Tom Steyer, the fossil-fuel powered hedge funder has suffered further setbacks on his $100 million mission to save the world from ‘global warming’ by destroying the US economy.
He is hoping to raise $50 million from left-wing environmentalist billionaire donors for his NextGen political action committee. But so far, it emerged at a renewable energy conference in Aspen, Colorado this week, he has managed to raise just $7 million.
Steyer is continuing to put a brave face on affairs.
Acknowledging that some donors prefer to give to organizations other than NextGen, Steyer believes activists demanding action on climate change will have an impact on the November election. “The ultimate question will be will we have enough money to run the programs we need to run and the answer is yes,” Steyer said. “Definitely, yes.”
But prospective donors may have decided that Steyer is tainted beyond redemption by a string of recent revelations about his murky financial background. As Breitbart reported last month, a fair chunk of this green evangelist’s fortune came from his hedge fund Farallon Capital’s investments in the coal industry. With help from Steyer’s financing, coal production from Indonesia to China increased annually by 70 million tons – the equivalent, some experts have speculated, of around one melted glacier and thirty drowned baby polar bears per annum.
Though Steyer has since detached himself from his Big Coal financed hedge fund and claims to have seen the light, the suspicion remains that he is rather less interested in saving the planet than he is in lining his own pockets and those of fellow Democrats in the left wing Billionaires Club.
Consider, for example, his mutually beneficial dealings with Nancy Pelosi. Steyer has been a great supporter of the former House speaker, financially and politically. By strange coincidence, Steyer’s business projects have been boosted by around $1 billion in government aid, much of it announced by Pelosi herself.
In 2004, reports Free Beacon, Steyer’s Farallon Capital bought two million feet of commercial real estate in the Mission Bay area. At the time, according to the San Francisco Business Times, it was “decrepit and seemingly abandoned.”
But, reports the Daily Signal, with the help of fairy godmother Pelosi this soon changed. She waved her wand (made of yew, it is rumoured, like Lord Voldemort’s) and showered the area with taxpayer-funded gifts: a $942 million public transportation link between Mission Bay and downtown San Francisco; $10 million in stimulus funds for a Mission Bay biotech cluster; $25 million for the repair or removal of piers in the area. Steyer has claimed there is no link between his political donations and these government grants – but Farallon has certainly benefited handsomely from this non-arrangement.
Another of Steyer’s completely un-business-related enthusiasms is his fervent opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that he has long had a stake in a rival pipeline called Kinder Morgan. Though he promised that he would divest himself of financial interests in Kinder Morgan by the end of 2013, it is not clear that he has yet done so.
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