Billionaire Steyer Spends $15M Pushing Low-Priority Climate Change Message in Florida

In an effort to oust Gov. Rick Scott, billionaire activist Tom Steyer has underwritten a nearly $15 million campaign focusing on climate change, an issue one poll says few Florida voters care about.

Steyer’s advocacy group, NextGen Climate Action, set up shop in Miami this year, targeting Scott as oblivious to global warming disasters, a partner of eco-threatening big business and alleging that “2.4 million people… are vulnerable to sea level rise,” as NextGen’s website says.

It’s no accident Steyer chose Florida as Scott’s poll numbers have been mostly underwater since the first-time public officeholder and career businessman barely squeaked by his Democratic opponent in 2010, amid a tea party-driven wave election.

The stakes also are high. Putting former governor Charlie Crist back in the governor’s mansion could create leverage against a decidedly Republican state legislature, not to mention affect future elections. Florida is the largest swing state in presidential elections with 29. Only California and Texas have more electoral votes.

The environmental carpet bombing has political observers wondering.

“It’s not entirely clear why a San Francisco billionaire is pouring millions into a Florida governor’s race, but I suspect if Crist wins we’ll see some sort of policy payback that benefits Mr. Steyer,” said Phil Kerpen, president of the free market advocacy group American Commitment.

“For all the talk of Tom Steyer and the millions he’s spent here, I don’t think that there’s going to be much impact of it,” said Sean D. Foreman, former president of the Florida Political Science Association.

Many of the ads have included factual errors such as Scott promoting a pollution-causing oil venture in the Everglades when the state actually forbid such a procedure and fined the company when it proceeded anyway. No pollution has been documented.

The same ad also said Scott received donations from the driller when the money came from the landowner. One television station pulled an ad  after receiving a cease-and-desist order from Scott’s camp.

The mistakes “probably blunted the message that NextGen was trying to communicate,” political scientist  Rick Foglesong of Rollins College, in Winter Park, Fla., told NPR.

A recent poll showed only 4 percent of voters in Florida think of climate change as an important issue. Respondents cared more about the economy, immigration and health care in that order.

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