Today marks 100 days since Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won five seats in the 4 July general election.
Reform MPs have used their new platform in Parliament to attack climate action and cast doubt on climate science – in speeches in the House of Commons, at the party’s annual conference, and in public appearances alongside notorious climate denial groups and activists.
This has included attacking net zero emissions reduction targets as a “cult”, claiming the UK government “wants to cover all our farmland” with solar panels, and spuriously suggesting that climate change is caused by sunspots and underwater volcanoes.
Reform MPs have a record of climate science denial. The party campaigns to “scrap net zero” and vocally advocates for new oil, gas, and coal extraction.
DeSmog revealed in June that Reform received £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, polluters, and climate deniers from the 2019 general election to the start of the 2024 campaign – 92 percent of its funding during this period.
“It’s sadly no surprise that an organisation bankrolled by oil and gas investors would keep pushing climate denial and misinformation, even as extreme weather events wreak havoc across the world”, said Richard Wilson, director of the campaign group Stop Funding Heat.
“While evidence mounts of the threats we face from climate change, fossil fuelled billionaires are using every trick in the book to deny the truth and delay the transition to clean energy.”
Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, has warned that policies to reduce emissions are being hindered by a “prevailing narrative… pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers – that climate action is too difficult; it’s too expensive.”
This comes as the U.S. is hit with some of the worst hurricanes in the country’s history, which experts state have been exacerbated by climate change.
Reform in Parliament
Reform MPs have used their platform in the House of Commons to attack green policies.
Deputy leader Richard Tice made his first speech to Parliament on 23 July and said that: “Another reason why my constituents are really quite grumpy is that the stupid net zero policies will result in hundreds of massive, ugly pylons blighting the environment and countryside of my constituency, as well as solar farms planned on incredibly productive agricultural farmland. It is absolute idiocy.”
In a debate on renewable energy on 3 September, Reform MP Lee Anderson, who defected from the Conservatives earlier this year, told Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband that voters are not interested in net zero.
“This secretary of state is living in a completely different world from my constituents, because they are not asking for this on the doorstep at all,” he said.
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.
Anderson then compared spending on green policies to Labour’s plans to stop winter fuel payments for people above a certain income. “By the way, he is quite happy to spend £11.6 billion on climate aid abroad and £8.5 billion on GB Energy, yet rob our pensioners of £300 at the same time.”
Polling by More in Common in July found that 70 percent of people support GB Energy, Labour’s green investment vehicle. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll in August found a majority of respondents wanted the UK to get more energy from renewable sources and less from oil, gas, and coal.
Anderson went on to ask when pensioners in his constituency of Ashfield would “receive significant discounts on their fuel bills, and of how much?”.
Miliband replied that Labour’s plans would “absolutely” deliver lower bills for Anderson’s constituents, adding: “Does he believe that a continuing reliance on fossil fuels, and this country saying no to renewables, which I think is their position, will give us energy security? The truth is it will not.”
As the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has noted, renewable energy is significantly cheaper than energy from fossil fuels.
A spike in the cost of living across the West following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was particularly acute among countries – such as the UK – that relied on gas to heat homes and produce electricity, according to the International Monetary Fund.
“The UK energy crisis is a fossil gas crisis,” Sarah Brown at the energy think tank Ember told The Guardian.
Reform Conference
At Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham on 20 September, its MPs again trained their rhetorical guns on climate action.
Tice dedicated much of his speech to what he called “the new cult of net zero” – one of three so-called “cults” he attacked, including immigration and the National Health Service.
Tice falsely claimed that Ed Miliband “wants to cover all our farmland […] with solar panels”, calling the energy secretary “the most dangerous man in Britain to our economy”.
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 such claims as “sensationalist”.
Tice also blamed workers being sacked at Tata’s Port Talbot steelworks on climate policies, saying that “thousands of jobs [are being] sacrificed on the altar of net zero”.
In fact, this decision was made in January, when the Conservatives were in government, and the new Labour administration has negotiated redundancy payments and re-training for staff at the steelworks. Tata’s decisions have been criticised by policy experts at the London School of Economics as the wrong way to switch to greener steel.
Tice also used his speech to argue for new fossil fuel extraction, complaining that Labour had dropped the government’s support for the opening of a coal mine in Cumbria. He also claimed that Reform was rising in the polls in Scotland “because the oil and gas industry is terrified about the destruction of those jobs there”.
Tice claimed that other oil producing countries, particularly Gulf states, are “laughing at our naive stupidity as they steal our jobs and our money”.
