The Drax power station in Selby, England. The site was one of the UK’s worst methane hotposts. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Greenpeace urges Labour to ‘fulfil international obligations’ as critics question accuracy of official data
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The Guardian and Watershed Investigations analysed official methane emissions data from the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) along with information on the Watershed pollution map to identify Britain’s methane hotspots.
Top of the list was a site near Glynneath in Wales, home to the Aberpergwm colliery, the UK’s last coalmine. Next was Selby, the location of industry including Drax power station, as well as a number of old landfills and farmland. The top 10 also includes power stations, oilwells and Slough trading estate, home to a wide range of industry.
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Greenpeace’s chief scientist and policy director, Dr Doug Parr, said: “These alarming findings highlight that, despite the UK joining a global pledge to reduce methane emissions by nearly a third by 2030, a proper British action plan has yet to materialise.
“Given its potency, and the fact that it is in fact a short-lived greenhouse gas, reducing methane emissions could help rapidly slow the warming that is creating the climate crisis.
“The new government must fulfil the UK’s international promises, and has the opportunity to come up with an exemplary, internationally leading plan for tackling methane from both the energy and farming sectors.”
Labour leader, Keir Starmer, addresses delegates at the 2022 Labour Party conference in Liverpool. Credit: Karl Black/Alamy
Campaigners have accused the party of allowing “climate wreckers” to access its flagship annual conference.
This year’s Labour Party conference will feature events sponsored by an oil and gas trade group, the owner of the UK’s largest emitting power plant, and a gas distribution company, DeSmog can reveal.
The conference, which is being held from 22 to 25 September in Liverpool, is one of the largest political gatherings in Europe and will feature set piece speeches from Labour’s newly-elected Cabinet ministers.
Although the full conference agenda is yet to be released, the New Statesman magazine has published a list of firms that will be sponsoring its panel events. These include the controversial energy company Drax, the fossil fuel lobby group Offshore Energies UK, and the gas company Cadent.
Labour, which has been in power for less than three months, has already unveiled an ambitious raft of policies to tackle climate change, including plans to decarbonise electricity by 2030, facilitated by a state-owned company GB Energy.
Robert Noyes, Fossil Free Parliament campaigner, told DeSmog that the New Statesman was “selling its readers short” by accepting sponsorship from polluting companies and their lobbyists.
He added that “Labour must not allow its energy programme to be further captured by corporate interests. It pollutes our politics and dilutes their agenda… Climate wrecking sponsors have got to go.”
Labour’s annual conference hosts dozens of fringe events organised by external groups, which tend to feature a panel of speakers – including a representative from the corporate sponsor. All the events hosted within the official conference zone are reviewed and approved by the party.
“No other partnered event will get you as close to the biggest names and most important conversations in Labour politics,” the New Statesman says about its 2024 agenda.
The party faced protests at its conference in 2022, when the New Statesman hosted a debate on Britain’s net zero climate goals sponsored by Drax. The firm’s plant in Selby, Yorkshire, which burns wood pellets to generate electricity, is the single biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the country according to the climate think tank Ember. Drax disputes this claim.
Drax has received state subsidies worth more than £7 billion since 2012, and the government is currently considering whether to extend this financial assistance to 2027 so the firm can build facilities to capture and store carbon emissions.
The Labour Party accepted a £12,000 donation from Drax in September 2022, while the company has frequently sponsored events at both Conservative and Labour conferences.
The New Statesman is one of a number of major media companies to have come under fire for boosting the profiles of polluting companies through commercial partnerships. An investigation by DeSmog and Drilled previously revealed that many of the world’s most trusted English-language news outlets regularly promote the fossil fuel industry’s narratives on climate-related topics.
In May, former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas pulled out of the New Statesman’s energy and climate change conference over its sponsorship by the oil company Equinor. Days later, Labour MP Alex Sobel, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Net Zero, also withdrew from a Politico energy and climate summit due to its Equinor sponsorship.
Drax, Cadent, OEUK, the New Statesman, and the Labour Party were approached for comment.
Drax
A number of investigations have shown that Drax harvests wood from some of the world’s most precious forests.
