Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage speaking at a Reform UK press conference on 3 June 2024. Credit: Reform UK / YouTube
The Reform UK leader is a vocal opponent of net zero policies, and has questioned the basis of established climate science.
Pro-Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage has announced that he will be standing to be an MP at the upcoming general election and will be replacing Richard Tice as leader of the populist party Reform UK.
Farage, who says that he hopes to become “the voice of opposition” in Parliament, has long been a vocal opponent of climate action and a critic of climate science – campaigning for a referendum on the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target.
When he was the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the party’s 2015 and 2017 election manifestos pledged to rip up green measures, repeal the UK’s Climate Change Act, withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement – the flagship deal to tackle global emissions – and support fossil fuel extraction.
These reflected Farage’s personal views on climate action. In 2015, he told the libertarian website Spiked: “I think wind energy is the biggest collective economic insanity I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve never seen anything more stupid, more illogical, or more irrational.”
Farage is a presenter on GB News, the right-wing broadcaster that has regularly provided a platform to climate science denial and attacks on green reforms since it launched in June 2021.
Speaking on GB News in August 2021, Farage said that he was “very much an environmentalist” and that he couldn’t “abide things like plastics in our seas, pollution in our rivers.” However, on the issue of climate change, he added: “What annoys me though, is 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.”
The world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has stated it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”, while scientists at NASA have found that the last 10 years were the hottest on record. Earth’s average surface temperature in 2023 was the warmest since records began in 1880.
The IPCC 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”.
Farage has been a vocal critic of net zero. He has claimed that the policy is an “act of self harm” and has called for it to be scrapped.
He has said: “It will not bring economic benefits. It will make everybody a whole lot poorer. And yet the lemmings in Parliament are taking us towards an economic cliff,” adding: “I can’t think of an issue on which the public and politicians are more divided.”
In fact, politicians are markedly less in favour of climate action than the general public. New polling by YouGov for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has shown that almost two-thirds (62 percent) of the public believe the best way to achieve energy security is to reduce the use of fossil fuels and instead expand the use of renewable energy, compared to 48 percent of MPs.
The Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on its net zero policies, has estimated that the cost of achieving net zero will be less than 1 percent of UK GDP, while the government independent spending watchdog – the Office for Budget Responsibility – has said that, “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Farage has also claimed that, “If green technology is going to work, it ought to work without ordinary folk subsidising it” – referring to the government grants and investment dedicated to developing clean energy sources. The UK government has given £20 billion more in support to fossil fuel producers than their renewable energy peers since 2015.
Farage has also spread conspiracy theories about anti-pollution measures being used to control people’s lives.
In a video posted on Twitter, he argued that Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s calls to reduce air pollution by cutting car engine use would pave the way 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.”
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has highlighted how climate lockdown claims are part of “a conspiratorial narrative which claims that global elites are using climate change as a pretext to restrict individual freedoms and civil liberties.”
Farage and Reform UK
Farage used his announcement to state his belief that Labour will win the general election, which will be held on 4 July, and that the Conservative Party has “crushed itself”. With the Tories predicted to lose in a landslide, Farage appears to believe that he can lead a new right-wing movement.
The Reform leader was already a key figure in the party prior to today’s announcement, effectively owning the party as well as serving as its president. Reform operates as a private company without a democratic structure, so Farage’s majority shareholding meant that could have appointed himself as leader at any time.
Despite Farage failing to be elected as an MP when he stood in seven previous general elections, and Reform only winning two councillors in May’s local elections, polls indicate that Farage may succeed in becoming the MP for Clacton.
If this is the case, Farage will be advocating in Parliament for the anti-climate policies that have been proposed by his party.
Reform has called for the UK’s net zero emissions target to be scrapped, and has proposed holding a referendum on the policy – a campaign launched by Farage in 2022.
The party’s policy agenda states that: “Westminster’s net zero plans send our jobs and money overseas, making us net poorer and net colder”, adding that net zero policies are “net stupid”.
The party’s former leader Tice, who will now become its chairman, is a prominent climate science denier. Tice has claimed that “there is no climate crisis”, and has also expressed the view that “CO2 isn’t a poison. It’s plant food”.
