Ed Miliband said the Conservatives had ‘abandoned 20 years of bipartisanship when to comes to climate’. Photograph: UK Parliament
Energy and net zero secretary lays out stark picture of how climate crisis and nature depletion is affecting UK
Ed Miliband has accused the Conservatives of being “anti-science” by abandoning a political consensus on net zero as he gave MPs a stark outline of how the climate crisis and nature depletion are already affecting the UK.
In the first of what is promised to be an annual “state of the climate” report, the energy and net zero secretary set out the findings of a Met Office-led study that detailed how the UK was already hotter and wetter, and faced a greater number of extreme weather events.
Miliband, who told the Guardian before the statement that politicians who rejected net zero policies needed to be accountable for their decisions, called for opposition parties to unite around the need for urgent action.
But speaking after Miliband, Andrew Bowie, a shadow energy minister, criticised what he called the government’s “shrill” language, saying the party was sticking by Kemi Badenoch’s decision to ditch the 2050 target for the UK to reach net zero.
…
Miliband quoted the former prime minister Theresa May, who put net zero targets into law in 2019 and had argued that the real climate zealots were “populists who offer only easy answers to complex questions”. He added: “I couldn’t put it better myself.”
…
“The lesson is clear. The choices we make as a country have influenced the cause of global action, and in doing so, reduced the impact of the climate and nature crisis on future generations in Britain. To those who say Britain cannot make a difference. I say: you are wrong. Stop talking our country down. British leadership matters.”
UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from Unicorn horn dustNigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
While campaigners take to the streets, fossil fuel interests lobby governments directly, and often without scrutiny, a new report has found | Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Oil and gas firms were able to water down or change Conservative policies without scrutiny, new report finds
The British government weakened key climate policies after fossil fuel giants lobbied ministers and used legal loopholes to avoid public scrutiny, a new report has found.
Climate-focused think tank InfluenceMap has uncovered that industry influence appears to have led to the delay and dilution of UK policies on the roll-out of heat pumps, the development of ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel and the granting of new oil and gas licenses.
In each case, it found that lobbyists representing fossil fuel actors that stood to lose billions from progressive climate regulations were able to influence the Conservative government’s policy without scrutiny.
While InfluenceMap’s report looks at policies relating to the UK’s net-zero ambitions, its findings on the way the UK’s lax laws allow lobbying to be conducted in secret can be applied across sectors. The think tank is calling for reforms to address this and close the “major transparency gap”.
The secrecy around lobbying, which has been at the heart of many government scandals in recent years, is a major driver of the disillusionment in British politics.
InfluenceMap’s findings illustrate “how inadequate and opaque lobbying rules undermine effective policymaking”, said Alastair McCapra, the CEO of the UK lobbying industry body.
He added: “Business engagement should help to build sounder policy with better outcomes for the public, but unaccountable lobbying breeds public mistrust. This important report removes the guesswork needed to piece together what kind of lobbying is taking place.”
Weak lobbying laws
openDemocracy has previously reported extensively on the ways that the UK’s weak lobbying laws allow corporate influence to secretly shape policy.
Our investigations have now been backed up by InfluenceMap, which has found a huge gap exists between the lobbying that takes place and that which is disclosed. This means the British public often has no way of knowing who is swaying policy.
Comparing transparency rules in the UK, the European Parliament, the US, Canada and France, InfluenceMap found that the UK has by far the worst system.
Of the five, only the UK exempts lobbyists who work in-house for a company, rather than for an agency or consultancy, from registering with a statutory lobbying watchdog. Less than 15% of lobbyists working in the UK need to register because of this rule.
The firms on the register must publish a list of clients on whose behalf they have lobbied each quarter. But they do not have to publish any details about the lobbying, including whether it involved written correspondence or a meeting and what legislation or policy was discussed.
Registered lobbyists also only need to declare clients for whom they lobbied government ministers and senior officials. There is no requirement to name clients when they approached other MPs and peers, including those on select committees, or influential government advisers.
