Conservative leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch borrowed evidence from a U.S. climate denial group to criticise climate action and advocate for more fossil fuel extraction, DeSmog can reveal.
The former business and trade secretary said she is a “net zero sceptic” but “not a climate change sceptic” in her leadership pitch at the Conservative Party conference on Wednesday (2 October).
Badenoch has received funding for her campaign, as well as the use of a London home, from Neil Record, the chair of the UK’s leading climate science denial campaign group.
In addition, just days before her party conference address, Badenoch published a 40-page document that draws on findings from a group run by former Donald Trump advisors that has called climate science a “contradiction in terms”. Her campaign did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.
On Monday, the North West Essex MP published a 25,000-word treatise setting out the direction she believes the Conservative Party should take following its electoral defeat on 4 July.
In her foreword to the text, entitled ‘Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class’, Badenoch complains that “whenever you try to roll back the environmental laws… too many in our party are nowhere to be seen”.
The document attacks policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions, including the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars introduced by the previous Tory government, calling them “radical environmentalism” driven by a “bureaucratic class”.
It also praises the U.S. boom in oil and gas fracking and questions why other countries have not followed its example.
The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee – a body of MPs that advises the government on climate matters – concluded in 2019 that fracking was incompatible with the UK’s climate goals.
Since then, there has been a moratorium on fracking, with only a temporary lifting of the ban during Liz Truss’s short-lived tenure in 10 Downing Street – reinstated by her successor Rishi Sunak.
The pamphlet goes on to claim that achieving net zero emissions is only supported by high-earning graduates living in cities, citing a survey of 3,000 Americans published by the U.S. non-profit Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
Nearly three-quarters of people in the UK back the shift to net zero, according to a poll carried out in July by YouGov.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity was founded by Stephen Moore and Arthur B. Laffer, both economists and former advisors to ex-president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump.
The group has called for the U.S. government to cut benefits for poorer Americans and scrap taxes on the oil and gas industry. It also rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, likening it to the belief in a flat Earth.
“The climate change movement has become like the Flat Earth society of the Middle Ages that excoriated and banished anyone who dared tell the truth,” its website states.
In her speech at the Conservative conference on Wednesday, 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 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.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity and Stephen Moore have been approached for comment.
Project 2025
Moore has also contributed to Project 2025, a set of radical policy proposals published by the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative U.S. think tank, intended as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.
One chapter co-authored by Moore advises that the U.S. should withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Paris Agreement, which established the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C. Moore’s chapter also advocates expanding U.S. investment in oil and gas.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity is not the only climate denial group that Badenoch has links to.
The Tory leadership candidate, who is the current favourite among grassroots party members, received £10,000 towards her campaign from Neil Record, chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).
The GWPF, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, 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.
NZW has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”.
Bloomberg revealed yesterday that Badenoch was running her campaign from a London home owned by Record.
Commenting on the story, Record said that Badenoch had “stardust,” and compared her to 1980s Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Record is also the life vice president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, which he chaired until July 2023. The IEA has opposed state-led climate policies and has advocated for more fossil fuel extraction, including via fracking. The think tank 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.
When questioned previously about his GWPF donations, Record said: “I personally regard the continuing contribution of the GWPF to the climate change debate as very positive in assisting balance and rationality in this contentious area.”
