Campaigners and politicians have warned a former Conservative MP against reviving an anti-net zero group which is allied to climate science denial. 

Craig Mackinlay stepped down as MP for South Thanet before the general election after contracting sepsis in September. Tributes were paid in Parliament to Mackinlay’s personal courage in May after the illness required the amputation of his legs and arms.

Mackinlay was nominated to the House of Lords on 4 July (the day of the election) by outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak, and Mackinlay said he would use this position to campaign around sepsis and limb loss, “as well as sensible net zero”.

In an interview last week with GB News – a broadcaster which frequently airs climate science denial and attacks on net zero – Mackinlay announced that he plans to continue to chair the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG), which he has led since its launch in 2021.

“The Net Zero Scrutiny Group will continue”, he said. “We had a number of peers in it before. 

“I intend it to continue – and perhaps even stand it up with some external funding – if we can fund it as a proper group, to actually tell the story to new parliamentarians about why the current thinking is so woolly and so wrong and so costly, and there’s a better way of doing this.”

The NZSG has led the opposition to climate action in Parliament in recent years. The group has urged the government to scrap “environmental levies on domestic energy”, “expand North Sea exploration” for oil and gas, and support “shale gas extraction” by lifting the ban on fracking. 

“Just a month on from the worst electoral defeat in its entire history, you’d think the Conservative Party might be reflecting on why policies that will trash the planet went down so badly,” Zack Polanski, deputy leader of the Green Party, told DeSmog.

“If its remaining MPs decide to double down on their hostility to net zero then it will show that they have learnt absolutely nothing, are completely out of touch with the British public, and represent a threat to life on our planet.”

Public Support for Net Zero

The NZSG has extensive ties to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group, sharing research and staff, and promoting each other’s work. 

In March 2022, Mackinlay gave a supportive quote to a report by the GWPF’s campaign arm, Net Zero Watch, which called for “rapid” new North Sea exploration and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”. 

As recently as May of this year, Mackinlay’s parliamentary aide was still Harry Wilkinson, head of policy at the GWPF, according to the official register of secretaries. 

The GWPF frequently publishes reports that cast doubt on established climate science, explicitly rejecting the position of the world’s climate scientists. It has also actively campaigned against net zero policies, and in favour of new fossil fuel extraction. 

As reported by DeSmog, two thirds (24 out of 37) of the NZSG’s supporters in the House of Commons lost their seats in the general election. The Conservative campaign adopted some of the language and policies of anti-net zero groups, as the party pushed for more fossil fuel extraction and to delay key net zero reforms. 

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

The Conservative Party won its lowest ever number of seats in July’s election, registering only 121 Commons constituencies, with Mackinlay’s former seat (albeit with reformed boundaries) falling to the Labour Party. 

Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, has urged the party’s leadership candidates to learn from Sunak’s mistakes. Writing for CapX on 29 July, he said: “Now in a new Parliament, aspiring Conservative leaders must learn the lessons from the campaign and set out a bold plan to stop climate change and restore nature… 

“Further weakening environmental policies will not shift Reform voters, and will only serve to alienate current Conservative voters and the voters the party needs to win back from Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens.”

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. 

Voters that switched from the Conservatives to Labour were highly engaged on climate issues, with 72 percent saying prior to the election that net zero would affect how they planned to vote.

It also appears that support for climate action has risen since the election. A new poll by YouGov for Climate Barometer, which tracks public opinion on climate change, found that support for net zero had risen from 69 percent in April to 74 percent in July after the election.

“This attempt to deny science and resurrect the failed Net Zero Scrutiny Group is bizarre against a background of the YouGov poll this week which showed that three quarters of the UK public support the drive to net zero,” said Jolyon Maughan, executive director of the Good Law Project. 

The world’s leading climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that climate action has been delayed by “rhetoric and misinformation that undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency”.

Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, last week warned of a “massive mis- and disinformation campaign” to stop climate action. “There is this prevailing narrative – and a lot of it is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers – that climate action is too difficult, it’s too expensive,” he said.  

“It is absolutely critical that leaders, and all of us, push back and explain to people the value of climate action, but also the consequences of climate inaction.”

Mackinlay said he had “nothing to add” when approached by DeSmog for comment.