federal legislation meant to strengthen protections across communities.
Becerra pointed to the work of government already in motion, and described an attorney general approach that leans on California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the courts to force local compliance and back communities fighting oil development near homes and schools.
Steyer named structural racism as the way pollution is sited and defended cap-and-trade as a mechanism that can push resources to frontline neighborhoods. Swalwell cast himself as the prosecutor-in-chief, promising to scale up state enforcement so polluters face consequences, not just rhetoric.
That split matters because it reflects the larger choice that this race will shape: not whether climate change is urgent, but what kind of state California intends to be as disasters accelerate and costs rise. Each candidate offered a different theory of governance – campaign-finance rules and legislation, courtroom pressure, market-based revenue streams, or expanded enforcement capacity – and each implies a different definition of accountability: who pays, who benefits first, and who gets compelled to change.
The forum revealed a Democratic field united on the diagnosis and divided on the prescription. California’s next governor will inherit what Swalwell called a state with “five seasons—the other four and fire season,” along with widening gaps in who is protected and who is exposed. With federal climate support diminishing as resilience bills come due, the point of deliberation isn’t whether California will act – but which blueprint voters will deem best to follow – and which communities will feel the results first.