Of the £2.5 million that Reform UK has received in donations since the 2019 election, around 92 percent (£2.3 million) of that income has been given by fossil fuel interests, polluting industries, or climate science deniers.
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.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.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
A woman uses an umbrella to try to cope with the scorching heat in London on 8 July. Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images
For months, ministers have refused to publish a report on how climate crisis will affect the UK. Burnham must release it
The past two months have seen exceptionally hot weather across much of Western Europe, with even the UK witnessing record temperatures. Even now, England and Wales are well into their third heatwave this year, with some areas on their 13th consecutive day of temperatures above 30°C.
More than 2,700 people are thought to have died as a result of the extreme heat in England and Wales, with scientists estimating that 440 people died during each of the three peak days of June’s record-breaking heatwave, when temperatures reached 37.7°C.
The situation was perhaps best summarised by the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate report for 2025, published last week: “What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly see as normal.”
Introducing the report, its lead author, climate information scientist Mike Kendon, notes that “2025 was the UK’s warmest year on record, the sixth time this record has been broken in the 21st century so far”. He adds: “The latest 10-year period (2016-2025) is 1.33°C warmer than the period from 1961-1990”.
In these elevated temperatures, wildfires are a particular concern. This week, local authorities across France cancelled many Bastille Day events to minimise fire risks, not least from firework displays, and in the UK there were fears about what are becoming known as “firewaves”. Less cold winters mean more vegetation earlier in the spring, which, when dried out by heatwaves like those seen this year, increases the risk of wildfires. Last Tuesday, emergency services dealt with 19 such fires, including two major incidents, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council.
Speaking to the Guardian, Maria Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology said: “What we are witnessing is climate change actively rewriting the vulnerability of the British landscape.” Perhaps the key element to draw out here is that this is not a change likely to affect us in the future; it is happening now.
Moreover, it relates to one of the surprising elements of the June heat: a public disconnect in the UK between acceptance of climate breakdown and relating this to carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil or gas. People seemed unwilling or unable to make this link, even with the widespread personal experience of heat, the risk of wildfires and those reports of thousands of deaths.
One explanation is that many of our biggest media outlets often fail to point to the connection.
Researchers at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit reviewed 2,500 news reports on the heatwaves from the nine main national daily newspapers, finding that nearly three-quarters made no mention of climate breakdown. The Financial Times was most likely to mention the climate crisis, doing so in 50 of its 78 articles on the heatwaves, while The Sun was least likely to do so – making the link in only four of its 69 articles.
All too often, the reports gave the impression that the main challenge regarding the heatwaves will be adapting to the “new normal” of a hotter world, with plenty of coverage on changing our behaviour, converting buildings and being prepared for new health concerns.
But the challenge we face goes way beyond that. Adapting to a world where average temperatures are 2.5°C above current levels might be possible at considerable cost and human suffering, but unless we also cut carbon dioxide emissions, then we will have to keep on adapting to ever-higher temperatures. Concentrating on current adaptation alone is barely half the answer.
This is a known issue within government and is causing such concern that publicity is unwelcome, as shown by events relating to a study prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which was officially described as a “national security assessment” and titled somewhat ominously: Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security.
The study was supposed to be launched at a landmark event on 9 October last year, but was held back, with one source telling The Guardian that insiders “feared it was being suppressed because the government was unwilling to face the issues raised.”
After pressure from MPs, including the official environmental audit committee, and Freedom of Information requests to publish the report, the government eventually released a redacted 14-page version in January this year. It warns of a high probability that the UK’s national security, financial prosperity and food security will come under threat from the climate crisis and the subsequent collapse of vital ecosystems that support food production.
Even that makes for very sober reading. The report identifies nine “planetary boundaries” as the safe limits identified for human pressure on nine Earth system processes crucial to maintaining a stable planet, such as climate change, biosphere integrity and oceanic acidification. Six have already been crossed.
The report concludes that ecosystem degradation is occurring across all global regions and every critical ecosystem is on a “pathway to collapse”, which it helpfully defines as “irreversible loss of function beyond repair”.
