Tom Steyer, a California billionaire who has openly opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, is pouring $100 million into political campaigns across the country to support candidates who are aggressively pursuing policies that curb carbon dioxide emissions.
Politics have so far stalled progress on addressing climate change, Steyer told a gathering at the Vermont Law School during a lecture on Friday.
“That’s why we are bent on trying to affect the politics in the country,” Steyer said. “We will not win this unless people participate politically.”
Steyer, a climate activist and retired founder of Farallon Capital Management in San Francisco, is taking a state by state approach. He is backing Democratic governors across the country. Steyer last year gave the Democratic Governors Association $250,000, and an additional $5,000 through his new political action committee NextGen Climate Action, according to the Internal Revenue Service. In the 2012 election, Steyer raised $1 million for President Barack Obama.
One of the candidates Steyer is backing is Gov. Peter Shumlin, a long-time supporter of renewable energy programs.
Shumlin stands uncontested in this year’s gubernatorial race. Steyer gave the governor a $2,000 donation last year.
The $9.5 million NextGen Super PAC recently ran ads in Witchita and Washington, D.C., needling the Koch brothers for refusing to debate Steyer on climate change. The Kochs run petroleum refineries and have spent $22 million on campaign contributions to Republican candidates since 1990, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The Koch brothers have spent $87.2 million on lobbying since 1998. They plan to spend $125 million on the 2014 midterm congressional elections, according to Politico. Steyer has pledged $5 million to support Democratic Senate races.
Steyer said states like Vermont can develop energy policies that could serve as a model nationwide, citing the state’s participation in a regional carbon cap-and-trade program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas initiative (RGGI), as an example.
“We have a federalist system. When it comes to climate change, many of the states are doing really good things,” he said.
Steyer denied a request for an interview.
Gov. Peter Shumlin, who heads the Democratic Governors Association, echoed the Obama administration’s “all-of-the-above” attack on climate change. This includes harnessing the power of wind, biomass, solar, hydroelectric power and natural gas, he said.
“As we do all-of-the-above, we’re creating jobs and economic opportunity,” Shumlin said.
Steyer said he is hopeful the nation will begin to mitigate climate change because scientific studies show the Earth’s temperature has already increased, the polar caps are melting and extreme weather events will become more frequent.
“The dogs are not barking. We have not heard an intellectual or data-driven response to any of those studies,” he said. “It’s not about the science, we’re not hearing a comeback on that.”
The political response has been much less “thoughtful” than the science. Steyer said many elected officials still deny that climate change is caused by human consumption of fossil fuels.
