Neil Record

Tories Ditched Net Zero Commitment While Receiving £250,000 from Oil Investors and Climate Deniers

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Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

The Conservatives received a hefty sum from oil and gas investors and those with roles at anti-climate campaign groups during the period when the party rolled back a key climate commitment.

New records released today reveal that Kemi Badenoch’s party accepted £50,000 in January from Neil Record, the chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s foremost climate science denial group.

In March, Badenoch announced that the Conservatives would no longer be advocating for the UK to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 – the goal currently pursued by the government. In a speech hosted by an advertising group that works for the oil giant Shell, Badenoch suggested that we are “bankrupting ourselves” in the pursuit of the 2050 target.

While the UK’s oil and gas reserves are dwindling, the country’s green economy grew by 10 percent in 2024.

Badenoch said that the country should still seek to reduce its climate impact, but shouldn’t set a date for achieving net zero.

Record – who is also lifetime president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a pressure group that received funding from BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018 – has claimed that achieving net zero emissions by 2050 “will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive”. Record has donated to both the IEA and GWPF.

The GWPF regularly contradicts basic climate science, suggesting that CO2 emissions are “not pollution”.

A month before her net zero announcement, Record paid for Badenoch, her family, and members of her shadow cabinet to have a week-long retreat in Gloucestershire. The Net Zero Watch chair is close to the Tory leader, having provided funding and office space to her 2024 leadership campaign.

Over the past two decades, the Conservative Party has accepted £7.2 million from senior figures at the GWPF, while Badenoch’s campaign also received funding from a director at the fossil fuel major Chevron.

The party accepted a further £117,600 in the first quarter of this year from Alasdair Locke, a longstanding Tory donor who made his fortune in the oil industry. Locke is currently the chair of the UK’s largest independent petrol station operator Motor Fuel Group, and the non-executive chair of Well-Safe solutions, a firm that decommissions oil and gas wells. He is the founder of Abbot Group, a major oil and gas services company in the North Sea.

Badenoch’s party also received £75,000 in March from IPGL, a family investment firm belonging to Tory peer Lord Michael Spencer. A billionaire financier and former Tory treasurer, Spencer has investments worth at least £100,000 in each of the oil and gas companies Deltic Energy and Pantheon Resources.

“Is it any wonder that Kemi Badenoch’s Tories are so vehemently against net zero? No sooner do they get a quarter of a million from fossil fuel companies, do they decide to ditch the net zero commitments that they were so evangelical about just a few years ago,” said Harmit Kambo, campaigns manager at Good Law Project. “Given the existential climate threats we face, the Tories’ capitulation to climate change deniers perhaps sets a new low for their policy-making integrity.”

The Conservatives, Neil Record, Alasdair Locke, and Michael Spencer were approached for comment.

Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingTories Ditched Net Zero Commitment While Receiving £250,000 from Oil Investors and Climate Deniers

Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch’s Views on Climate Change

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Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch. Credit: Credit: HM Treasury (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The new leader of the opposition has regularly criticised the UK’s green ambitions.

The Conservative Party has elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader, who describes herself as a “net zero sceptic” and has received funding from the head of a climate science denial campaign.

Badenoch was announced as the winner of the Tory leadership contest on Saturday, beating her rival Robert Jenrick by 56 percent to 44 percent.  

The former business and trade secretary campaigned for leader as a straight-talking conservative who would tackle the “woke” left. 

But as DeSmog has reported, Badenoch has also repeatedly suggested that the UK’s net zero targets would “bankrupt the country”, has boasted of standing up to “the green lobby” while in government, and has called Labour’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences “foolish”. 

Badenoch has also received money and office space from Neil Record, the chair of the climate denial group Net Zero Watch (NZW), and produced a leadership manifesto which attacked the “radical environmental policies” previously introduced by the Conservative Party.

Net Zero Sceptic

Making her pitch to Conservative MPs at the party’s annual conference on 2 October, Badenoch described herself as a “net zero sceptic” but “not a climate change sceptic”. 

Badenoch said in 2022 that the UK’s 2050 legally-binding target for achieving net zero emissions was “arbitrary” and last year suggested she would support delaying it. 

In her Conservative conference speech, Badenoch said that net zero is “making energy more expensive and hurting our economy”, a claim which the International Energy Agency, a leading authority on energy policy, says is false. 

Badenoch did not confirm in her speech that she would delay or scrap the UK’s net zero targets but said, “I did not become an MP to deliver an agenda set by Ed Miliband”, who currently serves as the secretary of state for energy security and net zero.

She has repeatedly said that she wants to reduce emissions but not in a way that would “bankrupt” the country.

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 one percent of UK GDP. 

The government independent spending watchdog – the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – 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”.

Badenoch claimed during the Tory leadership campaign that, while serving as business secretary, she “had to work hard to push back against the green lobby”, and condemned Labour’s “foolish decision to ban new licences for North Sea oil production” as part of its “fanatical approach to net zero”.

As DeSmog revealed, during the leadership contest Badenoch published a 40-page manifesto which cited the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a U.S. group led by former advisors to Donald Trump, which has likened climate science to believing the earth is flat. 

Badenoch used evidence produced by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity to claim that net zero policies are only supported by high-earning graduates living in cities.

Badenoch’s document, titled ‘Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class’, attacked what it called “radical environmental politics” – such as the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars introduced by the previous Tory government – and praised fracking, the controversial method adopted in the U.S. to extract more oil and gas. 

Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, have said that without “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” limiting global heating to 1.5C is beyond reach.

Restricting global temperatures to this target, which was agreed as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, would prevent the worst and most irreversible impacts of climate change.

Climate Denial Ally

In August, DeSmog revealed that Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her leadership campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s principal climate science denial group. 

