Nigel Farage’s party was recognised for “widespread embrace of climate change denialism and antivaccine misinformation”
Skeptic magazine editor Michael Marshall presents the Rusty Razor Award to an absent Reform party. Photo: Dave Hughes. / The Skeptic
Reform UK has received an award for being the organisation that engaged in the “most prolific promotion of pseudoscience” during 2025.
Each year the UK’s long-running publication for analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal, The Skeptic magazine, names their pseudoscientist of the year, and awards them the Rusty Razor prize.
The Rusty Razor this year went to Reform UK in recognition of “their widespread embrace of climate change denialism and antivaccine misinformation.”
The award was announced in front of an audience of around 700 people at the QED science and skepticism conference in Manchester on Saturday night.
In the Rusty Razor Award category, Nigel Farage’s party was recognised for ‘promoting pseudoscientific claims’.
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Michael Marshall, Editor of The Sceptic, said: “Whilst the political positions Reform UK put forward are outside of the scope and remit of The Skeptic and our awards, their positions on science are not.
“On current polling, Reform UK is the party with the most support in the country, yet they have shown that they have no problem with spreading pseudoscientific misinformation that aligns with the interests of their donors, no interest in vetting their members and candidates for holding dangerously misguided views about science and health, and no issue with fostering and indulging all manner of conspiracy theories if they think there’s a vote in it.”
Marshall branded Reform “a threat to science and reason, and deserving of being singled out as winners of our 2025 Rusty Razor award.”
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A view of Meta’s newly constructed data center on July 18, 2024, in Eagle Mountain, Utah. Credit: George Frey/AFP via Getty Images
Without a big increase in investment in renewable energy globally, humanity will not limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, but much of the data center boom is powered by fossil fuels.
By Jake Bolster
October 29, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence is putting humanity’s climate goals out of reach, extending the life of fossil fuels and driving up emissions in the U.S. power sector while contributing to deadly extreme weather, according to two new reports published Wednesday.
With power- and water-hungry data centers forecasted to come online at staggering speeds to serve big tech companies’ seemingly bottomless appetite for AI infrastructure, utility companies have turned to fossil fuels to help meet the explosion in demand for power.
It’s a sharp departure from earlier forecasts of only modest, gradual growth in electricity demand, potentially threatening large countries’ commitments to transition away from fossil fuels. President Donald Trump and his administration have spoken glowingly about how AI will reinvigorate U.S. coal and other fossil fuel markets.
“Accelerating from deployment to a deeply decarbonized, resilient energy system is proving far more complex than simply adding megawatts,” said Prakash Sharma, vice president for scenarios and technologies at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm, in a press release accompanying his company’s new report.
Wood Mackenzie’s analysis concluded that almost no countries—including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—were on track to meet their 2030 emissions goals. But if countries across the globe show “extraordinary ambition,” according to the report, and make significant, rapid investments in renewable energy, humanity could limit warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by around 2060.
The 2015 Paris Agreement called for holding Earth’s temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, and ideally to just 1.5 degrees C in order to preserve a livable planet. To do that, scientists estimated the global economy would need by 2050 to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions, in which human activity produces a negligible amount of greenhouse gases that could be absorbed by natural ecosystems rather than persisting in the atmosphere.
Among the world’s largest economies, the U.S. has the biggest gap between current climate transition investments and the spending necessary to reach net-zero emissions. The country would need to increase its spending on reducing emissions by 76 percent to meet the net-zero goal, more than double the increase the European Union would need to make and more than two-and-a-half times the increased spending necessary in China.
“A new climate leadership is emerging,” Sharma said. “As the U.S. doubles down on fossil fuels, pushing allies to buy its LNG, China is seizing the low-carbon mantle through EV and solar dominance, plus aggressive renewables deployment.”
The United States has signaled a willingness to offer tax breaks and open public lands to data centers—warehouses of servers whose computing power drives AI services and much of the internet, many of which will be powered by fossil fuels, according to International Energy Agency estimates.
Data center energy demand “is threatening to sabotage the country’s already faltering climate goals,” wrote John Fleming and Jean Su, with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a report published Wednesday. Fleming and Su found that, if AI data centers powered by fossil fuels grow as forecasted, all other sectors of the U.S. economy would need to cut emissions by 60 percent in order for the U.S. to meet its emissions targets.
“A gas-fed AI boom is going to hurdle us past any chance of keeping to our climate goal or maintaining a safe and healthy future for our planet,” said Fleming, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “To the extent that data center buildout is needed at all, it should be powered only by clean, renewable energy.”
