GB News gave a platform to at least 953 anti-climate attacks in the immediate run-up and aftermath of the 2024 general election, DeSmog can reveal.

Half of these featured attacks on clean energy policies, including that the goal of reducing emissions to net zero by 2050 is a “cult” and a “monster”.

The broadcaster aired an average of around 4.5 anti-climate claims per day during the period from 31 May to 31 December, with attacks on climate science, policy, or environmental groups featuring in almost 12 percent of all half-hour segments.

At least 74 of these anti-climate statements were made by current or former representatives of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and its predecessor party, the Brexit Party, several of whom are GB News hosts.

Reform UK, which opposes net zero, won five seats in the 4 July election, registering 14.3 percent of the vote – the best general election result achieved by one of Farage’s parties.

There were at least 84 examples where hosts and guests cast doubt on the scientifically-proven idea that climate change is caused by human activity, with some calling it a “hoax,” a “load of nonsense,” “rubbish,” and an attempt to “gaslight” the public.

Misleading statements about climate change frequently went unchallenged by GB News hosts. This is despite the TV regulator Ofcom stating in its Broadcasting Code that “views and facts must not be misrepresented”, and that “alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented” on air.

“GB News is letting down its audience by giving platforms to individuals who have strong opinions about climate change but are unable or unwilling to tell the truth about it,” said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

“Robust debate about climate policies is good but needs to be based on facts and evidence rather than ideology and propaganda.

“This is especially important ahead of May’s local elections.”

These anti-climate attacks were allowed on air even in the days leading up to the general election, which saw the Labour Party win an 170-seat majority on a manifesto that promised to “get Britain back on track to meet our climate targets.”

On 1 June, comedian Lewis Schaffer, who is a regular GB News guest, said “the whole climate thing is a scam” in a discussion about Labour’s plans to form a publicly-owned energy investment company.

One day before the election, Harry Phibbs, the local government editor of ConservativeHome, claimed that the Liberal Democrats and Labour agree on “climate change alarmism”.

During an election campaign period, broadcasters are required by Ofcom to adhere to strict impartiality guidelines. Voters will be going to the polls again on 1 May with elections being held for 23 councils and six mayors in England.

Since its election in July 2024, Labour has faced a range of attacks from hostile media outlets over its climate policies, in particular targeting Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband.

GB News broadcast anti-climate sentiments consistently throughout the seven month period, though the attacks peaked in November during the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, when the government set a new target of cutting emissions by 81 percent compared to pre-industrial levels by 2035.

The week starting 11 November saw the most hostility to clean energy, with 28 percent of all half-hour segments on GB News featuring attacks on climate change science, policy, or environmental groups.

DeSmog previously revealed that one-third of GB News presenters spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half attacked climate action. GB News had a broadcast audience of 3.5 million in February this year, while it was the 19th most viewed website in the UK as of January – logging a readership of 9.3 million.

However, Ofcom has so far refused to investigate the channel for spreading false climate claims.

The campaign group Stop Funding Heat has submitted 46 complaints to Ofcom over GB News’s climate coverage over the last year, none of which have been successful.

“GB News clearly can’t refute the scientific facts about climate change,” Richard Wilson, director and co-founder of Stop Funding Heat said. “Instead they’re pumping out increasingly wild and paranoid conspiracy claims which undermine climate action, while deflecting from the very real dangers we all face if climate change is not urgently addressed.”

An Ofcom spokesperson said: “We carefully assess every complaint about specific programmes we receive to see if they raise potential issues under our Broadcasting Code, including our rules on due impartiality and relating to elections. However, it is for broadcasters to determine their overall editorial approach.

“While our guidance considers the scientific principles behind the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming to be broadly settled, there is no general prohibition on representing alternative views. When assessing content, Ofcom will take into account the broadcasters’ and audiences’ right to freedom of expression as well as all relevant contextual factors.”

Climate Science Denial

“The truth is climate change is not a real thing,” said Lewis Schaffer on 16 June. Schaffer didn’t provide any evidence for this claim, and received no pushback from the show’s presenters or guests.

This overt climate science denial was a common theme of GB News’s coverage throughout the pre- and post-election period.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former deputy leader of the Conservative Party, hosts his own show on GB News, and said on 17 September in relation to climate change: “the assumption made that it is human in origin [is] not proven.”

In reality, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, concluded in its 2023 sixth assessment report: “it is unequivocal that humans are causing [global] warming.”

Former army officer Stuart Crawford claimed on two occasions that climate change would be better referred to as “climate variation”.