The Committee for Standards in Public Life, an independent public body that advises the prime minister on lobbying and other aspects of public office, has consistently recommended the government publish a single, searchable database of all meetings with lobbyists.
Its recommendations would expand the scope of the current register considerably, requiring lobbyists to disclose the specific policies or legislation they discussed at meetings with government ministers and special advisers.
InfluenceMap has also called on the government to take up this recommendation and address the fundamental flaws in the lobbying act by including in-house lobbyists and publishing all responses to government policy consultants as standard.
Susan Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, said the report “starkly demonstrates how major transparency gaps in the UK’s lobbying regime are undermining the development of good climate policy.”
“We fully support their recommendations to make lobbying much more transparent and bring the UK in line with international best practice. These reforms would support more participatory and open decision-making to help rebuild public trust and ensure better decision-making, widening the evidence base for policy making and reducing risks of policy capture by vested interests,” she said.
Oil and gas licensing
In 2022, the UK government quietly dropped two criteria from its ‘Climate Compatibility Checkpoint’ after lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. The checkpoint is used to assess whether proposed oil and gas licenses align with the UK’s climate change goals.
Oil giants BP and Shell and their industry association, Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), responded to a consultation on the checkpoint by objecting to the inclusion of two key metrics for measuring the impact of fossil fuels, according to InfluenceMap’s analysis of consultation responses obtained via Freedom of Information requests.
The measures they opposed would have required the government to consider ‘Scope 3 emissions’ and the ‘global production gap’ when issuing new oil and gas licences.
Scope 3 emissions are produced during end-use and contribute the largest share of all emissions from oil and gas production, while the production gap tracks the discrepancy between planned fossil fuel production and what’s needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.
The government dropped both criteria from the final checkpoint, which instead focuses solely on operational emissions, which represent only a fraction of total emissions from oil and gas projects.
This outcome, InfluenceMap’s report notes, strongly aligns with the positions advocated for by BP, Shell, and OEUK, suggesting their lobbying efforts were successful.
The following year, the government approved 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences, which had a potential emissions footprint equivalent to Denmark’s annual output.
InfluenceMap’s report also highlights the issues around government consultations on proposed policies, pointing out that, as in this case, lobbyists typically use these to suggest amendments in favour of their clients, but their responses are not published as standard.
Similarly, unlike in the other four Parliaments InfluenceMap looked at, corporations in the UK are not required to declare their engagement on policies, how much they spend on lobbying, or which legislation or decisions they are targeting.
It highlights that this can lead to a situation in which companies make voluntary corporate disclosures that fail to capture the true extent of this advocacy. In this case, InfluenceMap found BP published a summary of its response to the checkpoint that omitted key lines of its opposition, which were only revealed later through Freedom of Information requests.
Rachel Davies, advocacy director at Transparency International UK, said: “This report highlights, yet again, the glaring gaps in our lobbying transparency regime and the potential risks of favouring a small group of vested interests at the public’s expense.
“The UK needs to catch up to other comparable democracies and act swiftly to introduce a comprehensive lobbying register with meaningful disclosures.”
Domestic hydrogen
It is broadly agreed that, in the UK, hydrogen is not a viable solution for decarbonising domestic heating and is an especially bad alternative to heat pumps. Much of our hydrogen comes from burning gas or coal and it cannot be transported through our existing pipelines without massive and costly infrastructure changes.
This reality has been set out by different independent bodies advising the UK government.
In 2021, the Climate Change Committee warned that hydrogen had “not yet been proven at scale and should not be a cause to delay other options” such as the roll-out of heat pumps or low-carbon heat networks. Two years later, the National Infrastructure Commission said the government “should not support the roll-out of hydrogen heating” because there is “no public policy case” for its use.
As InfluenceMap’s report notes, this has not prevented the gas industry from waging a successful lobbying campaign in a bid to shore up its market position – with a clear impact on government policy.
The think tank found the industry pursued its cause in a number of ways, including setting up Hello Hydrogen, a campaign fronted by TV star Rachel Riley, to make the case for using hydrogen in homes to the public in 2022. While the campaign did not declare its funders, its director was also a director of Cadent Gas, the UK’s largest gas distribution network.