The implications are huge. This is an official government study by the combined intelligence agencies, and even if redacted, it is unable to hide the crisis ahead. One conclusion is obvious: if this is the greatest threat to our security and the integrity of the global ecosystem, we should be redirecting money away from conventional military spending and towards human and environmental security.
A key requirement of Andy Burnham as incoming prime minister should be the immediate release of the full report, followed by a vigorous public debate on where we go from here.
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The government has signed vast deals with gas-loving, Trump-donating AI giants.
When U.S. President Donald Trump landed for what he called the “exquisite honour” of an unprecedented second state visit to the UK this September, he brought along a retinue of his favourite Silicon Valley tech bosses for dinner with King Charles.
Among the guests seated in the gold-flecked banquet hall of Windsor Castle: Jensen Huang, CEO of the artificial intelligence (AI) chip-manufacturer Nvidia, which has recently skyrocketed into the position of the world’s largest public company, and Sam Altman, founder and CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Recently, these two tech CEOs seem to have earned a direct line to President Trump and, unsurprisingly, the bedrock of that influence appears to be money – earlier this year, Nvidia and Altman both donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration ceremony.
When they landed in London, they quickly applied their skills of political influence to Labour.
Altman and Huang’s visit to the UK accompanied the signing of Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s £150 billion “U.S.-UK Technology Prosperity Deal”, an agreement which includes £31 billion in investments from American tech companies to construct fleets of gargantuan “hyperscaler” AI-ready data centres across Britain.
Stargate UK, a massive AI infrastructure project from OpenAI, Nvidia, and UK AI startup Nscale, is only one of several huge new initiatives introduced via the deal.
On the first day of the big visit, Nvidia threw a press conference to celebrate its pledge to invest a further £2 billion in UK AI.
“This is a historic day,” Starmer rhapsodised about the Nvidia investment while standing next to Huang, lit by the glow of a towering Nvidia logo.
Huang handed Starmer a framed golden Nvidia supercomputer as a gift, embossed with an inscription which Huang asked the prime minister to share.
“This is the UK’s age of AI,” Starmer read out to rising cheers in the audience. “A new industrial revolution begins!”
One glaring omission from Starmer and Huang’s “revolution”? Any mention of how the UK will power an explosion of water and energy-voracious AI data centres – the vast warehouses of supercomputers needed to run the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini – without completely upending the UK’s net zero commitments.
Instead, on the same day, Huang declared Nvidia’s plans to power its UK AI with fossil fuels.
“Sustainable power like nuclear and wind and of course all of that solar is all going to contribute, but I’m also hoping that gas turbines can also contribute,” he told The Times.
Starmer has claimed that home-grown clean energy is “in the DNA” of his government, yet Labour has so far said little about Nvidia’s plans for fossil fuel-powered AI in Britain – or how it intends to hit its net zero targets while charging headlong into this big tech bonanza.
Too Much, Too Quickly
Labour has already been widely accused of growing too close to U.S. big tech companies.
In recent months, the government has signed wide-ranging deals with seven Trump-supporting U.S. tech giants – Nvidia, OpenAI, Instagram and Facebook creator Meta, software company Microsoft, online retail behemoth Amazon, search engine pioneer Google, and enigmatic “spy tech” company Palantir.
Together, these tech firms have donated a combined $7.5 million (£5.6 million) to President Trump, a figure that doesn’t count the unspecified amounts Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Palantir reportedly gave for the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom.
The Trump administration has pursued an anti-immigrant, anti-democratic, pro-fossil fuel agenda, which has included an eight-fold increase in weapons expenditure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carrying out deadly immigration raids across the country, and over $1 trillion (£760 billion) in defence spending, largely for weapons, shipbuilding, and military aircraft.
Trump has so far sent National Guard troops into five U.S. cities and cut nearly $60 billion (£45 billion) in aid funding worldwide.
Labour has already struck deals that would see Trump’s big tech allies train the UK workforce in AI, collaborate with the British military, house the UK’s classified information, and “modernise” the NHS. These deals have prompted widespread concerns about their lack of transparency and the threats they pose to UK data security.
