Rep. Gary Peters has also taken up the cause at Netroots Nation. One Dem's gamble on climate change

This story is part of an ongoing POLITICO series on how national policy issues are affecting the 2014 midterm elections.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — This Rust Belt state is one of the last places you might expect to wage a winning Senate campaign by trumpeting climate change to liberals at Netroots Nation and boasting about voting for cap and trade.


But Michigan Democrat Gary Peters is making the climate cause a central message in his neck-and-neck Senate campaign, in a state that for decades built gas-guzzling cars into a foundation of the U.S. economy.

Peters’ aggressiveness on the issue stands out in a campaign year when other embattled Democrats are attacking President Barack Obama’s climate policies, ducking positions on controversies like the Keystone XL oil pipeline and running away from past votes that could bite them at the ballot box. But the House member is gambling that he can appeal to voters — including conservative-leaning residents in northern Michigan — with a climate message honed to home-state priorities like the health of the Great Lakes.

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The question: Is Peters offering a vision that can help other Democrats win tough races in manufacturing-heavy states? Or a cautionary tale?

Peters is clinging to narrow leads over Republican Terri Lynn Land in recent polls as they vie to succeed retiring Sen. Carl Levin, and it’s unclear whether he can sell climate policy to voters who may increasingly care about the issue but rank it a low priority compared with jobs and the economy. The race is split in other ways as well: Peters is getting big support from national environmental groups and climate activist billionaire Tom Steyer, while Land’s backers include a group backed by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

Still, supporters like Michigan Democratic strategist Jill Alper think Peters is smart to play up climate change — and she says other Democrats should do the same.

“I think in a lot of states, this would be good politics and a good leadership issue,” she said. In Michigan, she added, protecting the Great Lakes is a cause that both Republicans and Democrats support.

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Land’s campaign is trying to spread the message that Peters is too radical for Michigan, although her campaign declined repeated requests to make her available for an interview to discuss her own position on climate change.

“Congressman Peters is willing to sell his position to the highest bidder, and right now that’s the billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer,” Land said in a written response to questions. “When Michigan unemployment was at 15 percent, Congressman Peters ‘proudly voted’ for cap-and-trade, even though it would cost around 100,000 Michigan jobs,” she added, citing estimates by groups like The Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Manufacturers.

As for her own views, Land wrote that there “is no denying that the climate is changing and we must take measures to protect the environment.” When asked how much of that change is caused by humans, Land spokeswoman Heather Swift said in an email that “Terri believes we need to keep an eye on it; but she doesn’t believe we should put a meter on the business end of a cow, like the EPA does.”

Land’s campaign told The Washington Post in May that she doesn’t agree with Peters “on the extent of the effect of human behavior on our climate.”

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Peters has sought to turn the issue against Land, demanding repeatedly that she declare where she stands on the reality of climate science. He said her position is “clearly out of step with the overwhelming scientific evidence.”

“Her stances are about ideology,” he said in an interview. “They’re not about practical problem-solving.”

Peters has also taken up the cause at Netroots Nation, the annual liberal gathering held this year in Detroit, where he proclaimed that “climate change is real” and introduced progressive icon Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). And he says on his House website that he “proudly” stands by his vote in 2009 for the cap-and-trade bill, a measure that soon sank to oblivion in the Senate and proved a political liability for several Democrats in 2010’s midterm elections.

One possible factor in Peters’ favor is that the politics of climate regulations have changed in Michigan in the past several years. The auto industry once resisted calls for reducing its carbon pollution through increased fuel efficiency standards, but the Obama administration got automakers to agree during his first term to a sharp tightening of those requirements.

On the other hand, not even all of Peters’ supporters buy his message that climate change is harming the Great Lakes. “Global warming occurred hundreds and thousands of years ago” as well, said John Pampu, CEO of Big Jon Sports, which owns a downrigger fishing production plant in Interlochen where Peters and Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow talked to employees last week about the threat posed by invasive Asian carp.

Still, Pampu said he and many of his employees would support Peters, even though many lean conservative. He said voters there care about protecting the Great Lakes because they’re such an economic engine for the state. “We do want to protect it and we’ll fight tooth and nail,” he said.

Peters is careful to cast his climate message in terms that appeal to voters’ varied interests.