Cadent is one of the funders of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Hydrogen, which has publicly called for hydrogen to play a part in domestic heating. The APPG’s other funders include Equinor, Shell and the Energy and Utilities Alliance, a lobbying body run by Mike Foster, the former Labour MP for Worcester (home to Worcester Bosch, a major manufacturer of gas boilers).
Other fossil fuel firms and industry lobbying bodies have also consistently pushed for the use of hydrogen in domestic heating in letters to parliamentary select committees and responses to government consultations.
Ahead of last year’s general election, Centrica (formerly British Gas) wrote to the Public Accounts Committee, which examines the value for money of government projects, to call for further public investment in hydrogen for home heating. The firm had written to the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee in support of the technology less than 12 months earlier.
This industry lobbying has led to indecision and disruption on government plans. A February 2023 report by the House of Lords Committee blamed mixed messages on the effectiveness of hydrogen from the government and industry for the poor uptake of a publicly subsidised scheme for heat pumps, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create many jobs.
The lords’ report concluded: “Hydrogen is not a serious option for home heating for the short to medium-term and misleading messages, including from the government, are negatively affecting take-up of established low-carbon home heating technologies like heat pumps.”
The UK’s heat pump roll-outs have lagged behind those of its neighbours. Just 55,000 heat pumps were installed in the UK in 2019, compared to 600,000 in France, according to a study cited in the InfluenceMap report.
In the UK, this reportedly created around 2,000 jobs and reduced emissions of CO₂ by 0.08 million tonnes (MT); in France 30,000 jobs were created and 0.84 MT of CO₂ emissions avoided.
‘Sustainable’ aviation fuel
InfluenceMap also uncovered how industry significantly influenced the government’s so-called ‘Jet Zero’ strategy for cutting emissions in the UK’s aviation industry, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Biofuels, largely made up of used cooking oils, are often suggested as an option for producing Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), although they are generally accepted to be worse in terms of scalability than other, more advanced fuels, and much worse than just reducing the number of flights.
The government initially proposed limiting the use of used cooking oil for SAF to alleviate competition on the resource – which is increasingly in demand for other uses, such as producing biodiesel for cars – and to encourage investment in new technologies for the aviation industry.
The proposals included two options; either banning the use of used cooking oil for SAF altogether, or rapidly phasing down its use so that it would make up just 8.5% of total sustainable aviation fuel by 2040.
But the government’s final SAF policy was more closely aligned with industry preferences than scientific warnings, InfluenceMap found. It allows used cooking oil to make up 100% of SAF uptake in 2025 and 2026, 71% in 2030, and 35% in 2040.
InfluenceMap’s analysis reveals the weakened SAF mandate came after pressure from Shell, BP, the International Airlines Group (which owns several airlines), Airlines UK (the trade body for UK-registered airlines) and Virgin Atlantic airline.
It also found that business interests were overrepresented in parliamentary meetings on SAF while the policy was being shaped.
This can be seen in the make-up of Parliament’s Jet Zero Council, “a partnership between industry academia and government”, which was run by Heathrow’s chief operating officer, while the International Airlines Group chaired the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Delivery Group.
The council comprised 24 members from industry, three from academia and one from civil society. Ministers were also directly involved with the council, with then-prime minister Boris Johnson attending the group’s first meeting along with four ministers.
Transparency failures again played a key role. Not a single ministerial meeting on SAF referenced the weakening of the cooking oil cap in official records, and industry responses to consultations were only obtained through Freedom of Information.
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)Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Kemi Badenoch is due to address the Scottish Tory conference in Edinburgh (Image: PA)
KEMI Badenoch’s call for an end to the windfall tax for fossil fuel firms and a ban on new oil and gas licences has been branded “out of touch”.
The Conservative leader is set to address her first Scottish branch office conference in Edinburgh on Friday and will speak about the oil and gas industry.
Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay is set to address the party conference for the first time since taking over the role from Douglas Ross.
