Financier Plans Big Ad Campaign on Climate Change
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers.
The donor, Tom Steyer, a Democrat who founded one of the worlds most successful hedge funds, burst onto the national political scene during last years elections, when he spent $11 million to help elect Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia and millions more intervening in a Democratic congressional primary in Massachusetts.
Now he is rallying other deep-pocketed donors, seeking to build a war chest that would make his political organization, NextGen Climate Action, among the largest outside groups in the country, similar in scale to the conservative political network overseen by Charles and David Koch.
Tom Steyer and David Koch Fortune Live Media / Reuters A championship matchup: On the left, Tom Steyer. On the right, David Koch.
In early February, Mr. Steyer gathered two dozen of the countrys leading liberal donors and environmental philanthropists to his 1,800-acre ranch in Pescadero, Calif. which raises prime grass-fed beef to ask them to join his efforts. People involved in the discussions say Mr. Steyer is seeking to raise $50 million from other donors to match $50 million of his own.
The money would move through Mr. Steyers fast-growing, San Francisco-based political apparatus into select 2014 races. Targets include the governors race in Florida, where the incumbent, Rick Scott, a first-term Republican, has said he does not believe that science has established that climate change is man-made. Mr. Steyers group is also looking at the Senate race in Iowa, in the hope that a win for the Democratic candidate, Representative Bruce Braley, an outspoken proponent of measures to limit climate change, could help shape the 2016 presidential nominating contests.
Mr. Steyer also prospected for potential donors on a recent trip to New York City, where he met with aides to former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has made championing climate change a focus of his post-mayoral political life, but whose own super PAC has focused chiefly on gun control.
Our feeling on 2014 is, we want to do things that are both substantively important and will have legs after that, Mr. Steyer said in an interview. We dont want to go someplace, win and move on.
Mr. Steyer, 56, accumulated more than $1.5 billion during his days at the hedge fund Farallon Capital Management, before he retired in 2012. Today, he is among the most visible of a new breed of wealthy donors on the left who call themselves donor-doers, taking a page from the Kochs, Mr. Bloomberg and others to build and run their own political organizations outside the two parties and sometimes in tension with them.
But the newest wave of single-issue super PACs including groups seeking greater regulation of guns and of campaign fund-raising has drawn criticism even from those who share those priorities.
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