In August, the firm agreed to pay £25 million following an investigation from the energy watchdog Ofgem found that Drax had failed to supply enough evidence about the type of wood that it imports.
Drax says that its electricity is “carbon neutral” given that trees can be planted to reabsorb emissions – a claim that has been disputed by climate experts. More than 500 scientists signed a letter in 2021 stating that it would take decades for the carbon emitted by burning wood to be balanced with the planting of new trees.
The New Statesman published a sponsored article from Drax in May, written by the executive in charge of the firm’s bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) project, claiming that it will “make a sizable contribution to the UK’s climate change targets”.
Almost all of the net zero emissions pathways modelled by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency envision huge deployments of CCS technology by the middle of the century.
However, as DeSmog has shown, most large-scale CCS projects underperform or fail to meet their capture targets. As the November 2023 Production Gap Report, produced by climate experts, pointed out: “the track record for CCS has been very poor to date, with around 80 percent of pilot projects over the last 30 years ending in failure.”
Sally Clark from the campaign group Biofuelwatch said it’s “deeply concerning” that Drax is set to sponsor a fringe event at the Labour conference.
“Events like these give Drax the opportunity to influence decision-makers and greenwash its planet-wrecking tree burning at a time when the government is considering whether to grant huge new subsidies to continue funding Drax’s harm to forests, wildlife, communities and the climate,” she added.
“If we are to prevent the worst impacts of climate breakdown, we need to kick big polluters like Drax out of our politics and instead invest in real climate solutions, such as wind and solar power, and protect the world’s best carbon-storing technology – trees.”
OEUK
Offshore Energies UK (OEUK) is set to join Drax as a sponsor of the New Statesman’s 2024 Labour conference agenda. OEUK is the “leading representative body” for the country’s oil and gas industry, while its members include some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, such as Shell, ExxonMobil, and Equinor.
The group lobbies the government, both in public and private, to enact policies that benefit oil and gas companies.
DeSmog previously revealed that OEUK and its members met with ministers over 200 times in the year after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of a lobbying blitz to undermine the proposed windfall tax on energy company profits. The tax was launched in 2022 but contained loopholes including tax relief on investments in UK fossil fuel extraction.
OEUK has vocally opposed Labour’s policy of extending the windfall tax from 75 percent to 78 percent until 2029, claiming that it could cost 42,000 jobs – a figure that has been disputed by experts.
The group’s CEO David Whitehouse even went so far as to accuse Labour of being unable to “do the maths” over its windfall tax plans. Labour has also said that it won’t be granting any new North Sea oil and gas licences – a policy that has likewise been criticised by OEUK.
This isn’t the first time that the New Statesman has accepted sponsorship from OEUK. The lobby group sponsored a Labour conference event in 2023 hosted by the magazine and attended by Sarah Jones, Labour’s then shadow minister for decarbonisation and industry (who now holds this role in government).
“Cash-strapped media are increasingly easy prey for climate wreckers eager to launder their reputations,” said Robert Noyes. “When outlets like the New Statesman take funding from such lobby groups like OEUK, they sell their readers to the interests of that lobby.”
Cadent
The UK’s biggest gas distribution network, Cadent, which provides fuel to 11 million homes and businesses, is also listed as a sponsor for the upcoming conference.
Gas boilers are used to heat around 85 percent of UK homes, which together produce 14 percent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Cadent sponsored a New Statesman event at last year’s Labour conference, attended by the firm’s chief strategy and regulation officer, Tony Ballance.
In response to a question from DeSmog, Ballance advocated for the role of hydrogen in home heating, and claimed there was “limited” scientific evidence opposed to the deployment of the fuel.
The gas industry has championed hydrogen as a replacement for gas in heating, arguing that it can easily replace existing methane gas and can use existing pipelines to transport and store the fuel.
However, heat pumps are up to five times more efficient than gas boilers according to the International Energy Agency, and can be run on electricity generated via renewable energy sources. A peer-reviewed assessment of over 50 independent studies in 2024 concluded that hydrogen use in domestic heating is inefficient, costly and resource-intensive compared to other low-carbon options such as heat pumps.