The energy profits levy, also known as the windfall tax, was brought in by the previous Tory government, and extended by Labour when they took power.
Badenoch is expected to tout the oil and gas sector during her conference speech, accusing the UK Government of “killing” it, claiming “renewing our party and our country means standing up for our oil and gas industry”.
UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from
Unicorn horn dust
Keir Starmer visiting the defence contractor Leonardo in Luton, 2 May 2025. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/PA
The local elections showed that voters feel betrayed. But in a party that brooks no dissent, that message isn’t getting through
The response from Labour spokespeople so far to the loss of Runcorn and Helsby – and to the election results as a whole – has been especially tin-eared. There doesn’t seem to be any understanding of the deep-seated emotion in the reaction of Labour supporters to the party’s behaviour in government over the past 10 months. There used to be talk of the need for emotional literacy in politics. What we are witnessing is a staggering level of emotional illiteracy.
Labour supporters feel deeply that their party has turned its back on them. It’s not just that they feel they are not being listened to. It’s that the Starmer and Reeves government is doing things that they believe no Labour government should ever do.
After 14 years of enduring year after year of austerity under the Conservatives, there was such a collective sigh of relief in getting rid of the incompetent, corrupt and brutal Tories. There might not have been much in the way of inspiring politics from Keir Starmer in the run-up to the election last July, but at least we had a Labour government.
The problem now is that, at times, the government is unrecognisable as a Labour government. This isn’t the traditional argument about whether the Starmer administration is behaving like old Labour or New Labour. It’s whether it’s Labour at all in the eyes of people who have supported us or would want to support us.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright speaks to ARC by video. Credit: Marc Fawcett-Atkinson
In exclusive interviews, they called the Trump administration official “terrific,” “very smart,” and someone who “gets it.”
In mid-February, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright described the global effort to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in dark and conspiratorial terms.
“Net zero 2050 is a sinister goal,” he told the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), an international gathering of conservatives convened by Canadian podcaster, author, and anti-climate powerbroker Jordan Peterson. “It’s certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power [and], top-down control, and shrink human freedom.”
Then in March, Wright did a speech at the 43rd annual CERAWeek where he attacked the Biden administration’s climate policies as a “quasi-religious” agenda “that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”
Those views put Wright, formerly a CEO with the fracking company Liberty Energy, far outside the Paris Agreement consensus among many world leaders and heads of major corporations that climate change is an urgent issue that requires fundamental changes to our global energy system.
But Wright’s reactionary statements are winning him praise from fossil fuel advocates who acknowledge that human-caused climate change is real but deny that it presents existential threats to civilization – what watchdog nonprofits such as the Center for Countering Digital Hate refers to as “the new denial.”
In exclusive interviews with DeSmog and Canada’s National Observer conducted during the ARC conference, three prominent figures who deny there is a climate emergency explained why they’re excited that Wright holds one of the most consequential cabinet posts in the Trump administration, with one referring to the U.S. energy secretary as “a good friend.”
Bjorn Lomborg speaks about his most recent book during a press briefing at ARC. Credit: Marc Fawcett-Atkinson
Bjorn Lomborg
One particularly influential climate crisis denier is Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who for decades has been trying to convince policymakers and the public that there are more important global challenges to address than climate change. This is the subject of his most recent book, Best Things First, which Lomborg was promoting at ARC. Last year, Peterson personally presented a copy of the book to Elon Musk.
“We’ll have to wait and see if he actually reads it,” Lomborg said of Musk in an interview with DeSmog and Canada’s National Observer at the conference.
Lomborg, who is an advisor to ARC, said during a keynote speech that efforts to transition off fossil fuels are a “green fantasy.” Lomborg acknowledges that climate change is real but claims, contrary to decades of scientific and economic evidence, that it will be relatively easy and painless for humankind to adapt.
Those arguments have resonated with Wright, who during a 2020 podcast referred to Lomborg’s previous book False Alarm as “fantastic,” and earlier this year described him as a “friend” on LinkedIn.
