The energy giant BP has been accused of prioritising its profits over people and the planet after making £2.7 billion in profit over the last quarter, while investing £2 billion in fossil fuels.
Leading think tank IPPR said now was a time when energy companies should be urgently responding to climate change, but instead BP has “doubled down on its oil and gas business to reap enormous profits.”
For every £1 BP spent on low carbon investments in the last quarter, they invested £11 in fossil fuels it was revealed. And since the energy price shock began two years ago, BP has put nine times more into fossil fuels as renewables.
BP also completed more than £14.8 billion of buybacks from surplus cash flow whilst announcing a new round of share buybacks, which will transfer £1.2 billion to shareholders.
“It’s clear that oil and gas companies are prioritising their shareholders at the expense of the transition to clean energy, so the UK government must now take the reins by investing in renewables,” said Joseph Evans, IPPR researcher.
Although BP’s profits have actually fallen on last year, when the oil company saw mega earnings following the rise in oil prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, £2.7 billion profit between July and September remains extremely high as organisations ask why ordinary people are still facing high energy bills.
“The government has had countless opportunities to bring down our bills and emissions. Instead, all we’ve had are weakened green policies and massive tax breaks for oil and gas giants,” Friends of the Earth responded.
One of the owners of GB News runs a hedge fund that has a major financial stake in more than 100 oil and gas firms, DeSmog can reveal.
This news comes after former prime minister Boris Johnson was announced as a new presenter on the television broadcaster on Friday.
An investigation by DeSmog in May found that one in three GB News presenters had spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half had attacked climate action. GB News presenters have used their platforms to urge the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more coal, oil and gas.
Paul Marshall is the chairman and chief investment officer of Marshall Wace, a London-based hedge fund that he co-founded in 1997.
Marshall Wace is now one of the world’s largest hedge funds – an investment vehicle that bets on rising and falling share prices – with around $63 billion (£51.9 billion) in assets under management.
According to DeSmog’s analysis of Marshall Wace’s filings with the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), his fund owns shares worth $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) in fossil fuel firms. This includes companies that specialise in extracting, refining, transporting and distributing fossil fuels.
In its latest SEC filing, for the quarter ending 30 June 2023, Marshall Wace reports a $213 million (£175.6 million) shareholding in the oil and gas supermajor Chevron, as well as stakes in Shell, Equinor, and 109 other fossil fuel companies.
The value of Marshall Wace’s stake in Chevron, the world’s eighth largest fossil fuel company, has more than doubled from $105 million (£86.6 million) to $213 million (£175.6 million) in two years, even though its total number of shares and equity options has increased over that period by just 35 percent.
The hedge fund’s stake in Chevron appears to be one of its top 50 most valuable investments, among the thousands of companies in which it currently holds shares.
This reflects the soaring value of fossil fuel companies following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up the price of fossil fuels and therefore the profits of suppliers. At the end of June 2021, Chevron’s share price stood at $107.30 (£88.27), rising to $157.35 (£129.45) by June 2023.
Marshall Wace held shares in 112 fossil fuel companies as of June 2023. Two years earlier, in June 2021, the hedge fund held shares in 50 of these firms. The value of the stakes in these 50 firms almost trebled over the period, from $565.4 million (£466.1 million) to $1.4 billion (£1.15 billion).
“I’ve always wondered why anyone would invest in comically inept, loss-making GB News,” said John Nicolson MP, a member of Parliament’s influential Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee. “Step forward one major investor who makes bundles of cash from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, a disturbing number of GB News presenters question climate science. I’m beginning to see a connection.”
Marshall Wace has 22 partners and its latest company accounts, for the period ending February 2022, show that they shared bumper profits of more than £720 million as the firm’s annual turnover jumped 62 percent to more than £1.5 billion. The average salary at Marshall Wace is £561,000 a year.
Paul Marshall, who is one of these partners, is also a lead investor in the startup broadcaster GB News, holding a 45 percent stake. Marshall, estimated to be worth £800 million, reportedly invested £10 million in GB News when it first launched two years ago. In August 2022, he joined the Dubai-based investment firm Legatum Group in a £60 million capital injection and buyout of GB News’s other major investor, Discovery.
On the announcement of the buyout, Marshall said: “This is more than a financial investment. As investors we’re proud of what GB News [sic] doing for media plurality in the UK, bringing fresh perspectives to the national conversation on issues that matter to real Britain.”
Marshall also owns UnHerd, a publication founded in 2017 that claims to give a platform to marginalised views. UnHerd has published multiple articles and videos critical of climate action, including an interview in July with Bjorn Lomborg about “how global warming will save lives”.
