Saturday, July 5, 2014

The epic hypocrisy of Tom Steyer: NY Times edition

This story is likely to get significant play as it's in the NY Times, but a blog did the work exposing where the story was, so I've referenced the NY Times article through that blog

The epic hypocrisy of Tom Steyer: NY Times edition | Power Line:
This past April, with the help of a knowledgeable reader, we took a deep dive into the fossil fuel investments of Democratic money man and environmental poseur Tom Steyer in “The epic hypocrisy of Tom Steyer.” Introducing our reader’s report, John wrote regarding Steyer: “Today, he is a bitter opponent of fossil fuels, especially coal. That fits with his current economic interests: banning coal-fired power plants will boost the value of his solar projects. But it was not always thus. In fact, Steyer owes his fortune in large part to the fact that he has been one of the world’s largest financers of coal projects. Tom Steyer was for coal before he was against it.”
You read it here first, and in something like a definitive form (taking account of Steyer’s current financial interests), but we now welcome Michael Barbaro and Coral Davenport reporting in the New York Times: “Aims of donor are shadowed by past in coal.” Barbaro and Davenport may induce serious cognitive dissonance among alert Times readers with this, at the top of page A1 today:
Mr. Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager, emerged this election season as the green-minded answer to Charles G. and David H. Koch, the patrons of conservative Republican politics, after vowing that he would sell off his investments in companies that generate fossil fuels like coal.
But an examination of those investments shows that even after his highly public divestment, the coal-related projects his firm bankrolled will generate tens of millions of tons of carbon pollution for years, if not decades, to come.

Continue reading the Times story, or at Powerline, if you choose Powerline you'll read that they'd like the NY Times to cover another of their threads:
Did the Washington Post coordinate with some combination of Henry Waxman, Sheldon Whitehouse and Tom Steyer to plant a false story so that the Democrats could use it to attack Koch Industries?
That was the topic of the Powerline articles I'd referenced in my March 2014 blog post, From Bad to Worse: Kochs to Steyers, May to Green, RPJ to Krugman/Mann

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