Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Every political system has its share of charlatans or nutcases who deliberately try to stir up division, embrace conspiracy theories, deny reality or advocate dangerous policies for short-term advantage. But what do you do when such views are not just held on the political fringe, but are embraced at the heart of government, as is currently happening in the UK?
There are plenty of immediate challenges facing the Government – inflation, housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, struggling public services and immigration. Internationally, conflicts rage in many parts of the world, Iran and North Korea continue to pursue nuclear weapons, and democracy itself is under threat from hostile regimes, such as Russia and China.
But by far the biggest long-term threat, which will only make all of these immediate problems harder to tackle, is climate change.
Climate change is not only already devastating animal and plant life, and exacerbating poor health, famine and poverty in some parts of the world, but also fuelling more conflict within and between states for scarce resources. It is driving migration levels higher and, through melting the polar ice cap, opening up new areas of strategic competition with Russia and China.
Climate change is not just a long-term survival threat, but an ongoing, immediate, security, political and economic threat. The evidence is all around, plain to see.
According to the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation, July was the hottest month on record, possibly the warmest month humanity has ever experienced. The planet’s temperature has surpassed the crucial threshold of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. Swathes of the American South, the Mediterranean and China have endured devastating heatwaves this summer. Only last week, we saw on our TV screens thousands of desperate British tourists fleeing devastating fires on Greek islands.
It is ‘deeply concerning’ that Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, and a raft of Tory MPs are speaking alongside anti-green forces, say opposition politicians
The National Conservatism (NatCon) conference kicks off today in Westminster, London, featuring a roster of high-profile speakers drawn from the upper reaches of the government and the conservative right.
A DeSmog analysis has found climate denial and a hostility to net zero to be a common feature among many of the individuals speaking at the three-day summit.
The gathering comes as Rishi Sunak’s government – which is already off track to meet the UK’s climate commitments – pursues new fossil fuel extraction, and prominent figures in the right-wing media continue to cast doubt over net zero policy.
The NatCon conference is being organised by the US-based think tank the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF) and intends to catalyse a “revival” of a political philosophy based on “national identity and culture” alongside “god and country”.
While energy and climate policy is oddly absent from the agenda, many of the speakers and their parent organisations have a record of hostility to climate action, a scepticism of climate science, and interests in fossil fuels.
The event features keynote speeches from Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Secretary Michael Gove. Braverman ran for Tory leader last year vowing to “suspend the all-consuming desire to achieve Net Zero by 2050”. They will be joined by David Frost, a Conservative peer and a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group.
Fellow conference speakers also include Lee Anderson, Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party, who has claimed that people are “sick to death” of net zero, and former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has said that taking action on climate change is “unrealistic” because “it would have no effect for hundreds or possibly a thousand years.”
Another speaker is Conservative MP John Hayes, a former energy minister who received £150,000 between 2018 and 2020 from Lebanon-based oil company BB Energy for work as a “strategic advisor”. Also in attendance will be Conservative MPs Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, and Conservative peer Daniel Hannan.
Cates used her speech to claim that “epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion” among young people are being caused by “culture, schools and universities” teaching that “our country is racist, our heroes are villains, [and] humanity is killing the Earth.”
Wera Hobhouse, Liberal Democrat Climate Spokesperson, told DeSmog: “It is deeply concerning to learn that Conservative ministers would attend a conference with climate deniers who stand in the way of progress.
“We need leaders who are committed to finding solutions to this crisis, not those betraying the trust of the people they were elected to serve by ignoring the overwhelming evidence of climate change.”
The selection of high-profile MPs, peers, and ministers are attending the NatCon conference despite Conservative backbencher Daniel Kawczynski having been reprimanded by the party in 2020 for speaking at a NatCon conference in Rome alongside far-right politicians.
“Daniel Kawczynski has been formally warned that his attendance at this event was not acceptable, particularly in light of the views of some of those in attendance,” the Conservative Party said at the time. Kawczynski spoke alongside Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orban and other far-right figures from across the EU.
The Edmund Burke Foundation
NatCon conferences have been running since 2016 and have featured radical right-wing politicians, academics and journalists from across the world, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni.
The EBF, which has organised the conferences since 2021, is a US think tank founded in 2019 under the founding principle that “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honoured by the state and other institutions both public and private.”
NatCon conference chairman Christopher DeMuth, who is co-chairing this week’s London conference, has previously expressed climate science denial and is tied to a number of think tanks that have opposed climate action.
DeMuth served as president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) from 1986 to 2006, an influential conservative think tank whose representatives have consistently cast doubt on humanity’s contribution to climate change.
The AEI has received over £2.9 million ($3,615,000) from ExxonMobil since 1998, and over £1.6 million ($2 million) from foundations related to petrochemicals giant Koch Industries from 2004 to 2017.
Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch drew criticism for meeting the AEI in November. Her predecessor Liz Truss met with the group in 2018.
In 2001, DeMuth wrote in the AEI’s Energy Crunch publication that “The Kyoto Treaty Deserved to Die”, and cast doubt on climate science. He wrote: “Although it is fairly well-established that the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed somewhat (one degree Fahrenheit) during the past century, it’s not clear why this happened.”
“Whatever the causes, we don’t know if future warming trends will be large or small, or whether the net environmental and economic consequences (including both beneficial and harmful effects) may be large or small,” he added.
It’s not clear whether DeMuth’s views towards climate science have evolved since. However, at the 2022 EU NatCon conference, he praised the contested science that emerged during the Covid pandemic and appeared to contrast this with a too-eager scientific consensus over man-made climate change. “The climate-change mantra of ‘the science is settled’ never got traction in a genuine crisis,” he said.
DeMuth is also a distinguished fellow of The Hudson Institute, a group which has reportedly worked to defeat climate bills in Congress. The group received more than £6.3 million ($7.9 million) in funding from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund between 2011 and 2013 – two opaque groups that have provided finance for anti-green causes.
DeMuth is also on the Alliance of Market Solutions board of advisors – an organisation of “conservative leaders” that aims to build support for policies that “protect the environment and deregulate and grow the economy.”
Another keynote speaker at the conference is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation – a hub of opposition to climate action. The think tank, which influenced the policy of the Reagan administration, has platformed high-profile climate deniers such as the late S. Fred Singer, and received over £4.9 million ($6.1 million) from groups linked to the Koch family between 1997 and 2017.
The Heritage Foundation’s Vice President for Outreach, Andrew Olivastro, will also be speaking at the NatCon conference. Olivastro has said that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing – based on standards measuring a business’s impact on society and the environment – “is a direct assault on the heart and soul of the free market economy”.
‘Doom Mongering Propaganda’
The London conference will also play host to a number of British speakers who have refuted the scientific consensus on climate change in recent years.
Keynote speaker Douglas Murray, Associate Editor at The Spectator, argued in 2020 that “terrible policy decisions” were being made due to “the false belief that we are seeing an increase in catastrophic weather events.”
A Carbon Brief analysis of 504 scientific articles examining the link between climate change and extreme weather events found that 71 percent of the events and their underlying trends were made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change.
Elsewhere, Murray claimed that educating children about climate change was akin to “terrifying our children with doom mongering propaganda” which “is nothing less than abuse.”
Speaker Melanie Phillips, a regular contributor to the The Daily Mail, The Spectator and The Times, wrote in 2022 that “there is no evidence that anything is happening to the world’s climate that lies outside historic fluctuations.”
She continued by arguing that “net zero has been a major contributor to Britain’s soaring fuel prices and the cost of living crisis, which played an outsize role in defenestrating Boris Johnson by turning the public against him.”
Daily Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs, who will also speak at the event, argued in 2019 that “CO2 emissions may not be the only reason for warming.”
She added: “sidelining studies that have, for example, found the natural climate system can suddenly shift, and ridiculing researchers who explore other possible variables – from solar changes to volcanoes – could be driving us further from the truth.”
Beyond climate science denial, many of the conference’s speakers have attacked green policies, with a particular focus on net zero.
Along with Lord Frost, the conference will host Gwythian Prins, a member of the GWPF’s academic advisory council. In 2021, Prins argued that “net zero agenda hands geopolitical control to China,” because green policies “attempt to defy the laws of thermodynamics.”
Toby Young, Editor of the Daily Sceptic, will also be speaking at the conference. Young wrote in The Spectator in 2022 that, “it’s not the fact of climate change that I’m sceptical about, but the claim that it’s anthropogenic [caused by humans]. I think that could be true, but the evidence isn’t compelling enough to justify the net-zero policy.”
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.
“There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 was directly caused by humans,” Young told DeSmog. “What we do know is that temperatures have varied widely over the last 600 million years, along with levels of greenhouse gases, and these natural forces did not stop operating at the start of the last century.
Young questioned the validity of studies that cite near unanimous agreement among scientists on climate change. “Science is a process, not a consensus. The unproven hypothesis that humans have caused all or most climate change since the Industrial Revolution does not lend itself to a yes or no answer. The debate is over how much or how little humans are responsible for”.