It is possible to produce ‘green’ hydrogen using solar and wind, which is widely seen as an important way to decarbonise industrial processes where it is hard to avoid greenhouse gas emissions. However, the overwhelming majority of hydrogen – around 95 percent worldwide – is currently produced using fossil fuels.
Even so, the gas industry has cast doubt on heat pumps, while talking up the merits of hydrogen.
An investigation by DeSmog in July 2023 found that the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA), which represents the vast majority of the UK’s gas boiler manufacturers and distributors – including Cadent – had paid for an extensive negative PR campaign to “spark outrage” against heat pumps in the British press.
Cadent was one of two gas networks to win a government contract to trial hydrogen for home heating ahead of the government’s decision on the policy, expected in 2026. But plans for the village of Whitby in Cheshire were scrapped in July after a sustained local campaign, which raised concerns over the safety of hydrogen in homes.
Hintze, who has donated more than £4 million to the Conservatives since 2002, also donated £10,000 in August to leadership hopeful Priti Patel, who was voted out of the contest by Tory MPs this week. Tugendhat also received £3,000 from Hintze in December.
The GWPF actively campaigns against the government’s climate policies and rejects established science on rising temperatures, calling carbon dioxide a “benefit to the planet”.
Lord Hintze has said he believes “there is climate change” caused “in part due to human activity over the past century”, but “all sides must be heard” on climate change “to reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.
Authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
The IPCC has stated that we are in the midst of “widespread and rapid [changes] … unprecedented over many centuries, to many thousands of years”.
Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the Conservatives received £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers.
Cleverly, Tugendhat, Patel are not the only Tory leadership hopefuls to have received donations from figures associated with the GWPF. DeSmog revealed in August that Kemi Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the GWPF’s campaign arm.
Record is also a “life vice president” of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, which he chaired until July 2023. The IEA, which supports new fossil fuel production, has received funding from the oil giant BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018.
Record has given money to both the IEA and the GWPF, which are part of the Tufton Street network of think tanks and lobbying groups based in Westminster campaigning for less government regulation, including on climate change.
The latest register of interests also shows that Record donated £2,000 to Tory MP Jesse Norman, who is publicly supporting Badenoch’s campaign.
As DeSmog has reported, Tugendhat also received donations and gifts worth £7,000 during the general election campaign from Tory donor and former party treasurer Lord Michael Spencer, who is a fossil fuel investor.
Spencer is the largest shareholder in Deltic Energy, which this year received licences to explore the North Sea for oil and gas. He also holds shares in Pantheon Resources, a UK company exploring for oil in Alaska.
Spencer, who has donated £6 million to the Conservatives since 2005, previously told DeSmog that oil and gas investments are less than two percent of his portfolio.
Views on Net Zero
Tugendhat, Badenoch, and Patel have vocally criticised the UK’s climate policies.
In a July interview on GB News, Tugendhat said the UK’s target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 was “not realistic”. Badenoch said in 2022 that it was “arbitrary” and last year suggested she would back delaying it, which would contravene the UK’s legally-binding climate commitments. Patel shares this position, and told GB News last year that net zero targets should be “paused” because the “public are not ready”.
Polling by More in Common and E3G during the general election period found that a majority of people in every UK constituency are worried about climate change. Some 61 percent of 2024 Conservative voters said they are worried about climate change, matched by 76 percent of Labour voters, and 65 percent of the country overall.
In his GB News interview, Tugendhat also defended the previous government’s support for new oil and gas extraction, saying: “Drilling our own oil in the North Sea is more carbon efficient than bringing it in from anywhere else.”
The claim that UK oil and gas has a lower carbon footprint than imports is “misleading” and can only be achieved “by comparing UK gas production to the very dirtiest gas imports”, according to the research and campaign group Uplift.
Cleverly has supported the 2050 target but has said he would favour a “competition-based approach” rather than using the power and funding of the state. However, the private sector has often acted to delay climate action. According to the non-profits groups NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, which surveyed 51 major companies, their median goal is to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030 – well below the 43 percent reduction identified by the IPCC.
