Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have been announced as speakers at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference later this month alongside close allies of President Donald Trump and his anti-climate agenda, DeSmog can reveal.
ARC is a network of influential right-wing figures from across the world, and the group claims that its conference in London will “work to re-lay the foundations of civilisation”.
The Conservative and Reform UK leaders will be speaking alongside individuals who have called climate change a “hoax”, have said that global warming “is probably doing good”, and have called climate activists “eco fascists”.
ARC is backed by the UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group and British hedge fund millionaire Paul Marshall, who together own the right-wing broadcaster GB News. Marshall provided £1 million in funding to ARC in 2023, which is run by Conservative peer and UK government advisor Baroness Stroud.
ARC is fronted by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has said that climate change is a “scam”.
Badenoch and Farage will be speaking alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, who recently helped to set up Trump’s new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) until he was sidelined by DOGE chief and Trump mega-donor Elon Musk.
They will be joined by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, new U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, tech founder and 2016 Trump donor Peter Thiel, and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the radical ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for a second Trump term.
Badenoch and Farage have both vocally opposed climate policies in recent times. The Reform UK leader has said that the goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 should be scrapped, while the Conservative premier has called herself a “net zero sceptic”.
“This is like Glastonbury for climate science deniers, Trump acolytes, manosphere enthusiasts and nihilists in general,” Good Law Project campaigns manager Hannah Greer told DeSmog.
“But the serious point is that some of the people that Paul Marshall has assembled in this right-wing rogues gallery have huge amounts of money and power over our media, medical data and the future of our planet – and they are set on creating a new oligarchy.”
Trump’s Inner Circle
The ARC conference, to be held from 17 to 19 February, will play host to a number of figures in Trump’s inner circle.
These individuals share the new president’s anti-climate convictions. Trump entered office a fortnight ago by declaring an “energy emergency” in order to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels – simultaneously directing the U.S. to withdraw from the flagship 2015 Paris climate agreement, and banning new offshore wind farms.
Ramaswamy, who became a Trump ally after losing the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, used a debate on 23 August to claim that “the climate change agenda is a hoax”.
He has also said that, “We need to abandon the climate cult that shackles America while leaving China untouched. Drill. Frack. Burn coal. Embrace nuclear.”
House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson has called the Paris Agreement “a terrible deal for the United States” and supported leaving it. He has claimed that climate change is part of a normal cycle, adding: “we don’t need the UN dictating to us how to be responsible stewards of what God has given us”.
In October, Johnson said that Trump “has more stamina and mental acumen and strength than any political figure probably in the history of the country that I can remember.”
The House speaker has backed the president’s agenda and has expressed strong support for the new administration’s campaign to gut federal agencies. Since Trump entered office on 20 January, he has started to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and has offered redundancy to two million federal workers.
This agenda appears to draw from the blueprint laid out by Kevin Roberts and the Heritage Foundation in their Project 2025 agenda, which urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”. The 900-page plan also proposed reversing policies on climate action, slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping state investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency.
Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright will also speak to the ARC conference via video link. Wright, who serves as the CEO of the oilfield services company Liberty Energy, told ARC’s inaugural conference in November 2023 that the UK should lift the ban on fracking for shale gas, which has been in place since 2019 due to environmental concerns.
Farage has openly supported ditching the ban on fracking, while Badenoch has expressed her sympathy for the practice.
Although he didn’t receive an invite to Trump’s inauguration, Farage is a close ally of Trump and spent election night at the new president’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Speaking in September at a 40th anniversary fundraiser for the Heartland Institute, a pro-Trump climate denial group, Farage bemoaned the levels of “net zero fanaticism” in the U.S. and UK – calling on both countries to unleash fossil fuel production.
Badenoch, meanwhile, went on a tour of North America in December during which she met with several anti-climate figures, including new Vice President JD Vance.
Farage will be joined at the 2025 ARC conference by Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf.
Climate Science Critics
The speakers at this year’s ARC conference also include a number of other influential critics of climate science and action.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson has regularly posted about “climate apocalypse insanity” and “eco fascists” to his online followers, while amplifying fringe climate deniers to millions of people via his YouTube channel.
He will be joined by British journalist Douglas Murray, an assistant editor at The Spectator – now owned by Paul Marshall – who spent election night at Mar-a-Lago with Farage and Trump’s closest supporters.