Marshall is involved in other projects that are linked to key opponents of climate action. He is one of the directors of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new group established by the backers of GB News. The ARC advisory board features a host of individuals who have denied climate science, downplayed the extent of the climate crisis, and attacked net zero policies. A number of these advisers are speaking at a conference hosted by ARC in London this week, alongside Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch.
It has been reported that Marshall is preparing to expand his media investments and is “readying a bid” for the right-wing Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine, with both expected to be put up for sale in the coming weeks.
The Conservative Party has also received funds from Marshall, who donated £500,000 in 2019.
GB News lost more than £30 million during its first year on air and has been hit by multiple scandals over its use of Conservative MPs as presenters, its alleged lack of impartiality, and its habit of platforming of conspiracy theories.
The broadcast regulator Ofcom ruled in March that Mark Steyn had broken its rules on harmful content by claiming on GB News that the third Covid vaccine was causing higher infection, hospitalisation and deaths. Steyn’s claims were “potentially harmful and materially misleading,” Ofcom ruled. Steyn, who has also questioned the existence of climate change, resigned from the channel in February after GB News reportedly demanded he personally pay the fines issued if found in breach of the broadcasting code.
Ofcom currently has 12 open investigations into GB News. Its TV output reached 2.87 million viewers in December, while its website had a UK audience of 5.7 million in April.
Paul Marshall’s investments in GB News and UnHerd have been made in a personal capacity and there is no evidence that Marshall Wace’s investments have influenced the editorial output of either outlet.
Marshall Wace claims on its website that “sustainable investing is an organisational focus” and that the firm is “committed to achieving positive social and environmental impact”.
GB News and UnHerd did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. Marshall Wace declined to comment.
‘State Control Over Your Life’
Since it launched in June 2021, GB News has been a prominent mouthpiece for individuals who support more fossil fuel extraction and oppose the UK’s target to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050.
The UK’s 2050 net zero target is legally binding and is backed by the world’s top climate scientists. They agree that rapidly cutting carbon emissions is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, including drought, famine, and ill health.
On 5 November last year, GB News host Neil Oliver used his show to attack “net zero [and] the green agenda”, which he claimed was part of “a hellish potpourri of policies guaranteed to condemn hundreds of millions to death by poverty, death by starvation”.
GB News host and Conservative MP Philip Davies was one of five MPs to vote against the Climate Change Act in 2008. Fellow presenters and Tory MPs Jacob Rees Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey are all supporters of the anti-climate action Net Zero Scrutiny Group of backbench Conservative MPs.
This opposition to net zero is often tied to a denial of established climate science, which has been expressed repeatedly by GB News presenters.
During last summer’s record UK heatwave, on 16 July 2022, then GB News host Calvin Robinson accused the Met Office of “alarmism”, adding: “Man-made climate change, I don’t buy it, because how much of an impact do we really make if we’re talking about carbon levels?”
Five days later, presenter Beverley Turner called summer heat warnings “fear mongering” in order to “facilitate state control over your life”.
The IPCC has warned that false and misleading information “undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency” of cutting emissions.
Several GB News hosts have also been vocal about their support for policies that would maintain and even extend the UK’s reliance on oil and gas.
Flagship presenter Dan Wootton argued on 10 March 2022 that the war in Ukraine meant “for now the rush to net zero must die”. He urged the government to “frack, frack, frack” for shale gas. Wootton has recently been suspended by the channel.
In a 9 December show, host Mark Dolan praised plans to open a new coal mine in Cumbria. He said the UK should “drill, baby, drill” for coal, oil and gas, adding: “I think the push for net zero here is another element of liberal progressivism which is infecting the West.”
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that any new fossil fuel projects would be incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5C.
‘Genuinely Independent Thinking’
Marshall has defended GB News’s output on the basis that “in a world of too much groupthink”, the broadcaster provides a “space for genuinely independent thinking”.
However, Marshall appears to share the opposition to net zero, and support for more fossil fuel extraction, expressed by a number of GB News presenters.
In July, Marshall shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) from Reform UK Leader Richard Tice, on the subject of Norway’s approval of new oil and gas projects worth $18 million. Tice’s post claimed that these fossil fuel resources are “essential to Europe’s energy security” and that the UK “could have these jobs and prosperity. But selfish wallies in Westminster want to make us poorer and colder with net zero”.
Tice has recently been hired by GB News.
A month later, Marshall claimed in a post that “The public are still being shamefully ill informed by the BBC about differing views on climate change policy”. This post linked to an article by Charles Moore, which argued that “Voters can see the disparity between the highly speculative and distant achievement of global net zero and the concrete and imminent prospect of becoming colder and poorer”.
In fact, the UK government’s failure to implement green reforms has added an estimated £2.5 billion to domestic energy bills due to the rising costs of fossil fuels and poor energy efficiency in homes. A reliance on gas has also cost the UK an additional £50-60 billion since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, equivalent to around £1,000 for every adult.
Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, run by the owners of GB News, is hosting an event next week that it claims will be attended by 100 parliamentarians from across the world.
Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch are due to speak at a major event next week alongside leading critics of climate action, DeSmog can report.
ARC was launched in March to address six “fundamental issues of our time”, including “energy and resources” and “environmental stewardship”. The group is fronted by psychologist Jordan Peterson and its advisory board includes senior politicians and academics from the UK and abroad.
As revealed by DeSmog, a number of ARC advisers have a history of attacking net zero policies and questioning climate science, many of whom are speaking at next week’s conference.
Levelling Up Secretary Gove and Business and Trade Secretary Badenoch will be speaking alongside these individuals at the conference, which culminates on 1 November in a public event at the 20,000-seat O2 arena.
Peterson, who is headlining the O2 event, has regularly posted about “climate apocalypse insanity” and “eco fascists” to his millions of online followers. He claimed in a Telegraph article in October that “eco-extremists are leading the world towards despair, poverty, and starvation”.
Gove and Badenoch will also be speaking alongside Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called climate change a “hoax”, and former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott – a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group.
Badenoch has not always been supportive of climate action. During the 2022 Conservative leadership contest, she suggested that the UK government’s legally binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 should be pushed back.
ARC claims that over 1,000 people will be attending its conference, “including over 100 parliamentarians from across Europe, the UK, and Australia, as well as a delegation of congressional leaders from the USA”.
This news comes after UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month watered down a number of flagship policies designed to achieve net zero emissions – moves that were welcomed by climate science deniers.
ARC, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Department for Business and Trade were approached for comment.
ARC’s Origins
ARC has extensive ties to GB News, which has prominently platformed climate science denial since its launch in June 2021.
According to Companies House, the same five individuals who own GB News’s parent company are also the people who control the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Limited: Paul Marshall, Alan McCormick, Richard Douglas, Mark Stoleson, and Christopher Chandler.
McCormick, Chandler, and Stoleson are all executives at Legatum Group, the Dubai-based investment fund that, alongside Marshall, is a principal financial backer of GB News.
ARC’s CEO, Tory peer Baroness Stroud, formerly served as chief executive of the Legatum Institute think tank, founded by the Legatum Group. The institute received $77,000 in 2018 from the Charles Koch Foundation, funded by the proceeds of Koch Industries, one of the largest privately owned companies in the United States, which trades heavily in fossil fuels.
Conservative peer Helena Morrissey, one of the directors of GB News’s parent company, is an ARC adviser, as is ex-GB News presenter Colin Brazier. Two Conservative MPs – Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates – are also ARC advisers.
Morissey, Marshall, Kruger and Cates are all set to speak at the ARC conference.
GB News has been a prominent opponent of climate action since it launched in June 2021. A DeSmog investigation in May revealed that one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while half attacked climate policies.
Its presenters have claimed that net zero will cause “death by poverty and starvation”, that the policy “poses an existential threat to the free world”, and have called for the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels.
ARC’s 44-member advisory board includes a number of climate science deniers and leading critics of climate action.
Writer Douglas Murray, who will be speaking alongside Peterson at the O2, has suggested that climate policies will “impoverish” Brits, and has argued that “terrifying our children with doom-mongering propaganda on climate change is nothing less than abuse”.
ARC adviser Tony Abbott has previously said that “climate change is probably doing good” and is a long-standing advocate for coal power, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
Abbott is joined on the ARC advisory board by fellow ex-Australian prime minister John Howard, who told Sky News in March that he was “increasingly sceptic [sic]” about climate policies, adding that Australia should “continue to benefit” from coal and gas.
ARC adviser Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be speaking at the conference alongside Gove, Badenoch, Abbott and Howard, recently tweeted to his 1.3 million followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the “real emergency isn’t climate change, it’s the man-made disaster of climate change policies that threaten U.S. prosperity.”
Tupy and Cato
ARC also plans to publish regular research papers, which it claims will be “written by leading thinkers and researchers across the world” and “provide deep analysis and offer solutions to the problems we face”.
The first papers were published earlier this month, including one from Cato Institute researcher Marian Tupy on the topic of “superabundance” – in other words, if the world and its natural resources can sustain population growth.
In the report, Tupy suggests that critics of established climate science have been censored by the media. He claims that “Inconvenient questions about ‘sensitive’ issues, such as the extent of climate change and the long-term threats posed by global warming, are being silenced in the media, and their proponents are being condemned as ‘denialists’”.
In reality, climate science denial is given a significant platform in the press and via social media. DeSmog reported in September that otherwise fringe climate crisis deniers are being exposed to millions more people due to the promotional efforts of ARC’s Jordan Peterson.
