Billionaire Tom Steyer is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads Wednesday night to get 2016 GOP hopefuls to talk about climate change and transitioning the U.S. to renewable energy.
Steyer’s advocacy group, NextGen, is urging Jake Tapper, CNN’s moderator at Wednesday night’s Republican debate, to ask the “presidential candidates how they plan to secure our country’s future by laying out a plan to achieve more than 50 percent clean energy by 2030, putting us on a pathway to a completely clean energy economy.”
“Republican candidates would be wise to lay out a plan, as polling shows that a majority of Republican voters in key presidential swing states support this goal, and 74 percent of voters under 35 are more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who lays out a plan to achieve #50by30,” according to NextGen.
Steyer’s ad is running on CNN and Fox cable networks. It invokes former President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 State of the Union speech in which he said environmental issues are not partisan.
