Tag: nextgen climate
Billionaire Green Activist Steyer Vows To Battle Trump, Says Money Not An Issue

Billionaire Green Activist Steyer Vows To Battle Trump, Says Money Not An Issue

BOSTON (Reuters) – Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, who has spent more than $140 million on fighting climate change, said on Tuesday he will spend whatever it takes to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s pro-drilling and anti-regulation agenda.

The former hedge fund manager from California is putting together a strategy that will “engage voters and citizens to fight back” once Trump takes the White House in January, he told Reuters in an interview. However, he stressed he was not planning to fight Trump through the courts.

Instead, he would focus on “trying to present an opposite point of view and trying to get that point of view expressed, and communicated to citizens.”

Steyer’s pledge to fight Trump suggests an intensifying battle for U.S. public opinion on global climate change, an issue that has already divided many Americans, lawmakers, and companies between those who consider it a major global threat and those who doubt its existence.

Other U.S. environmental groups are also preparing to resist Trump’s agenda, with some vowing street protests and more established organizations that helped draft some of President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations preparing to defend them in court.

“We have always been willing to do whatever is necessary,” Steyer said, when asked how much money he was willing to spend to oppose Trump’s agenda.

Trump campaigned on a promise to drastically reduce environmental regulation and ease permitting for infrastructure, moves he said would breathe life into an oil and gas industry ailing from low prices, without harming U.S. air and water quality.

He has also called climate change a hoax and has promised to “cancel” the Paris Climate Accord between nearly 200 nations to slow global warming, a deal he said would cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars and put it at a disadvantage.

While the approach has cheered the industry, it has sent shockwaves through the environmental movement, which is confronting the prospect of losing all progress it made during the Obama administration.

Steyer, who had endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, called Trump’s policies dangerous.

“Every single one of these things, whether it was getting rid of Paris or cutting back the EPA, we think are extremely dangerous to the security of every American,” Steyer said. “We think it is based on willful ignorance of the facts and flies in the face of the realities facing the world.”

ARCTIC DRILLING

Steyer’s main political vehicle, NextGen Climate, on Tuesday called on the Obama administration to defy Trump’s pro-drilling agenda by issuing an order permanently blocking all new drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has also promised to ask Canadian oil pipeline company, TransCanada Corp, to resubmit its application to build a pipeline into the United States that would link Alberta’s vast oil sands to American refineries and ports on the Gulf Coast. The project, Keystone XL, had been rejected by the Obama administration after years of mass protests and lobbying by environmental organizations.

Steyer said the project may no longer make sense since a slump in oil prices has reduced the profitability of oil sands production.

Steyer, who four years ago left the hedge fund firm he co-founded to devote himself full-time to environmental activism, said young voter turnout in areas where NextGen focused its mobilization efforts during the 2016 campaign was up more than 20 percent from the last presidential election in 2012.

“Did we get the president we want, absolutely not. Did we get a majority of clean energy supporters in the senate, no,” Steyer said. “But in terms of what we did, and the strategy we took, we wouldn’t do anything differently.”

NextGen poured nearly $69 million into its elections related programs during the presidential campaign, according to federal records compiled by OpenSecrets.org, slightly lower than the $74 million it spent during the mid-term congressional elections in 2014, when only two of the six candidates it supported won.

(Reporting by Richard Valdmanis, editing by Ross Colvin)

IMAGE: Investor, philanthropist and environmentalist Tom Steyer speaks at the Center for American Progress’ 2014 Making Progress Policy Conference in Washington November 19, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

Billionaire’s Political Ads Criticized By Fact-Checking Groups

Billionaire’s Political Ads Criticized By Fact-Checking Groups

By Josh Richman, San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Bay Area billionaire Tom Steyer’s blitz against candidates who are soft on climate change is underway in seven states, but some prominent fact-checking groups say he’s emitting enough hot air to melt a few glaciers.

Negative reviews from watchdogs like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and The Washington Post are dogging one of the nation’s biggest political donors, a former hedge fund manager who ditched his ties to fossil fuels and presented himself as a transparent antidote to the conservative Koch brothers’ semi-clandestine funding network.

Playing fast and loose with the facts is “unwise simply because you’re handing a bat to your opponents to use squarely over your noggin,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It sounds to me as if they need their own fact-checkers on staff.”

Steyer, 57, of San Francisco, was unavailable for an interview. But Bobby Whithorne, spokesman for Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action super PAC, said: “We stand by our ads.”