Tupy echoes Peterson’s language in his ARC study, claiming that the “precursors” to “extreme environmentalism” include “fascism and communism”. He claims that extreme environmentalism maintains a hold “on the public imagination, thus contributing to a sense of despair and decline”.
Tupy has commented on the topics of natural resources and global warming for a number of years.
Interviewed in April 2021 about “the true risk of global warming”, Tupy said that “I’m more or less convinced that human economic activity contributes to slight increases in global warming that we are currently experiencing”.
However, he suggested that the planet was merely “lukewarming”, and that “it is not… an existential crisis”. Tupy argued that humanity would be able to “adapt and technologically innovate” its way out of the problem. He said this would happen by slowly lessening our reliance on fossil fuels and creating solutions that allow people to adapt to the consequences of climate change.
“We don’t need to do it immediately; we don’t need to do it in the scope of 10 or 20 years, but it would be nice if say in 40 years time most of the world’s energy was provided by energy sources that do not spew CO2 into the atmosphere,” he said.
For 21 years, Tupy has worked at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C.. He currently holds the position of senior fellow at the group’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Charles Koch of Koch Industries. Charles Koch and his late brother David have channelled millions into right-wing organisations over recent decades, donating almost $9 million to the Cato Institute between 1997 and 2015.
The institute has downplayed the need to take urgent action on climate change and has in the past suggested that lawmakers shouldn’t pass any legislation to restrict the emissions of carbon dioxide.
Tupy’s arguments around “lukewarming” and technological innovation reflect the statements of the Cato Institute towards global warming.
“Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals,” claims the institute’s public statement on global warming.
In December 2015, Patrick J. Michaels and Chip Knappenberger wrote a Cato Institute “working paper” making the “case for lukewarming”.
“[W]e conclude that future global warming will occur at a pace substantially lower than that upon which US federal and international actions to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are founded. It is high time to rethink those efforts,” they wrote.
In 2009, Cato’s “Handbook for Policymakers” on global warming began with the suggestions that Congress should “pass no legislation restricting emissions of carbon dioxide”. In the same year, more than 100 scientists signed a statement, circulated by the institute, disputing the climate change “consensus”.
A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.
The IPCC also states that global warming will cause “increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, heavy precipitation, and, in some regions, agricultural and ecological droughts; an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones; and reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost.”
The IPCC’s chair, Jim Skea, has said that “Without immediate action to reduce emissions and adapt to continued warming, threats to planetary health and human systems are inevitable.”
The Cato Institute and Marian Tupy were approached for comment.
Campaigners take part in a Stop Rosebank emergency protest outside the U.K. Government building in Edinburgh, after the controversial Equinor Rosebank North Sea oil field was given the go-ahead Wednesday, September 27, 2023. (Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)
ROSEBANK owner Equinor have once again posted billions in profits – to the fury of climate campaigners.
The Norwegian fossil giant – which has the controlling stake in the huge oil field development in the North Sea – posted profits of £6.6 billion for the past three months.
Environmental campaigners said the firm was adding “insult to injury” with its huge profits as parts of Scotland continue to suffer from extreme weather caused by climate breakdown.
Last week, Storm Babet caused flooding that hit towns across north-east Scotland, with some evacuated residents in Angus told they would not be back in their homes by Christmas.
In September, the UK Government gave the green light for the Rosebank development to go ahead, despite fury from campaigners and across the political spectrum.
The field, which lies north-west of Shetland, contains up to 350 million barrels of oil and is expected to be in operation for decades.
Starmer won the membership election to succeed left-winger and Palestine solidarity veteran Jeremy Corbyn last weekend.
His first act as leader has been to declare the party’s allegiance to the Israel lobby, and to signal an impending purge of the left wing of the party membership under the pretext of combating “Labour anti-Semitism.”
Throughout his four and a half years as Labour leader, Corbyn was incessantly defamed with a manufactured anti-Semitism crisis by the the Israel lobby and by the right wing of his own party.
“Anti-Semitism has been a stain on our party,” Starmer claimed in his victory speech, giving full credence to the smears against his predecessor.
“On behalf of the Labour Party, I am sorry.”
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The Israel lobby was jubilant, with one major group gloating that they had “slaughtered” Corbyn.
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“Within hours of the result, Keir Starmer called me to discuss anti-Jewish hate in the Labour Party,” wrote former Labour lawmaker Ruth Smeeth, in a Times of Israelblog post.
On Tuesday, Starmer wrote another simpering apology to the Israel lobby, published in both the Evening Standard and the anti-Palestinian newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle.
“Once the coronavirus pandemic is over,” he wrote, “I will be closing the Labour Party’s offices for a day and inviting representatives of the Jewish community to come in and facilitate a day’s training for all members of staff on anti-Semitism.”
