Tom Steyer spends big to shift climate change’s political winds

Tom Steyer in Los Angeles this month. Tom Steyer in Los Angeles this month. Photo: Damian Dovarganes / Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press Photo: Damian Dovarganes / Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Tom Steyer spends big to shift climate change’s political winds 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

By Tuesday, San Francisco hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer will have poured more than $85 million into his crusade to put climate change at the top of the political agenda and force Republicans and their fossil-fuel donors on the defensive.

If it works, Steyer will be able to claim some of the credit for keeping the Senate in Democratic hands. If not, he’ll be “the Sheldon Adelson of 2014,” said Kathy Kiely, managing editor at the political money-tracking Sunlight Foundation — referring to the casino magnate who with his wife spent $92 million in the 2012 elections to help Republicans, only to see most of them lose.

Right now, it’s looking iffy for Steyer. Political handicappers are tentatively predicting a Republican takeover of the Senate, where control hinges on a handful of toss-up contests on which Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action committee has spent millions of dollars on aggressive advertising and ground campaigns backing environmentalist Democrats.

Steyer, 57, has an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion, a fortune made founding Farallon Capital Management, a hedge fund in San Francisco. He quit his firm in 2012 to devote himself full time to climate activism, moved by the issue’s near-invisibility in the 2012 presidential race, said Chris Lehane, the veteran San Francisco Democratic operative who masterminded the NextGen strategy.

Tough task

When he announced plans to spend at least $50 million on the 2014 midterm elections, Steyer told the New York Times the sum would be “a really cheap price to answer the generational challenge of the world.”

National environmental groups have bolstered the effort with millions of dollars of their own. But they are facing strong headwinds with an electoral map that heavily favors Republicans, a Democratic president with plunging popularity and a historical tendency by voters to turn against the president’s party in his sixth year in office.

Lehane said that no matter which party ends up with control of the Senate, there is ample evidence that Steyer’s effort has succeeded.

Steyer’s goal, he said, is “to change the politics of climate.” Drawing a parallel with same-sex marriage, Lehane said that once Republicans “start to recognize that it’s an issue that’s problematic for them, that’s when you begin to get the whole paradigm to flip.”

The tipping point on same-sex marriage arrived “when Republicans began to stop using the issue themselves offensively and had to start playing defense,” Lehane said, “and that’s exactly what’s happening on climate in this cycle.”

'I drive a hybrid’

Lehane pointed to Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst, a Tea Party-backed Republican locked in a tight campaign against Democrat Bruce Braley. Ernst wants to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and has adopted the now-common mantra among Republicans that she “is no scientist” regarding climate change. But when pushed in debates, Ernst was on the defensive, telling voters, “I drive a hybrid car, and my family recycles everything.”

In Colorado, Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner refused in a debate with incumbent Democrat Mark Udall to say whether he believes humans are changing the climate. But Gardner released an ad showing him posing in front of a windmill and saying, “So what’s a Republican like me doing at a wind farm? Supporting the next generation, that’s what.” The ad describes Gardner as “a new kind of Republican.” That race is rated a toss-up.

In Florida, after NextGen began spending money to defeat conservative Republican Gov. Rick Scott in his re-election race against Charlie Crist, a former Republican turned independent who supports action on climate change, Scott announced a “Let’s keep Florida beautiful” tour and began touting his efforts to combat sea level rise in Miami and protect coral reefs.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Kiely, however, said election results are what count, not soothing ads or debate toss-off lines.

“Are they trying to say because Joni Ernst has changed her tune on recycling, that’s a victory?” Kiely said. “I would think if he if spent $4.1 million to defeat a candidate and they end up winning, it’s not a victory.”

The Steyer campaign has built a ground effort in seven Senate battleground states, courting “climate voters” who care about the issue but often don’t vote in non-presidential elections.

Koch brothers’ investments

Among those scoffing at the effort are allies of the brothers David and Charles Koch, whose family fortune was built on oil refining. The brothers are reportedly spending an estimated $125 million to back Republicans in the midterm elections.

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a group chaired by David Koch, said polls show that “climate change remains stuck at the very bottom” of voters’ concerns, far behind issues such as the economy and foreign policy.

“Here’s how bad it is for the environmental left right now,” Phillips said. “The majority of the ads that mention climate or energy are pro-energy, pro-Keystone pipeline. ... Who would ever have thought that an oil pipeline stretching across the midsection of the country would be a winning political issue, not for the environmental left but for conservatives? But it is.”

Steyer’s fortune, large as it may be, is no match for the Kochs’, whose combined net worth is estimated at more than $80 billion. If the Kochs are spending $125 million, “they would be more than canceling Steyer out,” said Russ Choma, an analyst at the Center for Responsive Politics. The brothers have neither confirmed nor denied the figure.

But Lehane said NextGen has turned Koch money into an issue in some races, including the Senate contest in Michigan between Democrat Gary Peters and Republican Terri Lynn Land, a contest where polls show Peters pulling ahead.

Lehane said the outside spending “became one of the signifier issues in the campaign,” and the Kochs pulled out “because no matter how much they were spending, it was actually creating bigger and bigger negatives.”

Raising profiles for 2016

NextGen picked its Senate targets not just for this year, Lehane said, but with an eye to the presidential race in 2016, to raise the profile of climate and clean energy in states such as Iowa, Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire and Michigan that hold the keys to the presidency.

In addition to focusing on fossil-fuel-dependent toss-up states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, Lehane predicted, the 2016 candidates will work to win over the “40,000 voters in Florida who are worried about the fact that their houses are going to be underwater, or the 20,000 voters in Iowa whose farms have been impacted by extreme weather.”

Carolyn Lochhead is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: clochhead@sfchronicle.com