The Conservative peer Charles Moore has stepped down as a trustee of the UK’s principal climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which is working closely with backbench MPs to roll back climate policy.
The former Telegraph and Spectator editor stopped being a trustee of the GWPF in January, according to an entry on Companies House filed on Saturday 12 March, after nearly seven years in the role.
Lord Moore was confronted by Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP about his association with the group on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on Friday 11 March.
Moore denied he was a GWPF trustee. He said the public information was not up-to-date when his role was mentioned and defended the organisation, claiming: “It doesn’t deny climate change.” The GWPF updated its register later the next day.
GWPF founder Lord Nigel Lawson, who is on the board of its campaign wing, recently said that “global warming is not a problem”.
Moore was appointed to the House of Lords by his former Telegraph colleague Boris Johnson in 2020. In November, Johnson flew straight from the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow on a private jet to attend a Telegraph reunion with Moore in London.
Neither Moore nor the GWPF responded to requests for comment.
Moore’s views on climate action do not appear to have changed, however. In his Telegraph column last week, Lord Moore said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means “to deny ourselves all future indigenous production of shale gas is crazy green dogmatism”.
The piece also calls the plans to fill shale gas wells with concrete “an eco-punishment, as vengeful as the Romans sowing the defeated Carthage with salt”.
Growing Political Influence
The GWPF is currently working with backbench Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) MPs to block climate action, most recently using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to argue for more fossil fuel extraction.
Last week DeSmog revealed that former Brexit minister Steve Baker, who is also a trustee at the charity, received £5,000 from Neil Record, the chair of the GWPF’s campaigning wing.
DeSmog has also revealed that NZSG chair Craig Mackinlay is currently employing the GWPF’s head of policy, Harry Wilkinson, as a parliamentary aide.
Record of Climate Denial
Moore has a history of rejecting climate science. In a 2019 interview, Moore said climate “alarmists” were aiming for “unprecedented government control and the relative impoverishment of western societies”. The same year he called the Extinction Rebellion protest movement “a sort of death cult”.
In 2018, Moore said on the BBC’s Question Time programme that people “obsessed with climate change” are engaged in “a sort of project fear, and they’re trying to make us do things because everything’s about to collapse”.
Lord Moore has mocked the Met Office and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for supposedly inaccurate predictions.
In 2017, Moore said the government should worry less about climate change and more about pollution, writing that “climate change is often a highly speculative debate about what might one day happen”.