McKenna Beck, the Ralph Cavanagh climate solutions fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in either report, agreed with that conclusion, and warned that the current demand for AI runs the risk of spoiling climate pledges at the local level, too.
“The reports confirm what we’ve been seeing in states on the ground for the past year—that there’s a real risk of states with stated climate goals backsliding on those,” she said. As an example, Beck brought up North Carolina, which erased its 2030 climate goals this summer in the face of rising electricity demand.
Beck believes that, if given the right guardrails, AI electricity demand is not destined to add a ton of emissions to the U.S. economy. “With the right incentives and requirements, data centers could actually supercharge clean energy,” she said.
But with the Trump administration actively working to stifle renewable energy growth, Beck acknowledged that any good-governance AI policies would need to be implemented on a smaller scale.
“States are on the front lines right now,” she said.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
A family salvages belongings from their home after it collapsed during Hurricane Melissa’s passage through Santiago de Cuba, Cuba on October 29, 2025. (Photo by Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images)
“The very richest individuals in the world are funding and profiting from climate destruction, leaving the global majority to bear the fatal consequences of their unchecked power.”
A report released Tuesday showed that the wealthiest people on the planet are disproportionately fueling the climate emergency that is intensifying weather catastrophes like Hurricane Melissa, which slammed Cuba on Wednesday after leaving a trail of devastation in Jamaica.
The Oxfam International report, titled Climate Plunder: How a Powerful Few Are Locking the World Into Disaster, features updated figures showing that the consumption-based carbon emissions of the richest 0.1% of the global population grew by 92 tonnes between 1990 and 2023, while the emissions of the poorest half of humanity grew by just 0.1 tonnes.
“A person from the world’s richest 0.1% emits over 800kg of CO2 every day. Even the strongest person on earth could not lift this much,” the report notes. “In contrast, someone from the poorest 50% of the world emits an average of just 2kg of CO2 per day, which even a small child could lift.”
“A person in the top 0.1% emits more in a day than a person in the poorest 50% emits all year,” the report adds.
The destruction caused by Hurricane Melissa—the most powerful storm on Earth this year and the strongest to ever hit Jamaica—underscored the extent to which vulnerable nations are bearing the brunt of a crisis they did little to cause as wealthy countries and individuals continue to spew planet-warming emissions with abandon.
Jamaica, where the true extent of the damage from Melissa is only just beginning to emerge, is responsible for an estimated 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the latest available data.
“The climate crisis is an inequality crisis,” said Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar. “The very richest individuals in the world are funding and profiting from climate destruction, leaving the global majority to bear the fatal consequences of their unchecked power.”
“We must break the chokehold of the super-rich over climate policy by taxing their extreme wealth.”
Oxfam’s report was published less than two weeks before the start of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, where world leaders will gather once again to weigh climate solutions after years of failing to reach an agreement to curb fossil fuel production and use.
In its new report, Oxfam implores governments to target the emissions of the ultra-wealthy, including through “climate-specific taxes” such as “frequent flyer levies and taxes on luxury travel.”
“It is a travesty that power and wealth have been allowed to accumulate in the hands of a few, who are only using it to further entrench their influence and lock us all into a path to planetary destruction,” said Behar. “We must break the chokehold of the super-rich over climate policy by taxing their extreme wealth, banning their lobbying, and instead put those most affected by the climate crisis in the front seat of climate decision-making.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Ellie Chowns, Green Party MP for North Herefordshire. CC image Wikipedia.
Responding to a warning from the UN Secretary General that the world has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and his call on global leaders to urgently change course at the forthcoming COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Green Party MP Ellie Chowns said:
“It is vital we pay heed to the warnings by the UN Secretary General on the risks posed to the world of breaking through the 1.5C limit, set by the Paris Agreement ten years ago.
“As the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and its legacy of high carbon emissions, the UK has a special responsibility to be a global leader in the shift towards a green economy – and leading by example at home.
“It’s welcome that the PM is attending COP 30 and Keir Starmer must use his voice to demand action that closes the global emissions gap. He must also stand firm against the reckless and dangerous attempts to undermine climate action by Reform UK and the Conservatives. True climate leadership also means resisting pressure from the fossil fuel lobby.
“COP30 is taking place against a backdrop of continued financial support from governments for the fossil fuel industry. This includes an estimated £17.5 billion every year here in the UK.
“The government must also refuse permission for the giant Rosebank oilfield, which would create more emissions than the combined annual CO2 emissions of all 28 low-income countries in the world – the very countries that are bearing the brunt of climate breakdown.”
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Just 1% of the world’s coastal waters could, in theory, generate enough offshore wind and solar power to provide a third of the world’s electricity by 2050. That’s the promise highlighted in a new study by a team of scientists in Singapore and China, who systematically mapped the global potential of renewables at sea.