Cleverly’s leadership campaign told DeSmog that “We thank all of our donors for their support for James Cleverly as the best candidate to unite the Conservative Party and win the next general election.”
Tugendhat, Patel, and Hintze have been approached for comment.
Grenfell Tower is shown in west London on September 3, 2024.. (Photo: Lucy North/PA Images via Getty Images)
“The Grenfell Report gives us official confirmation: 72 people needlessly died because of corporate deceit, deregulation, privatization, ignorance, and contempt for working-class communities,” wrote Jeremy Corbyn.
Seven years after the U.K.’s worst residential fire since World War II, the second half of a report on the causes of the Grenfell Tower disaster partly attributed the deadly blaze to corporate greed.
The Phase 2 report, released Wednesday, blamed both private malfeasance and government deregulation for the fire on June 14, 2017, which claimed the lives of 72 people, including 18 children, when the cheap, flammable cladding surrounding the building ignited.
“The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable and that those who lived in the tower were badly failed over a number of years and in a number of different ways by those who were responsible for ensuring the safety of the building and its occupants,” inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick said in a statement.
“The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.”
The inquiry, which was launched the day after the fire by then-Prime Minister Theresa May, reviewed more than 300,000 documents and 1,500 witness statements. The first half, released October 30, 2019, focused on how the fire ignited and spread. The second, which took longer than expected, examined the “underlying causes.”
Those include the “systematic dishonesty” of the companies that sold the flammable cladding and insulation used to refurbish the tower in 2015, namely Arconic Architectural Products, Celotex, and Kingspan.
“They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data, and mislead the market,” the report authors wrote.
For example, Arconic had known since 2005 that its Reynobond 55 PE, used on Grenfell as rainscreen panels, “reacted to fire in a very dangerous way” when sold in cassette form and since 2011 that the cassette form performed worse under fire than its riveted form.
“Nonetheless, it was determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries (including the U.K.) to sell Reynobond 55 PE in cassette form, including for use on residential buildings,” the report authors noted.
The report authors also blamed quality control bodies such as the British Board of Agrément, Local Authority Building Control, and the U.K. Accreditation Body for failing to do their due diligence. The Building Research Establishment, a former government agency that had been privatized in 1997, was actually “complicit” with Celotex in misleading consumers about the insulation RS5000 by devising a strategy to rig tests to ensure the material passed.
At the same time, the companies took advantage of a period of deregulation in the U.K. during the 2010s, specifically in the Department for Communities and Local Government. The report authors concluded:
The government’s deregulatory agenda, enthusiastically supported by some junior ministers and the secretary of state, dominated the department’s thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed, or disregarded.
During that period the government determinedly resisted calls from across the fire sector to regulate fire risk assessors and to amend the Fire Safety Order to make it clear that it applied to the exterior walls of buildings containing more than one set of domestic premises.
In addition, the report authors found fault with the Tenant Management Organization for not taking tenant concerns, including about fire safety, seriously enough; the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where the tower is located; Studio E, the architect behind the refurbishment; contractor Rydon Maintenance Ltd and some of its subcontractors; and the London Fire Brigade, which was not prepared to respond to a high-rise fire.
“The inquiry report reveals that whenever there’s a clash between corporate interest and public safety, governments have done everything they can to avoid their responsibilities to keep people safe,” Grenfell United, a group of fire survivors and bereaved family members, said in a statement. “The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.”
The group added that the reports’ conclusions spoke to a “lack of competence, understanding, and a fundamental failure to perform the most basic duties of care.”
They continued: “When voids were created as the government outsourced their duties, Kingspan, Celotex, and Arconic filled the gaps with substandard and combustible materials. They were allowed to manipulate the testing regimes, fraudulently and knowingly marketing their products as safe.”
They added that their lawyers had told the inquiry that the three companies were “little better than crooks and killers,” a statement the report reveals to be “entirely true.”
“We were failed in most cases by incompetence and in many causes by calculated dishonesty and greed,” they wrote.
The Grenfell fire, when it first ignited seven years ago, called attention to rising inequality in London, as it was a public housing building in one of the city’s wealthiest boroughs.
