Former Conservative minister Robert Jenrick, who has today entered the race to lead the Tory party, has a growing record of attacks on climate action.

The MP for Newark – who saw a 23.9 percent swing against him in the general election, and served as secretary of state for immigration under former prime minister Rishi Sunak – has attacked what he calls “net zero zealotry”, and has labelled the UK’s net zero target “dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality”. 

This is despite Jenrick having hailed the UK’s “world-leading commitment to net zero by 2050” as recently as 2020.

Jenrick has also called for the building of “new gas power stations” and supports new fossil fuel extraction, including North Sea oil and gas, and the opening of new coal mines. 

Jenrick’s campaign manager is Conservative MP Danny Kruger, a political reactionary who is also an advisor to climate denier Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).

His candidacy follows the Conservative Party losing a landslide election on 4 July against a Labour Party committed to climate action, during which the Tories supported new North Sea oil and gas extraction, and the delaying of key climate reforms.

Almost half of voters (49 percent) believe renewable energy would lower household bills, while only 14 percent say the same for more fossil fuels, according to polling by More in Common. 

This week saw what climate scientists believe could be the hottest day on record thanks to climate change. The world’s leading climate science group, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that there is “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.

Attacks on Labour’s Climate Agenda

In his response to the announcement of Labour’s legislative agenda in the King’s Speech last week (19 July), Jenrick used an address in the House of Commons to launch an attack on the government’s climate policies, spreading familiar misinformation. 

Jenrick said that “despite being only responsible for one percent of global emissions, we find ourselves with a government pursuing for ideological reasons a net zero policy which is going to make it harder for our own consumers to afford their bills, [and] which is further going to erode our industrial base”.

Downplaying a country’s emissions is a “widely deployed” tactic used to delay international climate action, according to academics. Contrary to Jenrick’s claims, the UK’s cost of living crisis has been made worse by its dependence on fossil fuels, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

And rather than “eroding our industrial base”, net zero policies are already creating new jobs and economic development. The UK’s net zero economy grew nine percent in 2023 to £74 billion – equivalent to 3.8 percent of the total UK economy, and supported more than 765,000 jobs, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU). 

Jenrick also attacked Labour’s green investment vehicle, Great British Energy – launched today – as a quango “which serves no apparent purpose”, warned that new solar farms would “despoil our countryside”, and claimed that “200,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector have been put in danger”, using a widely debunked figure.

The chief advisor to the National Farmers Union (NFU) has said solar farms “do not in any way present a risk to the UK’s food security”, while NFU president Tom Bradshaw has attacked the claims made by Jenrick and others as “sensationalist”. 

On 11 July, when Labour announced its decision not to defend the new proposed coal mine in Cumbria in the High Court, Jenrick posted on X: “First the oil and gas industry, now coking coal for the steel industry. Less than a week in and jobs and economic growth are already being sacrificed on the altar of Labour’s net zero zealotry.”

In 2021, while serving as communities secretary under Boris Johnson, Jenrick decided not to challenge the planning application for the new mine – the UK’s first deep coal mine in more than 30 years, which would extract 2.8 million tonnes of coking coal a year, emitting an estimated 220 millions tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime.

Net Zero U-Turn

Jenrick’s attacks on Labour’s green policies mirror his growing criticism of climate action – despite having previously celebrated the Conservatives Party’s support for net zero.

In February, Jenrick wrote an article for The Telegraph – a newspaper that regularly publishes attacks on climate science and net zero reforms – claiming that voters are sick of the “dishonesty” from politicians about “what net zero entails”. 

He said that the UK’s 2050 net zero ambition was decided upon in the summer of 2019, “while the country was occupied by Brexit”, and was “nodded through the Commons with fewer than 90 minutes of debate”.

At the time, Jenrick, who was Treasury minister, welcomed the adoption of the target. In 2020, while serving as communities secretary, Jenrick praised the UK’s “world-leading commitment to net zero by 2050”. Ahead of the 2019 general election, he said that voters should support the Conservatives on the basis that the UK was the “first advanced economy in the world to pass a net zero target”.

Yet, in the February 2024 Telegraph article, Jenrick wrote that it was obvious to him “at the time” that the costs associated with net zero “were likely to be astronomical.” The article went on to claim that “reaching net zero by 2050 requires us to overhaul the material foundations of our economy in just three decades”, and that the result “is a dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality and that lacks the buy-in of the public”.

Climate Denial Links

Jenrick’s campaign for Tory leader is being run by fellow Conservative MP Danny Kruger.

Kruger is the chair of the New Conservatives faction in Parliament – a group that advocates for more socially conservative, right-wing ideas within the Tory party, campaigning against “woke” culture, and immigration. 

It also appears that New Conservative press officer Sam Armstrong is serving as one of Jenrick’s campaign aides, although Armstrong neither confirmed nor denied his role when approached for comment. 

As DeSmog has revealed, the New Conservatives received £50,000 in December from the Legatum Institute, a free market think tank that formerly employed Kruger as a senior fellow. 

In May of this year, Jenrick gave a speech to the Legatum Institute’s ‘Free Market Roadshow’ event at the group’s London office, where he called for new fossil fuel plants. He said: “We are smothering our ability to build new nuclear power stations, to build new gas power stations, which we’ve got to have to have the base capacity that we need as a country, in this mesh of regulation.”

The Legatum Institute’s parent company is UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group, which co-owns the right-wing broadcaster GB News. The outlet frequently spreads climate denial, both via its presenters and guests.

Kruger is also on the advisory board of another Legatum project, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), alongside some of the world’s most high-profile climate science deniers. 

Jenrick has pledged to win back voters who have switched from the Tories to Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage, which is bankrolled by climate deniers and polluting interests, and campaigns to “scrap all of net zero”.

Polling from the Conservative Environment Network, a green caucus backed by dozens of Tory MPs, found that only two percent of voters who planned to switch from the Conservative to Reform saw climate change as the most important issue for them in July’s election.