The National Conservatism website also recommends a number of books which dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. Of the 41 books listed on the website and reviewed for this article, 14 contain passages that either refute climate science, criticise climate action, or demonise those calling for climate action.
Legatum’s Presence
A number of speakers at the conference also have links to Legatum – the Dubai-based investment fund behind the broadcaster GB News, which regularly platforms views that are hostile to climate science and net zero. Legatum also funds the Legatum Institute think tank, which received over £61,000 ($77,000) from a Koch Industries foundation in 2018.
“Legatum is an investor in GB News, a platform which hosts individuals with views on both sides of the argument,” a Legatum spokesperson said. “GB News supports media plurality in the UK, bringing fresh perspectives to the national conversation.”
Five of the UK NatCon speakers are on the advisory board of The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a Legatum-funded enterprise, founded by Jordan Peterson and dedicated to empowering “responsible citizenship” by drawing “on our moral, cultural, economic and spiritual foundations.” ARC members speaking at the conference include: the Conservative MPs Cates, Hayes, and Kruger, EBF UK chair James Orr, and UnHerd columnist Louise Perry.
Fred de Fossard, who heads a research unit at the Legatum Institute and acted as a special advisor to Jacob Rees-Mogg between 2020 and 2022, will also be speaking at the conference.
Rees-Mogg is now a GB News host, as is Tory deputy chair Anderson. They will be joined at the NatCon conference by fellow GB News host Darren Grimes, who has used his TV platform to demand a Brexit-style referendum on the UK’s net zero target, which he called “an asphyxiating straitjacket bound around the body of Britain”.
“This collective of climate deniers should have representatives of this government nowhere near it – yet multiple cabinet ministers aren’t merely in attendance, they’re keynote speakers,” Green Party MP Caroline Lucas told DeSmog. “Ministerial links to this conference wipe away any remaining shred of this government’s climate credibility. It’s time to kick toxic fossil fuel interests out of politics once and for all.”
Financial, ideological and senior staff ties are still channelling the interests of opaquely funded think tanks into the heart of government.
The Conservative Party has received in excess of £600,000 since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister from four board members at leading Tufton Street ‘think tanks’, a new DeSmog analysis shows.
The data also shows that free market groups based in Tufton Street, Westminster, have retained significant influence in Sunak’s administration. More than half a dozen Tufton Street alumni currently serve as special advisers to the government, while seven ministers have appeared at events hosted by Tufton Street groups since Sunak became prime minister in October.
These groups have often acted as a blocker to climate action. All are known for their anti-big-state and pro-fracking views, while their anti-green stances range from opposition to state-led climate intervention to active climate science denial. Previous reports indicate that Tufton Street groups have received substantial funds from organisations that support climate science denial in the past decade, with some donations provided directly by fossil fuel firms.
The joint-largest donation to the Conservatives during this period was made by Graham Edwards, a board member at the influential Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). He gave £500,000 in December 2022 – the same month that he was appointed as Tory treasurer, responsible for party fundraising.
Other CPS board members – Lord Michael Spencer and Lord Anthony Bamford – have also donated £100,000 and £10,000 to the party respectively since Sunak became prime minister. Lord Spencer donated via his family holding company, IPGL, while Lord Bamford’s donation is linked to his construction conglomerate, JCB.
As revealed by DeSmog this week, a firm owned by a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – one of the UK’s principal climate science denial groups – also donated £20,000 in March to House of Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt and Conservative MP Liam Fox.
The CPS, which is based out of 57 Tufton Street, is a leading member of the network. This alliance of free market think tanks and lobby groups catapulted into public consciousness last autumn for its outsized influence over former Prime Minister Liz Truss and ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, whose ‘mini budget’ on 23 September 2022 caused market panic and a dramatic fall in the value of the pound.
The funding of Tufton Street groups is notoriously opaque. Every single one of its members was given the lowest transparency rating – E – by openDemocracy’s ‘Who Funds You?’ 2022 report into think tanks. Tufton Street groups have earned £6 million collectively in their latest accounting periods.
“It’s time to kick toxic fossil fuel interests out of politics once and for all,” Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, told DeSmog. “This government’s murky ties to Tufton Street have barely diminished since Liz Truss’s economy-wrecking mini budget fiasco. When we face a rapidly closing window of opportunity to tackle the climate emergency, there are still countless climate-denying and delaying influences right at the heart of government.”
The newspaper’s chief interviewer and columnist joins an increasingly influential body of trustees at the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The Daily Telegraph’s chief interviewer and columnist Allison Pearson has joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), one of the UK’s principal climate science denial groups.
