Ben Pile

Credentials

BA in Politics and Philosophy from the University of York.¹

Background

Ben Pile is a researcher, commentator and blogger. He is the co-founder and main writer of the Climate Resistance blog, which claims to be “challenging the climate orthodoxy.”²

Pile also writes for the anti-environmental, libertarian Spiked Online, and contributed to the work of the late Telegraph climate science denial columnist, Christopher Booker.³ ⁴ ⁵

Referencing a dispute with Labour MP Barry Gardiner, Breitbart London contributor and former Telegraph columnist James Delingpole described Pile as “daily-more-magnificent-and-admirable.”⁶

Pile was previously a paid researcher of former UKIP MEP and climate science denier, Godfrey Bloom. In an email exchange with a Guardian journalist, Pile acknowledged he received around £2,000-a-month for his work for Bloom.⁷

In 2012, Pile produced and directed the anti-wind power film, Lost Horizons. Pile has also spoken at UKIP events arguing against the use of wind energy.⁸ ⁹

Stance on Climate Change

April 2007

Ben Pile’s Climate Resistance blog has 16 ‘starting position’ statements, including:¹⁰

“The evidence for anthropogenic climate change is neither as strong nor as demanding of action as is widely claimed.”
“The scientific consensus on climate change as widely reported inaccurately reflects the true state of scientific knowledge.”
“The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is principally a political organisation.”
“Environmentalism will be worse for the poor than climate change.”

Key Quotes

May 26, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked which criticised the government’s plans to ban the sale of gas boilers after 2025 as part of a strategy to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a plan which would include installing 600,000 heat pumps in place of gas boilers by 2028. Arguing that the ban would “impose serious costs on ordinary people,” Pile wrote: “A backlash is highly likely.”¹¹

Characterising the government’s net zero strategy as antidemocratic, Pile stated that in mainstream media outlets such as the BBC: “There is no scepticism about the proposals, no consideration of their consequences or even any questioning of why we should take orders from technocrats about how to live.” Later in the article, he wrote: “Of course, green policy wonks should be free to do what they like with their own boilers. But their agenda has no legitimacy and its advocates have no right to presuppose our agreement to it.”

Praising an article written by Conservative MP Steve Baker for The Sun which had stated: “the cost of Net Zero could deliver a political crisis greater than the Poll Tax,” Pile wrote: ““Baker’s intervention is notable by its rarity.” He added: “It has been a long time since any elected politician has said anything to defend the voters’ interests against the green ideology that has captured the British establishment.”¹²

May 12, 2020

In an article for Spiked entitled, “COVID-19 is a frightening dress rehearsal of the climate agenda,” Pile wrote that environmental policies would lead to a permanent lockdown scenario, writing:¹³

“For half a century, greens have been prognosticating the imminent collapse of society. Yet with each new generation, deadlines to stop the destruction of the planet pass without event. In reality, the world’s population has become healthier and wealthier, and we live longer lives than ever before. Panic about the virus achieved in days what greens have been demanding for years: grounded planes, empty roads, and a halt in economic growth.”

Pile also disputed the efficacy of renewable energy, writing that wind turbines and solar panels produced a “dangerous surplus” of energy that “threatened to destabilise the energy grid”.

November 17, 2018

Pile appeared to call for violence to be used against climate change activists from the “Extinction Rebellion” movement during protests in London. He tweeted: “Please, God, let there be violence. Please, God, help the @metpoliceuk find their batons.” and “Anyone who thinks this is how you start a revolution surely needs a truncheon to the head?”¹⁴ ¹⁵

September 2017

Pile criticised climate scientists for linking Hurricane Harvey, which ravaged Texas, to climate change. In an article for Spiked, he wrote:¹⁶

“Central to greens’ fetish for hurricanes is the scientific theory that warmer sea-surface temperatures caused by global warming can increase hurricanes’ energy and destructive power. It may well be true. But theory easily becomes dogma, and climate pundits have rushed ahead of their science.”

December 2015

Pile described the Paris Agreement as “a triumph of meaninglessness,” and “a triumph of mediocrity” in an article for Spiked. He wrote:¹⁷

“In many respects, a Humpty Dumpty fudge gives more licence to climate champions than a precisely worded document ever could. Just as the fact of the scientific consensus on climate change allows environmentalists to ad-lib about its substance, so too the pretence that an agreement on climate change exists will free the mediocracy assembled under its protection from being held to account. That is the main function of this so-called agreement.”