In 2019, Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn said that “Grenfell Tower would not have happened to wealthy Londoners. It happened to poor and mainly migrant Londoners.”
Upon the report’s publication, he wrote on social media: “The Grenfell Report gives us official confirmation: 72 people needlessly died because of corporate deceit, deregulation, privatization, ignorance, and contempt for working-class communities. We will never, ever forget.”
The Grenfell Report gives us official confirmation: 72 people needlessly died because of corporate deceit, deregulation, privatisation, ignorance, and contempt for working-class communities.
The Peace & Justice Project, meanwhile, wrote that the report showed: “The legislative actions of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government on 2010-15 are largely to blame for the fire and resulting death toll. Their disgraceful and habitual deregulation has been found to have led to safety matters being ‘ignored, delayed, or disregarded’ by building materials manufacturers and council officials.”
To avoid another similar fire, the report authors made several recommendations, including:
Making one government department responsible for fire safety issues;
Creating a construction regulator;
Mandating fire safety strategies for high-risk buildings;
Developing a special license for contractors who work on higher-risk buildings; and
Establishing a system for accrediting fire-risk assessors.
Grenfell United called the recommendations “basic safety principles that should already exist.”
In addition to following the report’s advice, the survivors and family members also called for the government to ban Arconic, Kingspan, Celotex, and Rydon from working with both central and local governments.
They also urged the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, who are now reviewing the report to decide on charges, to hold those responsible accountable. Any cases are not expected to go to trial until 2027.
“To prevent a future Grenfell, the government needs to create something that doesn’t exist,” the group wrote, “A government with the power and ability to separate itself from the construction industry and corporate lobbying, putting people before profit.”
The Peace & Justice Project also called for accountability, saying: “Today’s report paints a clear picture of how the Grenfell Tower disaster was allowed to happen. We are hopeful that this stage of the inquiry brings those responsible to justice in the form of prosecutions and criminal proceedings, as well as an immediate end to the callous privatization that has been allowed to shatter communities like Grenfell.”
It noted that there remain 4,630 residential buildings in the U.K. with unsafe cladding as of July 2024.
“With only 29% of the necessary remedial work undertaken under the Conservative governments of May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak, we call on the new Prime Minister Keir Starmer to accelerate the removal of dangerous cladding from residential buildings to ensure the safety of all residents and the avoidance of another preventable tragedy like the Grenfell Tower fire,” the group wrote.
“We will assemble at the advertised point, and, in exercising our right to peaceful protest, we will march to the Israeli Embassy.”
We are deeply concerned by the Metropolitan Police’s decision to impose severe and unjustified restrictions on Saturday’s demonstration against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. These new conditions, including a delayed start time of two and a half hours after the advertised assembly, effectively hinder our fundamental right to peaceful assembly and protest. For 18 consecutive marches since October, we have gathered at 12 PM and commenced shortly thereafter—an arrangement that accommodates those travelling long distances, including thousands who have pre-booked coach travel. The last-minute disruption of these plans, without any clear rationale, raises serious questions about the police’s respect for our democratic rights.
Since notifying the police of our intentions on 8 August, we have faced a series of delays, obstacles, and uncooperative behaviour. Meetings have been cancelled without notice, and our reasonable proposal for an alternative route to the Israeli Embassy was dismissed outright. Now, with just four days’ notice, the police have imposed these new conditions without explanation, creating unnecessary obstacles for a demonstration expected to draw over one hundred thousand people.
The treatment of the Palestine movement by the police is unprecedented and deeply troubling. The consistent refusal to consider our proposed routes and the imposition of unreasonable conditions appear to be based on unfounded assumptions that our protests will lead to disruption or disorder, despite our long history of peaceful demonstrations. Such actions risk undermining the right to protest, a cornerstone of democracy.
It is crucial that the police reconsider these actions in light of their responsibility to uphold democratic freedoms. We will assemble at the advertised point, and, in exercising our right to peaceful protest, we will march to the Israeli Embassy. It is essential that the police recognise the importance of respecting the rights of citizens to gather and express their views peacefully.