Now, further concern is growing that Labour is encouraging American AI companies to run roughshod over the UK’s renewable energy transition.
“Starmer’s investment deals with U.S. big tech threaten to give them priority access to Britain’s resources – be they energy, water, or personal data – rather than using these resources to meet public need. They will drive a coach and horses through our climate commitments,” Nick Dearden, director of campaign group Global Justice Now, told DeSmog.
That threat revolves around the government’s efforts to aggressively woo U.S. big tech to ramp up multi-billion pound AI data centre investments at its designated AI “Growth Zones”.
To date, several big tech firms have heeded the call. In the past few months, Microsoft has invested £22 billion, Google’s parent company Alphabet has pledged £5 billion, and Amazon – the biggest owner of data centres in the world – has promised £8 billion for UK AI development.
Oliver Hayes, head of policy at campaign organisation Global Action Plan, agrees with Dearden’s concerns. “By striking deals with U.S. tech companies that are gung-ho about gas-fired data centres, ministers are opening yet more doors for lobbyists, exposing bill-payers to greater pain, and jeopardising UK climate targets,” he told DeSmog.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all already watered down or wholly abandoned their sustainability pledges in the last year due to the surging energy demands of their AI businesses.
OpenAI hasn’t even created one. This summer, the firm hired as its energy chief a former Trump-administration natural gas evangelist who promoted exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“One way of looking at AI is that its main use is as a vehicle to give the fossil fuel industry one last reason to expand,” wrote American environmentalist Bill McKibben in response to the hire.
Meanwhile, many of the people running these tech giants have veered into outright climate science denial.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates made headlines last week for making what he called a “strategic pivot” on climate change, claiming that it “will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future”.
His words contradict the position of hundreds of leading climate scientists across the world, who when surveyed by The Guardian said they expect that the earth will warm by at least 2.5C by the end of the century, which the UN’s climate agency has reported would lead to “catastrophic climate breakdown”.
Trump’s Tech Bros vs. Climate Change
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is not the only American tech boss with a proclivity for powering data centres with natural gas. Nearly all of the companies partnering with Labour have already embraced it.
Fossil gas as an AI energy “solution” is an import from Trump’s U.S. – the world’s top producer of liquefied natural gas. In July, Trump lauded the idea of powering data centres using fossil fuels while flanked by oil and gas executives.
A growing cadre of U.S. tech giants – including OpenAI, Oracle, Meta, xAI, and Microsoft – are installing gas turbine generators at their data centre sites in the U.S. and Ireland to provide energy to their supercomputer complexes. Amazon previously applied to build one, though eventually withdrew its plans. At the end of October, Google joined the list, announcing its investment in a gas plant with carbon capture for its data centres in the U.S. Midwest.
And many big tech companies are not shy about claiming that these projects are just the beginning.
Microsoft’s vice president for energy, Google’s chief investment officer, OpenAI’s Altman, Amazon’s vice president for global data centres, and Nvidia’s senior director of corporate sustainability have all publicly supported the idea of their companies relying on natural gas as an energy source for AI data centres.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Credit: WSJ / YouTube
Now, several of these tech giants have set their sights on powering the UK AI boom with gas.
In a June meeting of the government’s newly formed AI Energy Council, which includes Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft, Labour ministers were pressured to consider that “temporary on-site generation, including natural gas fuel cells” could be an “interim measure” to avoid delays in connecting data centres to the UK’s notoriously backlogged energy grid.
The Tony Blair Institute, a think tank with a strong influence on Starmer’s government and deep ties to Trump-supporting American billionaire tech mogulLarry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, has added its voice to this chorus. The institute argued in a report published in July that dedicated gas power sources will be needed to provide reliable energy to UK data centres as a “bridging measure” to give time for the country’s renewable energy networks to develop.
Campaigners are quick to point out that powering data centres with gas would decimate the UK’s climate targets.
