They call him the Tom Steyer of the right. A Republican business executive has rewarded the GOP’s greenest candidates with contributions totaling $650,000, just the beginning of his attempt to shift his party on global warming.
Jay Faison, a North Carolina native and founder of the nonprofit ClearPath Foundation, most recently donated $500,000 to the super PAC of Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. Ayotte voted in January for a non-binding amendment affirming climate change as real and primarily a consequence of human activity.
Following in Steyer’s footsteps, the businessman recently announced a $175 million effort to push Republicans toward action on climate change and embracing clean energy solutions.
“We are looking for strong Republican leaders who are forward thinking, recognize the risk of climate change, and who believe America can accelerate it’s inevitable transition to clean energy without harming the economy,” Faison said, according to The Hill.
Faison’s nonprofit advertises a switch to clean energy as the “most actionable solution” to combating climate change, but the serial entrepreneur has also endorsed a revenue-neutral tax on carbon that would increase the cost of fossil fuels to bolster clean energy alternatives, cap-and-trade policies and the use of carbon-capture technology in coal plants nationwide.
The latter is a form of “gasification” that reduces carbon emissions released through smokestacks by instead burying the carbon dioxide deep underground. Some industry leaders question whether this technology is currently commercially viable.
“Policymakers shouldn’t single out transitioning to clean energy or any other option as the only possible course of action,” states a “how to solve climate change” brief on ClearPath’s website.
Faison told the Washington Post he wanted 2016 presidential candidates to address climate change. emphasizing this could win the GOP millennial and Catholic votes.
In addition to his donation to Ayotte, Faison contributed $100,000 to the Sen. Lindsey Graham’s, R-S.C., super PAC and $50,000 to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s.
Federal election data shows previous donations of more than $20,000 by Faison to the National Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees. According to Politico, he is poised to spend $40 million through the 2016 election to convince conservatives to rally against climate change.
Skeptics think Faison is wasting his money, according to Myron Ebell, an energy and environmental policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“I doubt that Jay Faison’s $175 million will have much more effect than Steyer’s $50 million for several reasons,” Ebell told the Washington Examiner. “Public concern with global warming is very low according to every poll [and] younger people rank it at the bottom of their concerns, almost as emphatically as do older people.”
Andrew Moylan, executive director of the free-market think tank R Street, also believes that money isn’t the difference-maker many assume.
“The impact of political donations tends to be overstated,” Moylan said, while also noting that it is “interesting to have a donor of the scale that [Faison] is engaging with folks in a way that’s pushing conservatives on the issue of climate change.”