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog in January, however, awarded its dreaded “four Pinocchios” rating to a NextGen ad citing Chinese investment in Canada’s tar sands and claiming the controversial Keystone XL pipeline would produce oil only for other countries. The Chinese investment is small, the Post found, and NextGen took an oil executive’s words out of context to imply that no oil carried by the pipeline will remain in the U.S.

The ad “relies on speculation, not facts, to make insinuations and assertions not justified by the reality,” the Post said.

Last October, PolitiFact — a renowned fact-checking project run by the Tampa Bay Times — gave its “pants on fire” rating to a NextGen ad claiming Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, then running for governor, wanted to “eliminate all forms of birth control.” Cuccinelli has repeatedly said he has no interest in restricting contraception, PolitiFact noted.

This month, PolitiFact gave “half-true” ratings to a pair of NextGen ads attacking Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s ties to energy companies and polluters. FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, said it didn’t dispute the statement of critics that one of the Florida ads was “total fiction,” though the GOP response had “glaring factual problems” too.

And PolitiFact this month deemed “false” a NextGen ad accusing Iowa U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst of having signed a pledge that “protects tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.” The pledge was a broad vow to oppose all tax hikes.

But Whithorne, Steyer’s spokesman, noted that an Iowa television station had determined that the ad was “mostly true.”

And he is quick to defend all of NextGen’s ads: “The facts are there, and we provide extensive backup to substantiate the claims. With less than 80 days until the midterms, we’ll continue to keep the pressure on the anti-science candidates and highlight their extreme positions.”

Steyer is used to political battles. He took lead roles in California ballot-measure campaigns to defend the state’s landmark greenhouse gas emissions law and to close a $1billion-per-year corporate tax loophole.

Two years ago, he announced he would step down from his business and turn to public policy. He founded NextGen and said he hoped to spend $100 million — half from his own pocket, half raised from others — to challenge candidates across the nation on climate change issues. Steyer says the Koch brothers are out to enrich themselves, while he’s putting the planet first.

In Iowa, Ernst’s campaign is urging television stations to take down NextGen’s ad. In Florida, Scott’s legal counsel issued cease-and-desist letters telling stations to stop airing one of the ads; at least one, in Fort Myers, complied. And Californians Against Higher Oil Taxes, founded earlier this year by oil industry trade groups and other business organizations, says Steyer’s ads help make a case against him.

“It just goes to show that if the public understands the truth about his policies, they’re not going to support it because it’s going to drive up their cost of living,” spokeswoman Sabrina Lockhart said. “So it seems he’s pivoted to lies and distortions of the truth to sell the public on something they’re not buying.”

Sabato, however, said the ads are meant more to mobilize already-sympathetic voters than to change minds. And Tom Hollihan, a University of Southern California political communications expert, agreed.

“For the people for whom the ads are the primary audience, the fact-checking might not have much consequence,” Hollihan said, adding that the fact checks have more effect in correcting the record for media and policymakers.

Steyer doesn’t seem to have raised enough money to reach his $100 million spending goal but has spent more than $20 million so far in this election cycle.

Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Unruh Institute of Politics and former chairman of California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, said the ads’ targets have little choice but to up their own antes.

“Until someone decides to spend just as much money in opposition to these messages as NextGen has spent broadcasting them,” he said, “most voters will never hear a doubting word.”

Screenshot: NextGen Climate/YouTube

WATCH: Liberal Billionaire Launches Ad Campaign Slamming Iowa’s Ernst

WATCH: Liberal Billionaire Launches Ad Campaign Slamming Iowa’s Ernst

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer’s SuperPAC, NextGen Climate, released the first in what is expected to be an avalanche of midterm election ads on Wednesday, targeting Iowa Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst.

Surprisingly, the ad does not mention Ernst’s outspoken denial of basic climate science. Instead, it depicts two comically evil businessmen gloating that Ernst has sold out, and uses her decision to sign Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge to accuse her of protecting tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs overseas.

The ad is reportedly the first in a $2.6 million campaign that will air across Iowa over the next five weeks.

NextGen Climate has pledged to spend at least $100 million — including $50 million from Steyer’s personal fortune — opposing 2014 candidates who refuse to accept the science of climate change. In addition to Ernst, other targets include Governors Tom Corbett (R-PA), Paul LePage (R-ME), and Rick Scott (R-FL), and Senate candidates Scott Brown (R-NH), Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Terri Lynn Land (R-MI).

If the attacks against Ernst make even a marginal difference, it could be critically important in Iowa’s razor-thin Senate race. Ernst currently leads the Democratic nominee, Rep. Bruce Braley, by less than 1 percent in The Huffington Post’spoll average.

Screenshot: NextGen Climate/YouTube

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