“Off-grid gas plants are a climate catastrophe which could lead to hundreds of millions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions from the tech sector. They would delay the phase out of fossil gas in Europe when we need to speed up the transition to renewable energy,” Jill McCardle of renewable energy campaign group Beyond Fossil Fuels told DeSmog.
This fact doesn’t seem to have deterred the big tech elite.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, and Altman have all said, in one way or another, that the AI boom will be worth its skyrocketing emissions because artificial intelligence will help to solve the climate crisis.
“I don’t want to say this because climate change is so serious and so hard of a problem,” Altman said in a 2023 interview, “but I think once we have a really powerful super intelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult for a system like that.”
Schmidt has argued that pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a supercomputer as smart or smarter than a human – is the best way to solve the climate crisis, because “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway”.
Bill Gates told journalists last year that “data centres are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to global energy needs] but probably only 2 percent to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly.”
Critics say – nonsense.
“The fact is that the climate crisis is not primarily a technological problem: we have most if not all of the tech we need to fix it,” Adam Becker, science journalist and author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, told DeSmog.
“Tech oligarchs think that they can burn fossil fuels with impunity and clean it up later with a magic wand given to them by a machine god. But that isn’t going to happen. The reality is that we need to save ourselves from the machinations of these cruelly myopic billionaires.”
Starmer’s Silence
Will Labour regulate the climate-destroying impulses of these tech behemoths?
“This AI frenzy needs to be regulated or big tech will burn dirty fossil fuels to power it,” McCardle warned DeSmog.
Hayes of Global Action Plan added: “Ministers should immediately and unequivocally announce that data centres will not be permitted to connect to the gas grid. Silicon Valley has money to burn, so if they want to put enormous demands on the UK’s energy system, they should pay for new renewables to supply it.”
However, Labour ministers haven’t yet put the kibosh on gas-powered AI.
During the president’s state visit in September, Starmer and Trump – whose administration has reversed American climate policy so dramatically that some experts are now calling the U.S. a “petrostate” – held a press conference for the Technology Prosperity Deal.
With the camera rolling, Trump addressed Nvidia’s gas-embracing CEO directly.
“AI is taking over the world. You’re taking over the world, Jensen [Huang]. I don’t know what you’re doing here. All I can say is we both hope you’re right.”
Through the whole exchange, Starmer sat with folded hands next to the American president, chuckling.
Labour’s Tech Courtships: A Primer
Microsoft
Microsoft, which has donated $750,000 (£560,000) to Trump and recently rolled back its “moonshot” sustainabilitygoals amid a surge in its AI emissions, already operates several data centres in the UK and currently has plans to build a £106 million AI-ready hyperscaler data centre in Leeds.
During Trump’s state visit, and as part of the new U.S.-UK Technology Prosperity Deal, Microsoft announced its plans to invest $30 billion (£22.5 billion) to “power [the UK’s] AI future”.
Microsoft’s links with Labour go deeper than this huge infusion of Trump-affiliated cash. It has partnered with Labour on a number of projects, including joining Amazon in training millions of workers in AI skills, and signing a deal to provide Microsoft’s AI software at a discount to the UK public sector.
Though the company still pays lip service to its commitment to sustainably-powered AI, it is working with fossil fuel companies – selling its AI services to fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron – and actively embracing fossil fuel-based energy options.
As for gas-powered AI, Microsoft’s Vice President of Energy, Bob Hollis, told CNBC in March that powering more data centres with natural gas paired with carbon capture was “not off the table”.
Microsoft already operates a data centre campus powered by off-grid gas generators in Ireland, and had been slated to build a data centre next to a coal plant in the U.S. state of Wisconsin until local opposition stopped the project.
Google
Labour’s deal-making with Google, which gave $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration and quietly deleted all sustainability targets from its website in September, has been extensive.
Labour has granted Google a £400 million defence contract to use its cloud services for “classified information sharing”, has signed a partnership with the firm to help the government – including the NHS and local councils – to “modernise”, alongside an agreement for the company to help “upskill” British workers with AI.
Google’s parent company Alphabet – which opened a £735 million data centre in Hertfordshire with Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this year – announced a £5 billion investment in UK-based AI research and infrastructure in September to coincide with Trump’s visit.
