Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch received a donation from a director of a fossil fuel giant during this year’s party leadership election, DeSmog can reveal. 

The new Tory leader has vocally criticised the UK’s climate ambitions in recent months, calling herself a “net zero sceptic”. Badenoch has suggested that the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 would “bankrupt the country”, and has hinted that she may try to scrap the legally binding target. 

Badenoch received the £10,000 donation on 6 August from House of Lords member Baroness Moyo, an economist and banker who has served on Chevron’s board since 2016 and holds shares worth more than £100,000 in the company. 

Baroness Moyo became a peer in November 2022 having been nominated by the then prime minister Boris Johnson. Her House of Lords profile says that she sat as a Tory peer until July 2024 but is now non-affiliated. 

Chevron, the third largest oil and gas company in the world by market capitalization, does not have a net zero commitment, or a commitment to align its activities with the temperature goals set by the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement. Between 2010 and 2018, Chevron reportedly dedicated only 0.2 percent of its long-term investments to sources of low-carbon energy like wind and solar.

Badenoch, whose leadership manifesto attacked “radical environmental policies”, received funding and office space during the campaign from Neil Record, the chair of the climate denial group Net Zero Watch.

“It’s sadly no surprise that Kemi Badenoch’s anti-net zero agenda is being fuelled by a Chevron board member,” said Hannah Greer, Good Law Project campaigns manager. “The climate crisis is accelerating, but at a time when we need urgent action, Badenoch wants our country to take its foot off the gas and ditch key green policies – much like her predecessor.”

Baroness Moyo was approached for comment. 

Badenoch’s Climate Record

During an address to Conservative MPs at the party’s annual conference on 2 October, Badenoch described herself as a “net zero sceptic” but “not a climate change sceptic”. 

She also claimed that net zero is “making energy more expensive and hurting our economy”.

Badenoch did not confirm in her speech that she would delay or scrap the UK’s climate 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 new Tory leader has repeatedly said that she wants to reduce emissions but not in a way that would “bankrupt” the country.

Badenoch said in 2022 that the UK’s 2050 net zero ambition was “arbitrary” and last year suggested she would support delaying it. 

This is an opinion shared by her closest advisors. DeSmog revealed in November that Badenoch’s policy chief, Victoria Hewson, slammed the 2050 net zero target while working for a group that has been funded by the oil major BP. 

The Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, has estimated that the cost of achieving net zero will be less than one percent of UK GDP. 

The government independent spending watchdog – the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – has said that, “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.

Badenoch claimed during the Tory leadership campaign that, while serving as business secretary, she “had to work hard to push back against the green lobby”. She also condemned Labour’s “foolish decision to ban new licences for North Sea oil production” as part of its “fanatical approach to net zero”.

Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, have said that without “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” limiting global heating to 1.5C is beyond reach.

Restricting global temperatures to this level, which was agreed as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, would prevent the worst and most irreversible impacts of climate change.

In August, DeSmog revealed that Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her leadership campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group. 

Net Zero Watch has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”. 

Speaking to an audience in Washington DC last week, during a visit to North America that saw Badenoch meet with several climate science deniers, the Tory leader declared that the conservative desire to “protect the natural world” had been “hacked, replaced by a radical green absolutism”. 

Funders and directors of the GWPF have donated more than £7 million to the Conservative Party over the past two decades.

Carys Boughton, Fossil Free Parliament campaigner, said: “The fossil fuel industry can probably look forward to yet another Conservative leader championing its pollution profiteering in Parliament. In response, MPs who understand that the industry’s political influence is endangering our future must take concrete action to cut oil and gas interests out of our politics.”

The Conservative Party was approached for comment.