Bloomberg further revealed that Badenoch was running her leadership campaign out of Record’s London home.  

NZW has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”. 

Record – who is also lifetime president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a think tank that received funding from oil giant BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018 – in July wrote that achieving net zero by 2050 “will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive”. Record has donated to both the IEA and GWPF.

The GWPF has claimed that carbon dioxide has been mischaracterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. The group has been accused of spreading “daft conspiracy yarns” about net zero.

Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog

Continue ReadingTory Leader Kemi Badenoch’s Views on Climate Change

Kemi Badenoch running her leadership campaign from home of wealthy donor

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https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/kemi-badenoch-running-her-leadership-campaign-from-home-of-wealthy-donor-383643/

Badenoch being holed up in the flat of a millionaire donor, currency trader and Tufton Street think-tanker is actually depressingly predictable.

Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch has been running her leadership campaign from the home of a wealthy donor, according to Bloomberg reports.

Despite the Conservatives going on the attack over Sir Keir Starmer’s use of a London flat in the run-up to the general election, which he declared, Rishi Sunak’s potential successor has been doing precisely the same thing – and has yet to make that fact public.

Bloomberg notes that Badenoch has been running her leadership campaign from the home of Neil Record, who is the chair of the climate science denial group Net Zero Watch.

Neil is also the former chair of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think-tank closely linked to Liz Truss that was originally based on the infamous Tufton Street.

…

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/kemi-badenoch-running-her-leadership-campaign-from-home-of-wealthy-donor-383643/

Kemi Badenoch Manifesto Uses Climate Denial Group Research to Attack Net Zero

Continue ReadingKemi Badenoch running her leadership campaign from home of wealthy donor

Climate Denial Funder Pumps Another £30,000 into Tory Leadership Race

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Original article by Adam Barnett and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

Conservative MP James Cleverly. Credit: Andy Taylor / Home Office (CC BY 2.0)

Tory peer and major party donor Michael Hintze has funded the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Conservative Party leadership candidates have received tens of thousands in donations from a funder of the UK’s main climate science denial group. 

The latest register of MPs’ interests shows that James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat each received £10,000 in August from Lord Michael Hintze, a Tory peer who is one of the few known funders of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). 

Hintze, who has donated more than £4 million to the Conservatives since 2002, also donated £10,000 in August to leadership hopeful Priti Patel, who was voted out of the contest by Tory MPs this week. Tugendhat also received £3,000 from Hintze in December. 

The GWPF actively campaigns against the government’s climate policies and rejects established science on rising temperatures, calling carbon dioxide a “benefit to the planet”. 

Lord Hintze has said he believes “there is climate change” caused “in part due to human activity over the past century”, but “all sides must be heard” on climate change “to reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.

Authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

The IPCC has stated that we are in the midst of “widespread and rapid [changes] … unprecedented over many centuries, to many thousands of years”.

Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the Conservatives received £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers. 

Cleverly, Tugendhat, Patel are not the only Tory leadership hopefuls to have received donations from figures associated with the GWPF. DeSmog revealed in August that Kemi Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the GWPF’s campaign arm. 

Record is also a “life vice president” of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, which he chaired until July 2023. The IEA, which supports new fossil fuel production, has received funding from the oil giant BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018. 

Record has given money to both the IEA and the GWPF, which are part of the Tufton Street network of think tanks and lobbying groups based in Westminster campaigning for less government regulation, including on climate change.

The latest register of interests also shows that Record donated £2,000 to Tory MP Jesse Norman, who is publicly supporting Badenoch’s campaign.

As DeSmog has reported, Tugendhat also received donations and gifts worth £7,000 during the general election campaign from Tory donor and former party treasurer Lord Michael Spencer, who is a fossil fuel investor.

Spencer is the largest shareholder in Deltic Energy, which this year received licences to explore the North Sea for oil and gas. He also holds shares in Pantheon Resources, a UK company exploring for oil in Alaska.  

Spencer, who has donated £6 million to the Conservatives since 2005, previously told DeSmog that oil and gas investments are less than two percent of his portfolio.

Views on Net Zero

Tugendhat, Badenoch, and Patel have vocally criticised the UK’s climate policies. 

In a July interview on GB News, Tugendhat said the UK’s target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 was “not realistic”. Badenoch said in 2022 that it was “arbitrary” and last year suggested she would back delaying it, which would contravene the UK’s legally-binding climate commitments. Patel shares this position, and told GB News last year that net zero targets should be “paused” because the “public are not ready”.

Polling by More in Common and E3G during the general election period found that a majority of people in every UK constituency are worried about climate change. Some 61 percent of 2024 Conservative voters said they are worried about climate change, matched by 76 percent of Labour voters, and 65 percent of the country overall.

In his GB News interview, Tugendhat also defended the previous government’s support for new oil and gas extraction, saying: “Drilling our own oil in the North Sea is more carbon efficient than bringing it in from anywhere else.”

The claim that UK oil and gas has a lower carbon footprint than imports is “misleading” and can only be achieved “by comparing UK gas production to the very dirtiest gas imports”, according to the research and campaign group Uplift.

Cleverly has supported the 2050 target but has said he would favour a “competition-based approach” rather than using the power and funding of the state. However, the private sector has often acted to delay climate action. According to the non-profits groups NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, which surveyed 51 major companies, their median goal is to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030 – well below the 43 percent reduction identified by the IPCC. 

Cleverly’s leadership campaign told DeSmog that “We thank all of our donors for their support for James Cleverly as the best candidate to unite the Conservative Party and win the next general election.”

Tugendhat, Patel, and Hintze have been approached for comment.

Original article by Adam Barnett and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

Continue ReadingClimate Denial Funder Pumps Another £30,000 into Tory Leadership Race