GB News also gave a platform to the claim that net zero policies risk power cuts due to the supposed unreliability of renewable energy – an assertion made by Alan D. Miller of Together, a conspiracy theory group, on 9 June when he suggested that net zero would “lead to blackouts”.

The risk of blackouts decreased this winter compared to last, with the UK’s surplus energy increasing from 7 percent to 10 percent of demand. This comes as the share of renewable energy in the UK grid reached an all-time high, comprising 37 percent of total electricity production last year.

Guests and hosts also regularly confused weather events for evidence against the existence of climate change. GB News presenter Neil Oliver argued on 9 June that “despite the snow in Scotland, there were headlines about it having been the hottest May on record here in the UK.”

The Met Office’s temperature data is taken from the average temperature across the country – meaning it is still possible for there to be low temperatures and even snow in some places. 

The channel also consistently gave voice to fossil fuel advocates who argued for more fossil fuel extraction in the UK, including fracking for shale gas.

Carla Sands, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former ambassador to Denmark, called on 20 July for the UK to lift its ban on fracking because it is “actually a green thing to do because it’s renewable; it’s natural.”

Fracked gas is a fossil fuel and produces carbon dioxide when it is burned, which contributes directly to climate change.

GB News hosts also read out 42 viewer comments that attacked or undermined climate science, policy, or environmental groups. This included one comment read out by Bev Turner which labelled net zero as “rubbish” that would “destroy the country”.

James Painter, a research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, told DeSmog: “These findings on GB News are consistent with research on broadcast media in other countries. Most mainstream TV channels have virtually stopped giving coverage to voices questioning whether temperatures are rising, or the causes and impacts of climate change.

“In contrast, right-wing channels such as Fox TV in the USA, Sky News in Australia, and GB News in the UK continue to offer platforms to what are widely called ‘evidence sceptics’.

“This DeSmog research showing a sustained pattern of such climate denialism raises urgent questions as to why Ofcom is not paying more attention to GB News’s climate science coverage.”

The Money Man

GB News is co-owned by hedge fund magnate Paul Marshall, who also owns The Spectator magazine.

Speaking at a conference in February hosted by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a group funded by Marshall, he said that the UK’s net zero plans are “leading the way in wrecking our industrial base”, “impoverishing people”, “sacrificing our energy security”, and “sacrificing our ancient rural landscape.”

The UK’s net zero sector is growing at three times the rate of the rest of the economy, according to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

As of June 2023, Marshall’s hedge fund had at least £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels, including in the oil and gas giants Shell, Chevron, and Equinor.

Anti-Climate Hosts 

GB News hosts themselves regularly made false climate claims on air during the period, and failed to challenge those made by guests.

Presenter Martin Daubney – who was a Member of European Parliament for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party between 2019 and 2020 – made or supported 127 false claims, the most of any guest or host.

“The climate has always changed,” Daubney said on 24 July in a debate with Jim Dale. “It’s actually cooler now than it was thousands of years ago and we’re actually in a period of interglacial warming.” 

In reality, a 2023 UN report concluded that the earth is likely to be warmer now than it has been at any point for the last 100,000 years. 22 June 2024 was the single day with the highest average temperature observed in recorded history.

On 29 July, Daubney made the claim that “there have been no deaths directly attributed to vehicle pollution, let alone pollution in London”.

In 2020, an inquest into the death of nine-year-old Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah found that air pollution “made a material contribution” to the asthma that caused her death seven years earlier. 

Patrick Christys was the second-worst offender, spreading anti-climate sentiments 67 times in the 213 day period. On 31 December, he took aim at the UK’s pledge to provide £11.3 billion in overseas climate aid, claiming that some of the aid “is going to the Taliban,” which assumed rule of Afghanistan after the U.S. and its allies pulled out of the country in 2022.

Guest and GWPF board member Allison Pearson responded by claiming that climate aid is “just basically code for dictators in Central African Republics buying a new Mercedes diesel, isn’t it, really?”

“It’s just infantile – and hardly surprising – GB News leans heavily in favour of climate denial,” said Jim Dale, a meteorologist and media commentator who frequently appears on GB News and has been introduced on the platform as a “climate alarmist.” 

A Platform for Anti-Climate Politicians

The views expressed on GB News during this period often matched those articulated by Farage’s anti-net zero Reform UK, whose representatives were allowed to spread climate falsehoods on-air.

On 17 September, Farage questioned the existence of climate change. After one guest listed the likely consequences of continued climate change, Farage said: “that’s all assuming climate change and global warming is happening and will continue to happen.”

On 13 December, Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf claimed on GB News that the “religious obsession” with net zero is “one of the greatest acts of self-immolation in British history.”

Farage and fellow Reform UK MP Lee Anderson have received hundreds of thousands of pounds from their roles as GB News presenters. Farage’s deputy Richard Tice is also a former GB News host.

Reform UK’s prospective manifesto published in September 2023 included overt climate science denial, claiming that climate change is natural – “has been happening for millions of years” – and that “scientists disagree as to how much” it is driven by human activity.

In March 2022, Farage used his platform on GB News to launch a campaign to hold a referendum on net zero. The Reform UK leader also suggested during the ARC conference in February that it is “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant, despite admitting that he knows little about the science of climate change.

Appearing on GB News on 15 December, Reform UK’s immigration and justice spokesperson Ann Widdecombe claimed that “there is no climate emergency,” labelling the UK’s climate targets an “obsession with net zero” and a “dictatorship of nonsense”.

In the same appearance, Widdecombe argued that the UK should not try to reduce its emissions because “we contribute less than 1 percent” to the global total. However, taking historic emissions into account, the UK has contributed the fifth most to climate change.

GB News also gave a platform during the period to current and former Conservative Party MPs to attack and undermine climate science.

Rees-Mogg alone made 57 anti-climate statements in the last seven months of 2024. In July, the month of the general election, he claimed the Labour Party was “destroying the UK’s energy independence” and “increasing energy bills for the British people” via net zero, and lining “the pockets of overseas dictators” by refusing to extract and sell British fossil fuels.

There is no guarantee that oil and gas extracted domestically will be used to supply the UK, given that it is mined by private companies that sell it on the open international market. 

Fake Experts and Think Tanks

The channel also portrayed climate opponents with limited academic credentials as climate scientists or experts.

Representatives of anti-climate think tanks were welcomed onto GB News to attack climate policies, including staff from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s foremost climate denial think tank, and the group’s campaign arm Net Zero Watch. 

Guests included the GWPF’s head of policy, Harry Wilkinson, board member Allison Pearson, Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford, and directors Lord David Frost and Andrea Jenkyns.

Jenkyns is running as Reform’s candidate for the Greater Lincolnshire mayoral election this May. DeSmog previously revealed that the GWPF had been handed dozens of appearances on GB News to attack climate policy.

Mark Littlewood, the former director general of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank argued on 10 September that net zero is a “lunatic approach to energy, which is an absolutely pointless act of colossal self-harm,” saying that he would be “happy” with continued coal use. On another occasion, Littlewood said the UK should “get on with fracking”.

The IEA received funding from oil giant BP every year from 1967 until at least 2018, as revealed by Greenpeace’s investigative outlet, Unearthed.

Paul Burgess, the ex-environment spokesperson for the now-defunct far-right For Britain movement, was also regularly featured as a “climate scientist” on GB News.

In a comment to DeSmog, Burgess claimed that For Britain was not a far-right party – despite its history of fielding former members of the far-right British National Party as candidates, as well as those that have expressed racist views online. Burgess said that he has never been associated with the BNP, “the motives and aims of which I deplore.”

Burgess, a retired chartered environmental and water resources engineer, runs the YouTube channel ‘Climate Realism by Paul Burgess’. On the channel, he has suggested that net zero “is a lie designed to control you like sheep,” claiming that “the shepherds” are the UN, the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and Ed Miliband. 

The argument that climate policies are an attempt to coerce people is a conspiracy theory based on the idea that a shadowy elite is attempting to exert secret control of society.

Burgess appeared on far-right activist Tommy Robinson’s podcast ‘Silenced’ in February 2024, during which he boasted that he was the only voice in the British media saying that “the whole CO2 thing is a sham”.

On GB News, Burgess made dubious claims about climate science, for example that climate scientists “can’t find any evidence on the rising sea levels due to mankind”.

The IPCC has stated that the global mean sea level rose over the 20th century, that the rate of sea level rise has increased in recent decades, and that human influence is “very likely” the main driver of the increases since at least 1971.

“Your criticism of GB News is unfounded,” Burgess told DeSmog. “I have to provide the evidence for all I say on air”.

“My work involved having to study the climate to be able to predict long term droughts and storms over say 1,000 years or more,” he added.

“Although GB News occasionally interviews genuine experts, most of their discussions about climate change feature cranks and propagandists who mislead the audience,” said Bob Ward.

“It is well known that GB News gives undue prominence to individuals who promote falsehoods about climate change. This is clearly not in the public interest.

“It is a systemic failure of the UK’s broadcast regulation, and highlights, in particular, the feebleness of Ofcom.”

GB News was approached for comment.