Billionaire set to battle GOP over climate

WASHINGTON — Billionaire San Francisco environmental activist Tom Steyer is keeping alive a possible bid for governor in 2018, but in the meantime said he will spend heavily to force Republicans to address climate change in next year’s presidential election, citing evidence in an interview of a shift in GOP positioning on the issue.

In the 2014 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races, Steyer spent $74 million trying to defeat GOP candidates who refused to acknowledge climate change only to see Republicans seize control of

the Senate and gain two governorships. Undaunted, he said he plans to at least match that effort in the current election cycle.

Steyer was among the top individual donors in the 2014 elections, operating through his NextGen political action committee. Speaking to reporters in Washington last week as a prelude to international climate talks scheduled in Paris next month, Steyer would not put a specific figure on his spending plans this time around. But he boasted that he has more volunteers on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire than any presidential candidate in either party.

He is also putting $1 million this year into a California ballot proposition that would raise the tax on cigarettes by $2 a pack, from its current 87 cents.

As for climate change, Steyer said GOP candidates have shifted from last year’s “I am not a scientist” mantra to arguing that a transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy will wreck the economy. To counter that argument, Steyer’s NextGen committee financed a study this month showing that a complete transition by 2030 would create jobs and economic growth nationally. The study acknowledged, however, potentially steep job losses in mining and other industries associated with fossil fuels, especially in the Mountain West.

“They’ve been jumping, in my opinion, from ice floe to ice floe,” Steyer said of the GOP politicians. “When I listen to them though on TV, what they say is, it’s too expensive to do everything. They haven’t talked about it much. They don’t want to talk about it. The American people don’t agree with them, the facts don’t agree with them.”

Steyer said “three P’s” are driving a shift on public opinion on the climate: the president, the pope and Paris. President Obama’s plan to reduce emissions from power plants, Pope Francis’ appeal for action, and the attention focused on the Paris talks are all bring positive attention to the issue, he said.

He also dismissed the effectiveness of a nearly $1 billion dollar counterassault by the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industrialists whose fortune dwarfs Steyer’s.

“There’s a famous Warren Buffett saying about the stock market, that in the short run it’s a popularity contest, but in the long run it’s an adding machine,” said Steyer, who made his fortune as a hedge fund manager. “Their big mistake” in fighting any action on climate change, he said of the Koch brothers, “is they’re wrong. And they are saying something they know to be untrue.”

Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson, an environmental engineer and director of the university’s Atmosphere/ Energy Program, was also in Washington last week to drum up political support for action on climate change before the Paris talks, touting his new study showing how each of the 139 nations in the world could transition entirely to wind, solar and hydropower by 2050.

“The main barriers to getting to 100 percent clean energy are social and political, not technical or economic,” Jacobson told a forum of friendly members of Congress on Thursday.