Google – whose carbon emissions soared by nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024 – claims it has signed a deal with Shell to supply “95 percent carbon-free energy” for its UK investments. However, this claim is called into question by the company’s planned hyperscaler data centre in Essex, which will belch out 570,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
The company has also begun advocating for the use of fossil fuels to meet data centre energy demands.
In August, Google’s Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat praised a speech by the U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in which he pushed to expand the use of fossil fuels for powering data centers. Porat called Burgum’s comments “fantastic” – “[b]ecause I think it is very clear that to realise the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it.”
A Google policy brief has also detailed the company’s intention to pursue “accelerating innovation and investment in affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture”.
Meta
Meta, which donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration fund, is currently building “Hyperion”, three massive gas-powered data centres in Louisiana larger than the size of Manhattan. The firm is also pursuing a “titan cluster” of data centres in Ohio dubbed “Prometheus”, powered by its own gas plant.
It is also currently working on a $1 million (£750,000) initiative with Labour to provide “government-owned” AI tools for “high-security use cases like language translation for national security” and “speeding up the approvals process for house building”.
At the end of January, former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who was Meta’s president of global affairs at the time, hosted a dinner with former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair where tech entrepreneurs met with government investment ministers.
It is unknown whether Meta currently has plans to invest in UK data centres.
Palantir
Palantir, a mysterious spy tech company that builds databases of personal information, is run by a Trump-supporting climate science denier. However, that hasn’t stopped Labour from working with the firm.
In September, the government announced a £1.5 billion “strategic partnership” to “boost military AI and innovation”, in which Palantir will collaborate with the UK military to “develop AI-powered capabilities already tested in Ukraine to speed up decision making, military planning and targeting.”
The partnership comes on top of Palantir’s ongoing five-year £330 million NHS contract, awarded in 2023 by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, to create a data platform for personal health information that has spurred fears over the privacy of patient medical records.
The company’s co-founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, is a long-time Trump donor, having given at least $1.75 million (£1.31 million) to Trump campaigns from 2016 to 2020.
OpenAI is not hiding its intention to embrace off-grid gas as the energy source for its data centre construction frenzy in the UK, or its cosy relationship with Trump.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, is closely aligned with both Trump and several climate deniers, having donated $1 million (£750,000) to the president’s inauguration.
Nevertheless, in July, Labour deepened its relationship with the creator of ChatGPT – signing a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI to “turbocharge” UK AI.
The government is already using ChatGPT in “Humphrey”, a Whitehall tool designed to “speed up the civil service by taking away admin burdens”, as well as “Consult”, an AI tool which “speeds up the policy making process by automatically sorting public responses to consultations.”
OpenAI has already started powering data centres with gas. Its U.S. Stargate Project site in Texas, slated to become one of the largest data centre sites in the world, is installing off-grid gas turbines to power its operations.
The firm has chosen not to disclose the carbon footprint of ChatGPT-5, its most advanced AI model to date, despite the fact that researchers told The Guardian it uses “significantly more energy than GPT-4o”. The company, which is rapidly expanding across the globe, does not have publicly announced climate or sustainability targets.
These choices are reflected in the views of Altman, who said in a U.S. Senate hearing in May that “in the short term, I think [the future of powering AI] probably looks like more natural gas.”
Altman has also said that he thinks AI will solve climate change, despite the technology’s ever-expanding demand for power.
Altman’s history with climate deniers goes back to the beginning of his career when Thiel served as his mentor. The OpenAI CEO also previously donated $32,000 (£23,000) to climate denier Michael Shellenberger’s failed 2022 campaign for Governor of California.
Shellenberger has made extensive claims denying the severity of climate change, including that “humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’”, “the Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’”, and “climate change is not making natural disasters worse”.
Shellenberger is well known for his nuclear energy advocacy, which aligns with Altman’s own long-held positions.
In a 2015 blog on Altman’s personal website, he argued,:“The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy.”
Nvidia
Nvidia’s ties to Labour go well beyond its role in the freshly-announced Stargate UK data centre project.