On the trail in northern Michigan, Peters’ green message mainly deals with harmful algae blooms, Asian carp and other concrete threats to the Great Lakes. In fact, he barely used the phrase “climate change” during a three-day campaign swing last week that included stops in Traverse City, Muskegon, Lansing and Detroit, although he discussed lake levels and met with a farmer worried about how weather patterns were affecting his crops.

“You have to move beyond the abstract and get to the tangible for folks to understand that it’s an issue that must be addressed,” Peters said in the interview. He added that he often talks about the economic gains that acting on climate change could bring to Michigan, where “we can be a real leader in alternative energy manufacturing and processes.”

Despite his support for tackling climate change, Peters has raised some concerns about how the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed carbon rules for power plants would affect Michigan compared with neighboring states. But that doesn’t put off green groups supporting him, such as the League of Conservation Voters.

“He has always been a supporter of cutting carbon pollution, and he wants to make sure these rules work for Michigan,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs.

Peters is also skeptical of the proposed Keystone pipeline. In a recent Michigan public radio interview, he said that “we’ve got to ask more questions” about the project. And he raised concerns about the possibility of an oil spill, pointing to a high-profile 2010 pipeline accident near Marshall, Michigan.

Peters’ climate-focused strategy reflects a growing sentiment among Democrats that global warming can be a winning political issue — contrary to the political dangers it seemed to pose after 2010’s tea party tidal wave. But it has to be framed in terms people understand, like the economy, jobs, water and air quality, and public health — not greenhouse gas emissions or glaciers melting in Greenland.

“People get in their camps and they tune out when they hear that it’s Al Gore’s thing,” said Nicholas Schroeck, director of Wayne State University Law School’s Transnational Environmental Law Clinic, who met with Peters during the Detroit stop. “When you really unpack it and you talk about things like clean water and how we’re having impacts to our water from climate change, then I think people really start to get it.”

The trend stretches far beyond Michigan. Steyer’s television ads rarely talk about climate change explicitly, even though his super PAC has committed to spend $100 million or more making it a defining issue in this year’s elections. Even the Obama administration’s sales pitch for its climate regulations often focuses on warnings about childhood asthma rather than carbon dioxide levels.

The administration’s National Climate Assessment, released in May, also outlined the specific damage that it says is already starting to occur because of the changing climate, including the impact on the Great Lakes. Those include “changes in the range and distribution of certain fish species, increased invasive species and harmful blooms of algae, and declining beach health,” according to the report.

Alan Steinman, director of the Robert B. Annis Water Resources Institute at Grand Valley State University, said climate change will have a litany of effects on the Great Lakes, and those impacts could interact in unpredictable ways. Warmer water could cause a decline in ice cover, which could lead to lower water levels, Steinman said. High temperatures could also create an “ecological window” for invasions by algae species more acclimated to warmer regions.

Peters and Stabenow stopped at the Annis Institute during their Great Lakes tour and were followed by men with video cameras, whom Peters aides identified as Republican trackers looking to capture a possible stumble on video. When approach by POLITICO, one of the men said he was “not at liberty to talk to reporters.”

Democrats and environmental groups are also trying to tie Land to the Koch brothers, noting that the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity has spent millions on ads criticizing Peters. In addition, Peters and his allies say Land won’t protect Michiganders from a Koch affiliate that stored large piles of petroleum coke, a powdery byproduct of oil sands refining, along the Detroit River.

“It still looks like our Michigan, but the out-of-state billionaire Koch brothers use it as a dumping ground,” says an ad from the League of Conservation Voters, which has endorsed Peters and is spending $400,000 on a television campaign linking Land to the Kochs and blasting GOP opposition to EPA climate rules. The ad accuses the Kochs’ “front groups” of “trying to buy a Senate seat for Terri Lynn Land.”

Steyer’s group, NextGen Climate Action, is planning to run its first TV ads in the state in the coming weeks. Its effort will include spending several million dollars on paid media, an on-the-ground field program and a digital campaign presence that will highlight Land’s “extreme positions and strong ties to the Koch brothers and special interests,” a NextGen official said.

Peters isn’t new to climate advocacy — as a Central Michigan University professor before he was elected to Congress, Peters said he organized a policy forum on climate change and Michigan’s economy. More recently, in the Michigan public radio interview last week, Peters made the case that tackling climate change can help the economy, echoing the Obama administration’s messaging on the issue.

“I get frustrated with folks who see being strong on the environment and good for the economy as mutually exclusive,” he said. “They’re not. That’s what ideologues think.”