Category: new authoritarianism

Article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog

“Climate change has always happened. It always will.”

That was the remark made by Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice on Monday about this summer’s record heatwaves, which have caused wildfires and droughts across the country.

The Boston and Skegness MP added: “When it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it. And if it means that English wine and sparkling wine gets better and better, fantastic. […] Let’s celebrate some of these things rather than just be sort of doom and gloom about it.”

This wasn’t the first time a Reform politician has dismissed climate change as a threat or spread false or misleading arguments about it.

DeSmog has been covering Reform’s climate denial for seven years – since its founding as the Brexit Party in 2019 – along with its opposition to net zero targets and support for fossil fuels.

The party has received £24 million from fossil fuel interests, representing two-thirds of its total income to date. Those donations, and the party’s anti-climate commitments, stand in stark contrast to the lived reality of Reform constituents, who are also among those most at risk from extreme heat and flooding.

As the truth about and consequences of climate change become increasingly clear, here are some of the wildest climate claims made by Reform and its politicians.

‘The climate has always changed’

This week was only the latest example of Tice dismissing the extent of human-caused climate change by referring to fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature over several millennia.

In an interview with Bloomberg in May, Tice said: “Look, the climate’s always changed for millions of years. And it goes through cycles.”

In a June 2024 interview on BBC 5 Live, Reform leader Nigel Farage made a similar claim. “We’ve had climate change for millions of years,” he said. When told, “Not at this rapidity”, he replied: “How do we know? Our scientific knowledge of this is very small.”

And, in February 2025, Farage told the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London: “Now, there are times in our past when CO2 in the atmosphere has been much, much higher than it is today, and that’s before people drove 4×4 Chelsea tractors.” 

In fact, climate scientists have concluded that global warming since the industrial revolution is “unparalleled”, and stated that the contribution of humans is “unequivocal”. Scientists at NASA found that the last 10 years have been the hottest on record.

When Bloomberg showed Tice some graphs demonstrating this, the MP threatened to walk out of the interview.

‘CO2 is plant food’ and ‘not a pollutant’

Reform figures have also dismissed the role of CO2 emissions in human-caused climate change.

In November 2023, Tice posted a video on Twitter attacking climate policy, with the caption: “CO2 isn’t a poison. It’s plant food! We need to challenge the climate change nonsense!”

While plants absorb CO2, this doesn’t alter the fact that unprecedented emissions are trapping heat in the atmosphere.

At the 2025 ARC conference, Farage said: “The one thing I hear that drives me absolutely potty is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant! That’s what they tell us! That clearly is absolutely nuts.”

As the website Skeptical Science notes, whether CO2 is a pollutant depends on the context: “Although it has some very important and beneficial effects, CO2 meets the legal and encyclopaedic definitions of a ‘pollutant’, and human CO2 emissions pose a threat to public health and welfare.”

In February 2025, in an interview on Sky News, Tice said: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change [the] climate”.

In a 2021 appearance on GB News, Farage attacked what he called “this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science”. 

In fact, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.

It has also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.

In the Sky News interview, Tice – a property developer with no scientific background – called the IPCC’s evidence “absolute garbage”.

In response, Sky quoted Dr George Adamson from King’s College London, who said the idea that Tice had “discovered something that climate scientists don’t know about is of course preposterous”.

Dr Philipp Breul from Imperial College London added: “We are causing the climate to change significantly faster than it has, to the best of our knowledge, in the last million years”.

Sunspots and volcanoes

Senior Reform figures have also repeatedly spread the false claim that climate change is caused by natural phenomena including volcanoes. 

During the 2024 general election campaign, Tice appeared on BBC Breakfast and blamed climate change on “the power of the sun or volcanoes”.

In his February 2025 Sky News interview, Tice said: “The arrogant naivete of people who think you can stop the power of the sun, stop the power of volcanoes.”

At the 2025 ARC conference, Farage said: “I’m not a scientist. I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors.”

He went on to claim that Patrick Moore, a TV astronomer, had told him 20 years ago that “when it comes to carbon dioxide levels, and when it comes to warming and cooling, let me assure you that sunspot activity and underwater volcanic activity will always have a bigger impact on the environment than man himself ever can”. Farage added: “I’ve very much stuck to that view.”

These claims about sunspots and volcanoes have long been debunked by climate experts. For example, the sun’s energy has been decreasing while Earth’s temperature has increased. Volcanoes emit around 1 percent as much CO2 as produced by humans every year.

Farage has long opposed climate action. When he was leader of the UK Independence Party prior to the 2016 Brexit referendum, the party’s manifestos pledged to rip up green measures, repeal the UK’s Climate Change Act, withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement, and support fossil fuel extraction.

‘Climate lockdowns’

Reform politicians have also spread baseless claims about climate and environmental policy being part of a plot to take away people’s rights.

For example, posting on Twitter in 2023, Farage warned that London’s ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) would lead to “climate lockdowns”.

He said: “Mark my words this isn’t going to end with 20mph zones and low-traffic neighbourhoods. No – no. This is the beginning of climate lockdowns. We will have, in years to come, days where we’re told we can’t drive, we can’t do this, you can’t do that, while Sadiq Khan is leading the way. Remember you heard it here first. Climate lockdowns.”

This is a conspiracy theory accusing left-wing politicians of making plans to impose Covid-style restrictions under the guise of tackling climate change. It has been spread by fringe groups that see anti-pollution measures as part of a “Big Brother” dictatorship.

Meanwhile, three years after being implemented, London’s ULEZ scheme has resulted in a dramatic fall in deadly air pollution and better lung capacity among children. No climate lockdowns have come to pass.

‘Net zero will destroy the economy’

This week, Tice also repeated Reform’s position that trying to cut emissions to net zero is a terrible mistake. He said: “Of course, the climate changes, but where is the evidence that net zero is going to stop it? Where is the evidence? There is no evidence.”

In his June 2024 interview with the BBC, Farage called net zero “an act of mindless self-harm” that would cause the UK to “deindustrialise” and “put massive bills on the poor, when it doesn’t benefit global CO2 emissions at all”. 

Net zero targets are based on the advice of climate scientists. The IPCC has said global emissions must be cut to net zero by 2050 to limit warming to 1.5C and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Failure to do so would have vast economic consequences.

The independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) has estimated that the cost of achieving net zero will be less than one percent of the UK’s annual economic output. Failing to get climate change under control would cost more than net zero, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.

This has been witnessed this summer, with academic estimates suggesting that the heatwaves have cost the economy £4.4 billion so far. This year’s harvest has been the worst on record, leading to consternation from British farmers – including one of Reform’s own agriculture advisors.

The CCC has also said that the entire cost of net zero would be less than a single fossil fuel price shock, such as we have seen during the Ukraine and Iran wars.

By contrast, it’s estimated that Reform’s policy of scrapping clean energy schemes and expanding fossil fuel exploration would wipe £92 billion off GDP and risk over 60,000 jobs.

Article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog