Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has admitted that he doesn’t know about climate science, despite claiming that politicians shouldn’t worry about man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Farage was speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London today. ARC claims that it wants to help “save civilisation”, yet several of the event’s speakers have spread climate science denial.  

In an interview with Canadian psychologist and ARC co-founder Jordan Peterson, Farage said claimed that sunspots and volcanoes have more impact on the climate than human-caused CO2 emissions – an opinion long debunked by climate experts. 

He added: “I’m not a scientist. I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors.”

Despite admitting that he is not a climate expert, Farage claimed it was “absolutely nuts” that CO2 is considered to be a pollutant. 

Reform UK campaigns to entirely scrap the UK’s policies to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. It also proposes increased fossil fuel extraction, including the opening of new coal mines, and received at least £2.3 million (92 percent of its funding) from fossil fuel interests, polluters and climate deniers prior to the 2024 general election campaign. 

In December, Farage launched the UK-EU branch of the Heartland Institute, a U.S. climate denial think tank.

As DeSmog revealed on Monday, a leaked guest list for the ARC event includes executives from oil and gas giants including BP, Koch Inc., Valero Energy, and Energy Transfer.

ARC received £1 million in 2023 from its director Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager who owns GB News and recently bought The Spectator magazine. As revealed by DeSmog, Marshall’s hedge fund had £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels – including in oil and gas giants Chevron, Shell, and Equinor – as of June 2023. 

On 17 February, during the first day of the ARC conference, Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright called the UK’s 2050 net zero target “sinister”, and suggested climate action was a plot to “shrink human freedom”. 

Nigel Farage and Climate Denial 

Farage was a star speaker on the second day of the ARC conference at the ExCel centre in east London, during which he took part in a one-on-one interview with ARC frontman Peterson, who is a major promoter of climate science denial. 

After declaring that “net zero is a complete disaster”, Farage called for dozens of “small modular nuclear reactors” across the UK. Peterson responded with a question about the science of climate change, suggesting: “Maybe it’s time to stop our obsession with carbon altogether.”

Peterson said: “I also think conceivably that the environmentalist climate scam was an offshoot of the Club of Rome Malthusian stupidity that is predicated on the presumption that resources are finite and that there’s far too many people on the planet, and there’s a terrible anti-human motivation lurking underneath all of that’s pessimistic and brutal and genocidal in its fundamental ethos.”

Farage replied: “The one thing I hear that drives me absolutely potty is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant! That’s what they tell us! That clearly is absolutely nuts. Now, there are times in our past when CO2 in the atmosphere has been much, much higher than it is today, and that’s before people drove 4×4 Chelsea tractors.” 

In fact, 2024 was the hottest year on record, according to experts at the World Health Organization.

As climate scientist Dr Philipp Breul from Imperial College London has stated: “We are causing the climate to change significantly faster than it has, to the best of our knowledge, in the last million years.

“This incredibly fast rate of change is the real problem, as it leaves neither society nor the ecosystem time to adapt.”

Farage went on to say that Sir Patrick Moore, a TV astronomer, told him 20 years ago that “when it comes to carbon dioxide levels, and when it comes to warming and cooling, let me assure you that sunspot activity and underwater volcanic activity will always have a bigger impact on the environment than man himself ever can”. 

“I’ve very much stuck to that view,” Farage added.

Climate scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, have stressed that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

Farage went on to repeat the misleading claim that only three percent of CO2 emissions are produced by humans. In fact, human activity has raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 percent in less than 200 years, according to NASA. 

The Reform UK described himself as an “environmentalist in the old school sense and definition of that term”, complaining that “climate hysteria has blinded us to other environmental disasters such as the rape of our oceans”. 

Later in the interview, Farage agreed with Peterson that “family” is of central importance for a happy society. He also said he believed in “Judeo-Christen values”, and asserted that the Conservative Party is “not remotely right-wing”.