The supercomputer chip company, which donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump in January, has pledged to invest £2 billion to develop the UK AI sector and to deploy 120,000 advanced computer chips across the UK.
Earlier in the summer, the government also announced that it would collaborate with Nvidia on training the UK workforce via a “nationwide AI talent development pipeline”. An agreement was also forged for Nvidia to provide AI resource tools to UK universities.
Amazon
In June, Amazon, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and is the biggest owner of data centres in the world, pledged to invest £40 billion in the UK over three years, which includes a £8 billion investment in UK data centres.
It is also part of a Labour government initiative to provide. AI training to UK workers.
The UK government’s reliance on Amazon goes well beyond its Labour-era deals – it has won £1.7 billion in UK government contracts since 2016.
Though Amazon announced a plan in 2019 to eliminate or offset all company carbon emissions by 2040, its emissions spiked by about 40 percent by 2023, around the time that it stopped reporting its electricity usage.
It has also recently come under fire for obscuring the full extent of its data centre water consumption.
The company has since expressed interest in running its data centres on gas. Amazon Web Services (AWS) applied for planning permission in 2024 to build a gas-powered data centre in Oregon, but eventually withdrew the plans.
At an energy summit this April, Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centres, announced to a room of oil and gas executives that “to have the energy we need for the grid [to power data centres], it’s going to take an ‘all of the above’ approach for a period of time.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, dreams of a world powered by ever-expanding energy consumption, including AI data centres powered by solar in space.
“Everybody on this planet is going to want to be a first-world citizen using first-world amounts of energy, and the people who are first-world citizens today using first-world amounts of energy. We’re going to want to use even more energy,” he told the audience at a private event at the exclusive Yale Club of New York City in 2019.
To achieve this grand energy expansion, Bezos envisions a solar system populated by a “trillion” people living on space stations.
“[We] don’t want to face a civilisation of stasis… if we just stay on this planet – that’s the long-term issue. You have to capture more of the sun’s output,” he said.
Science journalist Adam Becker called Bezos’s space station utopia “a distraction from solutions to the climate crisis here and now”.
He added: “It’s sad to see one of the wealthiest people in the world waste his power and influence on something so pointless instead of actually helping with the biggest problem that humanity has ever faced.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.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.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, U.S. President Donald Trump, and French President Emmanuel Macron. DeSmog collage. Credit: Faces of the World / Flickr (Macron), Steffen Prößdorf (Merz), Gage Skidmore / Flickr (Trump)
European leaders are bending to the demands of U.S. climate science deniers.
“The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Heartland Institute, a pro-Trump U.S. think tank, tweeted on 31 March.
The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading climate science denial groups. It has helped to draft Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies, which have seen the president pledge to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels and once again pull the U.S. out of the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement.
Over recent months – along with a host of other Trump allies – the Heartland Institute has set its sights on a new target: the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
This vague acronym belies the potentially transformative impact of the new law. In its original form, the CSDDD sought to require large companies – and those in “high risk” sectors – trading in the EU to address human rights and environmental issues in their own operations and in their supply chains. High turnover companies would also have been forced to adopt a plan to align with the Paris Agreement, including setting emissions reduction targets.
The Heartland Institute and its anti-climate, anti-regulation peers are vocal opponents of the law – and launched an aggressive campaign to water it down, or even to see it scrapped entirely.
These groups, which are all part of the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) ecosystem, view the CSDDD as symbolic of the way in which “woke” governments are attempting to force citizens and global corporations to conform to a pro-diversity, pro-environment agenda.
Following Trump’s election in November, these MAGA groups wasted no time in formulating their plans to oppose this perceived agenda.
They focused in particular on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which attempt to create workplaces free from bias – and environmental, social and governance (ESG) schemes, which try to ensure that organisations are guided by responsible and sustainable practices, not just profit.
In December, barely a month after Trump’s victory, the Heritage Foundation – the group that wrote the key ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for the president’s second term – published a report entitled: “ESG, DEI, and What to Do About Them”.
In the report, the Heritage Foundation described ESG and DEI as “pernicious”, and called the CSDDD “a serious problem”.