This appointment adds to the influence of the GWPF in the press and potentially the amount of sway that it holds over the Conservative Party.
Pearson, who has written a number of articles criticising climate action, will be assuming a role on the board of trustees alongside former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who joined the GWPF in February and also serves as a trade adviser to the UK government.
Lord David Frost – a Conservative peer and former Cabinet Office minister who was appointed in November – is also a GWPF director, along with Terence Mordaunt, who has donated £342,500 to the Conservative Party and its MPs since 2008 via First Corporate Consultants and First Corporate Shipping. This includes £10,000 donated in March this year to Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt.
The GWPF is a member of the Tufton Street network – an interconnected hub of think tanks and pressure groups that lobby against state action, including in the realm of climate change. The GWPF has criticised both the policies adopted by governments to address climate change, and the science underpinning these policies.
The group said in 2015 that “policies to ‘stop climate change’ are based on climate models that completely failed to predict the lack of warming for the past two decades”. It has also expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”.
In September 2022 Net Zero Watch – the GWPF’s campaigning arm – published two reports rejecting climate science on the greenhouse effect.
Minister had secret meeting with oil-backed think tank that warned UK government not to listen to climate scientists
Badenoch has previously said she would delay the UK’s net zero goals. 06/09/2022. London, United Kingdom. Official Cabinet Portrait; Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade – Kemi Badenoch.
Trade secretary Kemi Badenoch met secretly with a US think tank that has taken millions of dollars from climate denial groups and claimed it would be “irresponsible” for the UK to follow climate science, openDemocracy can reveal.
Badenoch met representatives of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which campaigners say has a long track record of “distorting” climate science, for dinner in November while on an official visit to the US.
Scant details of the meeting were published by Badenoch’s department last week, as the minister’s Indo-Pacific trade deal faced criticism for “making a mockery” of UK pledges to tackle deforestation.
The AEI, which also met with Liz Truss in 2018 when she was trade secretary, has sown doubt over climate change science, describing a landmark 2021 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “alarmist” and “deeply dubious”.
The IPCC report was produced by the world’s leading climate scientists and concluded that the world was approaching “irreversible” levels of global heating, with catastrophic impacts rapidly becoming inevitable.
But Benjamin Zycher and Peter J Wallison, senior fellows at the AEI, played down its findings by claiming that “we don’t understand all the elements in the complex climate system – the effects of clouds alone are understood poorly”.
The authors, neither of whom have backgrounds in science, added that it would be “beyond irresponsible” for governments to adopt policies on the basis of the report.
The think tank also separately criticised COP 26, the annual UN climate conference hosted by the UK in 2021, with one of its authors claiming that delegates spread a “false narrative” that urgent action is required to tackle climate change.
Researchers have found that AEI has received more than $330m in donations from climate denial groups since 2008, including $4.8m from US oil giant ExxonMobil.
A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson told openDemocracy that Badenoch meets “all sorts of stakeholders that have different views – it’s no different to what it’s like in the UK”.
“There are various think tanks in Westminster that have sceptical views about climate change and ministers meet these people all the time,” they added.
The department has refused a Freedom of Information request by openDemocracy for minutes of the meeting with the AEI on grounds that there were “closed discussions under the Chatham House rule” – meaning that their contents are secret.
Badenoch also gave a speech at another US think tank, the Cato Institute, during her official visit in November. The institute was founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, one of the top funders of climate denial in the US. Cato is “focused on disputing the science behind global warming and questioning the rationale for taking action”, according to Greenpeace US.
The minister, who was beaten by Liz Truss in the first of last year’s Conservative leadership elections, gave a speech promoting free trade at the institute’s headquarters in Washington DC in which she hinted that some policies to tackle climate change could “impoverish” the UK.
“We all know that climate change is a challenge for us all, wherever we live in the world. But we know that we can and should solve it by using free trade and investment to accelerate the technological progress that will protect the planet,” she claimed.
“And something that not enough politicians say: we must do this, we must protect the planet in a way that does not impoverish the UK, the US or, let’s be honest, any other country,” she said.
During her unsuccessful campaign for the Tory leadership, Badenoch came out against the UK’s net zero target, describing the policy as “unilateral economic disarmament”. She told the Telegraph she “believe[s] in climate change” but said “there is a better way of going about these things”.
The American Enterprise Institute has been approached for comment.
A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson said: “Claiming that speaking to a particular think tank implies adopting every one of their policy positions is treating the public like fools. The Secretary of State visited Washington DC to emphasise the importance of trade as a force for security and prosperity, including green trade and investment, and to promote the UK’s high-talent, business-friendly environment and highly innovative economy.”
