The Los Angeles Times wrote an analysis of a green billionaire’s political ambitions earlier this week, but forgot to mention the huge schism developing between the labor movement and environmentalists.
The LA Times wrote a piece on Tom Steyer Sunday, examining how the former hedge fund manager and current Democratic money man would fair in a California gubernatorial race.
Missing from the article was any mention of the rift currently roiling two pillars of the Democratic Party: the labor movement and environmentalists. The strains could seriously hamper Steyer’s chances in the Golden State, though readers would not know that based on the LA Times’ reporting.
Steyer’s frayed relationship with the labor movement is well documented.
Trade union leaders sent a letter to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka demanding the union end ties with a super PAC created with Steyer and teachers’ unions called For Our Future.
Steyer, who was one of the key cogs driving the anti-Keystone XL oil pipeline campaign, is the founder of another political action committee called NextGen Climate – which announced a $25 million campaign in April to encourage young people to support and vote for green energy candidates in the November, 2016, election.
The union leaders argued in the letter that the AFL-CIO “seems to consistently minimize the importance of Building Trades jobs and our members’ livelihoods” in the name of an environmental agenda that “has produced mixed results at best and disastrous results at worst for our members and their employment prospects in many instances throughout the country.”
“We are not climate science deniers and have merely sought to ensure that the employment prospects of our members are not negatively impacted in any economic and energy transition,” the leaders concluded in the letter obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Michael Bastasch in May.
Steyer, for his part, is attempting to be one of the first super-wealthy Democrats to win the governorship of California, the LA Times reported.
Nearly 19 wealthy top-of-the-ticket candidacies had ended in loss, LA Times writer Cathleen Decker wrote.
She added: “I mentioned this to Steyer the other day during an interview in Long Beach, where he was spending a sunny Saturday shaking hands with Democrats gathered for a party meeting at a beachside hotel. By now, I added, it must be up to — what, 30? ‘Thirty-one,’ Steyer said, with the kind of mathematical precision that probably drove his success as a hedge fund manager. ‘You counted?’ I asked. ‘I think that’s the number that someone told me,’ he said, smiling. ‘I didn’t count. Someone told me that.”
The back and forth appeared to show how much thought Steyer has put into his decision to run for office, not to mention help explain why he has shoveled truckloads of money into various environmental and liberal concerns – he’s been building himself up as a climate change warrior with resources to push environmental issues.
Jeremy Adler, the communications director with conservative group AR Squared, told TheDCNF that Steyer’s habit of splitting two of the most pivotal groups in the Democratic Party is likely to come back to bite him.
“Tom Steyer’s agenda of opposing all fossil fuel development is a total disaster for the hundreds of thousands of working Americans whose livelihoods depend on the energy sector,” Adler said, “so it’s no surprise that even reliable Democrats condemn him as a ‘job-killing hedge fund manager with a bag of cash.”
Steyer, who sunk more than $8.5 million into unsuccessful bids to get a slew of anti-fossil fuel candidates elected to office in Colorado’s 2014 election, is likely to continue pushing money toward Democratic candidates. In total, he spent more than $60 million in mostly unsuccessful efforts to get candidates elected in the 2014 midterms.
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