But turning that potential into reality is another story. Scaling up offshore renewables fast enough to seriously dent global emissions faces formidable technical, economic and political hurdles.
To reach global climate targets, the world’s electricity systems must be fully decarbonised within a couple of decades if not sooner. Wind and solar power have grown at record-breaking rates, yet further expansion on land is increasingly constrained by a scarcity of good sites and conflicts over land use.
Moving renewables offshore is therefore tempting. The sea is vast, windy and sunny, with few residents around to object. The team behind the new study identified coastal areas with enough wind or sunlight, and water shallower than 200 metres, that are relatively ice-free and within 200 kilometres of population centres.
They estimate that using just 1% of these areas could generate over 6,000 terawatt hours (TWh) of offshore wind power and 14,000TWh of offshore solar power each year. Together that’s roughly one-third of the electricity the world is expected to use in 2050, while avoiding 9 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually.
That sounds impressive as 1% of suitable ocean seems small. Many European countries, such as Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the UK, already allocate between 7% and 16% of their coastal waters for offshore wind farms. Yet what matters for climate mitigation is not only how much low-carbon energy could eventually be produced, but how fast that could happen.
At present, offshore wind generates less than 200TWh per year, less than 1% of global electricity. By 2030, that might rise to around 900TWh. Hitting 6,000TWh by 2050 would require annual installations – each year, for two decades – to be about seven times larger than they were last year.
Offshore solar requires an even steeper climb. The technology is still experimental, producing only negligible amounts of electricity today.
Even if 15TWh a year (an equivalent of some 15GW capacity) can be generated by 2030, to reach the estimated potential of 14,000TWh by 2050 would require sustained annual growth of over 40% for two decades. Such a rate that has never been achieved for any energy technology, not even during the recent record-breaking growth of land solar.
Achieving techno-economic viability
Around 90% of existing offshore wind capacity is located in the shallow, sheltered waters of northwestern Europe and China, where most turbines are directly fixed to the seabed. Yet most of the untapped potential lies in deeper waters, where fixed foundations are impossible.
That means turning to floating turbines, a technology that currently accounts for just 0.3% of global offshore wind capacity. Floating wind power faces serious engineering challenges, from mooring and anchoring, to undersea cabling and maintenance in rougher seas.
It currently costs far more than fixed-bottom systems, and will need substantial subsidies for at least the next decade. Only if early projects prove successful and drive down costs could floating wind become commercially viable.
Floating solar on a reservoir in Indonesia. Algi Febri Sugita / shutterstock
Offshore solar is even further behind. The International Energy Agency rates its technology readiness at only level three to five on an 11-point scale — barely beyond prototype stage. The new study refers to research saying offshore solar could become commercially viable in the Netherlands only around 2040-2050, by which time the world’s power system should already be largely decarbonised.
Overcoming growth barriers
Even when low-carbon technologies become commercially competitive, their growth rarely continues exponentially. Our own research shows manufacturing bottlenecks, logistics and grid integration eventually slow expansion. And these challenges are likely to be even tougher for offshore projects.
Social opposition and the need for permits can also slow progress. Moving wind and solar offshore avoids some land-use conflicts, but it does not eliminate them. Coastal space close to populated areas is already crowded with shipping, fishing, leisure and military activities.
In Europe, approval and construction of offshore wind farms can a decade or more. Permits are not guaranteed: Sweden recently rejected 13 proposed wind farms in the Baltic Sea due to national security concerns.
What is realistic?
Offshore renewables will undoubtedly play an important role in the global energy transition. Offshore wind, in particular, could become a major contributor by mid-century if its growth follows the same trajectory as onshore wind has since the early 2000s.
However, that would require floating turbines to quickly become competitive, and for political commitment to be secured in the Americas, Australia, Russia and other areas with lots of growth potential.
Offshore wind (green) is tracking the growth rate of onshore wind (orange):
Timelines are shifted by 15 years, so that the year 2000 for onshore maps onto year 2015 for offshore. Aleh Cherp (Data: IEA, Wen et al)
Offshore solar, by contrast, would need to achieve viability and then grow at an unprecedented rate to reach the potential outlined in the new study. It may be promising for niche uses, but is unlikely to deliver large-scale climate benefits before 2050.
Its real contribution may come later in the century, when we will still need to expand low-carbon energy for industries, transport and heating once the initial decarbonisation of power generation is complete.
For now, the world’s best bet remains to accelerate onshore wind and solar power as well as proven offshore wind technologies, while preparing offshore solar and floating wind power options for the longer run.