Asked what he thinks about Trump’s pick for energy secretary, Lomborg replied: “Look, Chris Wright is a great guy and he’s very smart. And I’m very happy that we can get a more sense-based approach to how we do energy.”
Part of that, according to Lomborg, is acknowledging — despite low-carbon investment surpassing $2 trillion in 2024 — that a transformative global shift to green energy isn’t happening anytime soon. “We’re not there yet,” he said. “And that, I think, is what Chris Wright can help us to do, which is to say, ‘let’s be realistic now and let’s find smarter ways to have greener energy sources in the future.’”
Scott Tinker does a speech at ARC. Credit: Marc Fawcett-Atkinson
Scott Tinker
During his 13-minute presentation at ARC, Scott Tinker outlined his view that energy has to be affordable, reliable, and clean, criteria that in his view disadvantages renewable energy. “If you want 100 percent clean you don’t get much of these other things,” he told the conference. “There are trade-offs in the real world.”
Tinker runs an organization called Switch Energy Alliance that creates videos about energy and climate change for classrooms, museums, and professional training sessions. The organization says that it wants an “energy-educated future that is objective, nonpartisan, and sensible.”
But Tinker tends to promote the benefits of fossil fuels while downplaying the urgency of addressing global temperature rise. During a podcast interview in March, Tinker said it was “a very strange form of economic colonialism” to argue against developing world countries burning fossil fuels “because we’ll wreck the climate.” We shouldn’t fear a bit of atmospheric warming, Tinker added, urging listeners to instead consider “all the positive things” countries gain from oil, gas, and coal.
Wright has used similar language, telling a gathering of African leaders in March that it would be “a paternalistic post-colonial attitude” for the U.S. to stand in the way of their fossil fuel resources.
The similarities between Wright’s and Tinker’s views aren’t a coincidence. Tinker told DeSmog in an interview at ARC that he and the U.S. energy secretary have known each other for years. “Chris is a good friend,” Tinker said. “We’ve bounced a lot back and forth.”
One other area they seem to agree on is rejecting carbon dioxide’s legal status as a pollutant in the U.S., which helps provide the basis for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions. That’s been a long-time goal of climate denial organizations such as the CO2 Coalition and Heartland Institute.
“We shouldn’t confuse [CO2] with being a pollutant,” Tinker said.
Robert Bryce speaks at ARC. Credit: ARC / YouTube
Robert Bryce
For years Robert Bryce has been on a mission to convince the world that renewable energy can never replace or out-compete coal, gas, and oil. Previously a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute— a think tank with a long history of accepting fossil fuel money and questioning the scientific consensus on climate change — Bryce now attacks climate solutions as an author, speaker, and filmmaker.
During his speech at ARC, he claimed that “we are inundated with climate catastrophism,” and argued without evidence that the primary motivation for environmentalists to be opposed to fossil fuels is because their organizations have “enormous” budgets, saying “it’s a big business.”
Bryce is a long-time proponent of nuclear energy, something he shares in common with Wright, who stepped down as a member of the board of directors at the nuclear company Oklo after he was confirmed as energy secretary in February.
“Chris gets it,” Bryce said in an interview with DeSmog. “Chris knows what the score is. He’s a natural gas guy, a hydrocarbon guy. He’s promoting nuclear power. Hopefully this administration, now that they’re actually talking about nuclear, can actually move the ball forward, it’s overdue.”
Bryce and Wright also seem to share opposition to carbon capture and storage, a technology widely favored by oil and gas producers, which tout it as key to reducing emissions from their operations despite it being widely used to pull more oil from the ground. Under Wright, the U.S. Department of Energy is considering cutting billions of dollars’ worth of funding for projects utilizing the technology.
“There is only one reason why any of these hydrocarbon companies are doing carbon capture,” Bryce said. “Subsidies, that’s it.”
“It will never work at scale,” he added. “Once you get that CO2 super-compressed and you’re pushing it down underground, there are very few places where you can actually sequester it. So it’s a lot of money wasted.”
This special investigation between Canada’s National Observer and DeSmog was produced in collaboration with the I-SEA and TRACE Foundation.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
