Alaska glacier melt changed his life

Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund executive, billionaire, and Democratic presidential candidate has become one of the leading activist investors on climate change. But he wasn’t always as concerned.

For 26 years, Steyer ran the hedge fund he founded in 1986, Farallon Capital. It invested in all sectors of the economy — including fossil fuel companies.

But a return trip to Alaska in 2004 changed his internal compass, he told CNBC.

“When I was 24, I spent a summer working in Alaska,” Steyer told CNBC, on a phone call from Glasgow, Scotland, where he is currently attending COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

In 2004, two and a half decades after his own trip as a young man, Steyer went back to Alaska with his family.

“I wanted our kids to see the wilderness in North America as close as we could get to it,” Steyer told CNBC. “So we all went up to Alaska, and I wanted to do a wilderness trip, so that they could experience that because I had thought it was so immense and wonderful when I was there when I was 24 years old.”

But it wasn’t the same. “It was absolutely shocking to see the extent of the glacial melt,” Steyer told CNBC.

“I remember sitting on one side of the valley and looking across the valley, and there was ice at the bottom, but you could see clearly across. A nd 20 years before there was so much ice that you could not know there was a valley there. It was just a mountain of snow,” Steyer said.

“You could just see the water. It was like this gigantic stream of melting ice,” Steyer said. “That’s when it became clear to me that, ‘Oh my god, this is so obvious.'”

He and his family talked about how future generations would perceive this one. Now, people look back at people 100 years ago and think that things they did were “often incredibly cruel, or thoughtless or selfish,” Steyer said.

“We were sitting there going, ‘Wow, people are going to look at us and go, ‘Wow, they are incredibly thoughtless and cruel, and selfish,”” Steyer told CNBC. “And I thought, ‘We just can’t do that.'”

In 2012, Steyer stepped down from his role at the San Francisco-based financial institution he founded to launch NextGen Climate, which would become became NextGen America, to activate the youth vote.

And in 2019, Steyer ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, focusing his agenda on climate change as the central issue. He’s also known for the effort he launched in 2017 to impeach then President Donald Trump.

When Steyer officially separated from Farallon Capital in 2012, Farallon set up, at Steyer’s request, a separate fund for Steyer’s investments at Farallon which…