He added: “We’ve got all this energy treasure under our feet, oil, gas, shale gas, hundreds of billions of pounds worth, owned by all of us, and yet, no … I mean honestly, it’s utter madness.”
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5C, the goal established by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile, clean energy was China’s top driver of economic growth in 2023, with the country’s $890 billion investment being almost as large as global investments in fossil fuel supply during the year.
Lee Anderson also attacked climate policy in his conference speech. “What about net zero?” he said, to boos from the audience of Reform members: “What a load of rubbish that is.”
Anderson went on to attack “these lunatics that keep banging on about net zero”, claiming that they have forced the government to subsidise biomass company Drax, which burns wood pellets for energy at its power plant in Selby, Yorkshire.
In reality, his complaint about Drax actually puts Anderson in the unusual position of being on the same side as the green campaigners he regularly condemns. Drax subsidies have long been criticised by environmental groups over the company’s carbon emissions and its record of deforestation.
However, green groups also oppose new fossil fuel extraction, which emits far more CO2 than biomass, while Anderson and Reform fervently support new oil, gas, and coal production.
Anderson concluded, “The first thing we should do when we win the next general election folks is to scrap net zero”, he said, receiving cheers and applause from Reform members.
“The Reform UK MPs have demonstrated that they are a serious threat to the legitimacy of Parliament by using their elected positions to carry out a deliberate campaign of misinformation about climate change”, said Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
“They are clearly not acting in the best interests of the constituents who voted for them and who are all facing increased risk of damage to their lives and livelihoods from the growing impacts of climate change.”
Heartland and Jordan Peterson
Party leader Nigel Farage has also used his position as an MP to spread climate denial abroad.
Last month, Farage gave a speech to a fundraiser for the Heartland Institute, a U.S. group that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.
During his speech in Chicago, he urged the U.S. to re-elect Donald Trump as president and “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels, attacking what he called “net zero fanaticism”.
Farage, who has made several trips to the U.S. since his election to Parliament, also urged Heartland to set up offshoots in Britain and Europe.
Heartland is known “for its persistent questioning of climate science”, according to Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, and has received tens of thousands in donations from foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a fossil fuel behemoth and a leading sponsor of climate science denial.
In July, Farage was interviewed by Jordan Peterson, a Canadian conservative author who has become a leading promoter of climate denial on his YouTube channel, which has 8.3 million subscribers.
In the interview, Peterson attacked “idiot climate apocalypse-mongering that’s used by power-mad tyrants to cow the public”, and claimed that CO2 emissions were a “net benefit” to the planet.
Farage replied that the UK’s climate policies “have transferred vast amounts of wealth from the poorest to the richest”.
On climate change, he said: “I do find it extraordinary that people call carbon dioxide a pollutant, because as I understand it, plants don’t grow without carbon dioxide.”
Farage went on: “Surely historically when it comes to the planet heating up and cooling down, sunspot activity is a factor and yet that doesn’t get talked about. And then of course we’ve got volcanoes, and particularly underwater volcanoes in the Pacific ocean”.
He then repeated the debunked claim that “only 3 percent of carbon dioxide emissions are produced by man”. In fact, human activity has raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 percent in less than 200 years, according to NASA.
Farage added: “So without delving deeply into the science, I do have some pretty big questions [about climate change] that I’m not afraid to ask.”
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 also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
As reported by DeSmog, Farage’s coastal Clacton constituency is at risk of flooding and sea level rises as a result of climate change. A majority (68 percent) of voters in the constituency are concerned about the effects of rising temperatures – higher than the national average.
Peterson fronts the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a conservative pressure group which has dismissed the dangers of climate change. The group is bankrolled by British hedge fund millionaire Paul Marshall and UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group.
Legatum and Marshall co-own GB News, a broadcaster which frequently airs climate science denial, and which employs Farage, Tice, and Anderson as presenters. Marshall recently bought The Spectator magazine for £100 million.
Richard Wilson added that it was “disturbing” that broadcast regulator Ofcom “has proven so reluctant to hold GB News to account for amplifying such dangerously misleading claims”.
“Britain urgently needs a broadcasting regulator with the courage to enforce its rules – even if this does evoke the ire of the oligarchs who subsidise Reform and GB News”, he added.
DeSmog has mapped Reform’s support network of anti-green media outlets, political donors, think tanks, and fossil fuel interests.
Reform previously told DeSmog that: “Climate change is real, Reform UK believes we must adapt, rather than foolishly think you can stop it.
“We are proud to be the only party to understand that economic growth depends on cheap domestic energy and we are proud that we are the only party that are climate science realists, realising you can not stop the power of the sun, volcanoes or sea level oscillation.”