Murray has suggested that climate policies will “impoverish” Brits, and has argued that “terrifying our children with doom-mongering propaganda on climate change is nothing less than abuse”.
Another speaker will be former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, who has been a director at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s leading climate science denial group – since February 2023. Abbott has said that “climate change is probably doing good” and is a long-standing advocate for coal power, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
Abbott launched a new paper on energy security “on the outskirts” of the 2023 ARC conference, reportedly telling the Institute of Public Affairs event that climate change has “nothing to do with mankind’s emissions”.
He added: “The climate cult will inevitably be discredited, I just hope we don’t have to endure an energy catastrophe before that happens.”
Abbott will speak at this year’s ARC conference alongside Conservative peer Lord Frost, a director of Net Zero Watch – the campaign arm of the GWPF – and former GWPF director Matt Ridley.
Tory peers Lord Young and Lord Hannan have also been given speaking slots. Both have a record of rallying against climate action. Young wrote in The Spectator in 2022 that, “it’s not the fact of climate change that I’m sceptical about, but the claim that it’s anthropogenic [caused by humans]. I think that could be true, but the evidence isn’t compelling enough to justify the net-zero policy.”
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 speakers at ARC’s conference will also include Michael Shellenberger, a U.S. author who has downplayed the climate crisis via his think tank Environmental Progress and his 2020 book “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All”.
In a 2020 cover piece for Forbes, which was later retracted by the magazine, Shellenberger apologised “on behalf of environmentalists everywhere” for what he called “the climate scare”, and claimed that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse”.
At the inaugural ARC conference, Shellenberger asserted that “renewables are not able to provide the reliable energy we need” and advocated gas and nuclear energy, claiming that fracking for shale gas had been “demonised” by climate activists.
Shellenberger will be joined by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish writer who has regularly downplayed the threat posed by climate change and has been called a “friend” by new energy secretary Wright.
The ARC Network
The 2025 ARC conference will also provide a platform to those involved in other projects supported by Paul Marshall and the Legatum Group.
In addition to GB News presenter Farage, the conference will host Charlie Peters, who is a reporter on the channel.
GB News has been a prominent opponent of climate action since it launched in June 2021. A DeSmog investigation revealed that one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while half attacked climate policies. GB News presenters claimed that net zero will cause “death by poverty and starvation”, that the policy “poses an existential threat to the free world”, and called for the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels.
The summit will also platform a number of figures associated with The Spectator – the conservative magazine purchased by Marshall for £100 million in September – including its editor, former Tory minister Michael Gove, and its publisher Freddie Sayers.
Although ARC’s policy prescriptions are vague, Baroness Stroud has given an indication of where the alliance stands on climate change in a blog on its website. She states that “we risk driving policy interventions to address environmental concerns without having an honest conversation about the trade-offs for the poor at home or in developing and emerging nations”.
The notion that green reforms unduly punish the poor is a common refrain among those who oppose climate action. In reality, poor and indigenous groups in developing countries will be hit hardest by the impacts of climate change.
As revealed by DeSmog, Paul Marshall’s hedge fund held £1.8 million worth of shares in fossil fuel companies – including in oil and gas giants Chevron, Shell, and Equinor – as of June 2023. One of Marshall Wace’s biggest investors, U.S. private equity firm KKR, also has a large fossil fuel portfolio, including 188 assets in oil, gas, and coal.
The list of speakers at this year’s ARC conference also sheds more light on the ideologies and alliances of the group beyond the issue of climate change.
The summit will welcome Peter Thiel, an ally of JD Vance and the founder of the tech firm Palantir, which has been heavily criticised for its role in U.S. immigration deportations, and its processing of healthcare data. Thiel will be joined at the conference by Palantir’s executive vice president Louis Mosley.
The speakers also include Alan Miller, founder of Together – a UK group founded to oppose the mandatory Covid vaccine. Since launching in July 2021, GB News has given air time to anti-vax conspiracy theories – including the claim from its presenter Neil Oliver that Covid vaccines are causing “turbo cancer”.
In recent times, Together has spread climate science denial and runs a campaign to scrap the UK’s net zero targets.
ARC, Together, the Conservatives, and Reform UK were approached for comment.