Two months later, the State Financial Officers Foundation – an influential network of Republican finance officials – wrote an open letter calling on the new administration to “investigate” the CSDDD, claiming that the EU’s directives are based on “unscientific assumptions about the nature of climate change impacts” and “will force companies to incriminate themselves”.
This quickly filtered through to Trump’s Cabinet. On 12 February, Howard Lutnick, the president’s pick for commerce secretary, told a Senate committee that the CSDDD threatened to place “significant burdens” on U.S. companies, and that the Trump administration was exploring the use of “commercial tools” to mount a counter-attack against the EU’s environmental regulations.
Soon this rhetoric made its way to the White House. In March, as part of the worldwide tariffs implemented by the Trump administration, the president called the EU “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world”.
But the EU hasn’t stood firm in the face of Trump’s war of words.
The EU has already announced that it will be scaling back the CSDDD and delaying its implementation. The number of companies within scope has been reduced by 80 percent. The firms in question will only be required to file due diligence reports every five years, and won’t be required to investigate the ESG operations of their indirect business partners. The implementation of the law has also been postponed until 2028.
But Trump’s MAGA hardliners are still not satisfied. In April, the Heartland Institute released an open letter signed by 31 other groups, calling for Congress and the Trump administration to “take immediate steps to counter the CSDDD’s implementation”, including “if necessary, imposing retaliatory trade policies that punish EU nations for eroding America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity.”
This backlash is now influencing European leaders. In late May, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for the CSDDD to be scrapped entirely. They claim it must be abandoned in order to defend the “competitiveness” of European corporations, with Macron stating that Europe must “synchronise with the U.S. and the rest of the world.”
This judgement signifies the appeasement of anti-climate pressure groups that are ideologically opposed to clean energy and climate science.
The Heartland Institute has denied that humans are driving climate change, which it has called a “delusion”, while the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”, reverse policies on climate action, slash restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrap state investment in renewable energy, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency.
If the EU waters down its climate policies in response to Trump’s pressure, it will have helped to send Project 2025 global.
The ‘Climate Cartel’
It’s unclear whether these MAGA groups – and the Trump administration – will ease up on the EU if the CSDDD is ditched entirely. They may simply use it as evidence that European lawmakers will buckle under enough pressure.
Indeed, MAGA’s opposition to the CSDDD is part of a multi-pronged campaign that seeks to dismantle global climate initiatives pioneered by both governments and corporations.
Much of the original groundwork for this campaign was undertaken by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and its chair Jim Jordan, a leading Trump supporter.
Last year, Jordan’s committee produced reports – and demanded evidence from major corporations – on a supposed “climate cartel” of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions”.
The committee alleged that some of the world’s biggest asset managers – that have questionable climate commitments – are conspiring to force American companies to decarbonise against their wishes.
As part of its “investigation”, the committee demanded information from more than 130 U.S.-based companies, retirement and pension programmes, as well as 60 U.S.-based asset managers.
In November, 11 Republican-led states sued BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – three of the world’s biggest asset managers – over their ESG policies. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, nearly two dozen banks have been barred from public contracts for trying to divest from fossil fuels.
These actions, along with the anti-climate rhetoric of Donald Trump, have had a chilling effect. In February last year, BlackRock, State Street, and JP Morgan Asset Management withdrew from Climate Action 100+, an investor-led initiative that works to ensure the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters take action on climate change.
Fast forward a year, and a growing list of major U.S. corporations are either cancelling or delaying their sustainability reports – designed to show how they are meeting their climate commitments.
And a new story from the investigative outlet CORRECTIV today reports that German insurance giants and investment firms are withdrawing from climate agreements, while companies are quietly shelving their sustainability policies, amid the anti-ESG backlash orchestrated by Trump and his acolytes.
As one sustainability expert at a financial firm told CORRECTIV: “We have to be careful not to harm the cause by sticking our necks out and becoming a target in the U.S.”
This article was produced with support from the European Media and Information Fund, managed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The sole responsibility for any content supported by the European Media and Information Fund lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.