April 2015

In a guest post for the Institute of Ideas, a leading ‘Living Marxism’ website, which aims to “challenge contemporary knee-jerk orthodoxies,” Pile called the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act “the worst example of how politicians have distanced government from democracy.” He wrote:¹⁸

“[…] the main reason to object to the CCA [Climate Change Act] is that it reflects the growing tendency to hide from criticism behind the comforting certainty of scientific objectivity. The CCA has been an expensive failure, but its critics were dismissed as climate-change deniers. The real objective of the CCA was not to save mankind from the weather, but to save an exhausted political establishment from the public, and from democracy.”

July 2013

In a guest post for the University of Nottingham’s ‘Making Science Public’ blog, Pile praised BBC presenter Andrew Neil – who has a history courting controversy on climate issues – for daring to take on the scientific consensus on climate change on his Daily Politics show. Pile wrote:¹⁹ ²⁰

“[…] in just one show, [Neil] has done more to promote an active understanding of climate science and its controversies than has been done by the Carbon Brief blog, academics at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and elsewhere, Bad Science warriors, and a legion of Tweeters who claim to speak for science have done in their entire existences. Along the way, it is possible that Neil made some inconsequential technical mistakes. But by contrast, the uncritical reproduction of scientific orthodoxy is a far more egregious error: it denies that error can be observed from without the consensus. So much for ‘science’.”

Comments Surrounding 2021 Capitol Insurrection

On Jan. 6, 2021, as the Capitol insurrection was ongoing in the US, Pile posted messages on social media suggesting that “a little more terror of the population might be a good thing for democratic politics.” Some of Pile’s other social media posts about the US Capitol insurrection, posted under the Twitter handle @clim8resistance, are also collected here.

Pile also retweeted the following claim, from a since-suspended account, which asserts that a laptop stolen during the insurrection was in the possession of “white hats (good guys, part of special forces)”:

Key Actions

May 4, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked which criticised the Ministry of Defence’s ‘Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach,’ a document outlining a strategy for the armed forces to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.²¹

Describing the strategy as a “plan to make killing people and blowing things up more easy on Mother Nature,” Pile argued that environmentalism could provide a rationale for adopting a bellicose foreign policy, writing: “Perhaps some smaller, oil-producing or deforesting nation will once again prove a convenient impediment to the green ethics now championed by Britain’s degenerate establishment.”

Disputing the efficacy of decarbonisation targets, Pile stated: “The reduction of living standards and the removal of freedoms demanded by the Net Zero agenda establishes an antagonistic relationship between the government and the public.”

April 22, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked which commented on a pledge made by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to cut carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 during a climate conference attended by representatives of 40 nations at the White House on April 22, 2021. He stated: “But what this on-the-hoof policymaking really reveals is a chaotic government that is struggling to cope with a climate agenda that is out of control, has no chance of success, and will create hardship for millions.”²²

Pile asserted that Johnson was “sacrificing our material interests for the sake of his own vanity,” contending that the UK’s decarbonisation pledge would “impose the most stringent emissions-reduction targets – and by extension, the greatest constraints on economic activity – in the world.”

Arguing that the adoption of environmental policies was inadvisable, Pile wrote: “Mass protests, high energy prices, economic decline and deindustrialisation… these are the fruits of the climate agenda in the richest countries. Why would poorer countries want to follow suit?”

April 8, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked criticising the establishment of ‘The Daily Climate Show’ a programme on Sky News dedicated to reporting on climate change. He argued that the programme represented: “the collapse of journalism into obvious propaganda,” and resembled “a half-baked execution of a poorly conceived instruction from upstairs – like those reports of tractor production in the USSR exceeding quotas, and produced for similar ends, too.”²³

Pile compared Sky News to a “supranational political body,” stating: “One thing is for sure… it is no longer a news broadcaster.” He stated that Sky News had “shown itself unwilling and unable to reflect critically on a domestic and global political agenda.”

Disputing the severity of climate change, Pile cited an article written by climate science sceptic and deputy Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation Andrew Montford, who claimed that “The British public has been subject to a consistent diet of climate alarmism for years.”²⁴

March 10, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked which criticised the government’s plan for a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, stating: “It is big on hyperbole, setting bizarre, unrealistic goals, while short on detail of how to reach them.”²⁵

Characterising net zero decarbonisation as undemocratic and expensive, Pile wrote: “The UK climate agenda, despite being three decades old and having faced zero political opposition, lacks anything resembling popular support or democratic legitimacy,” adding: “It is dependent on technology that does not yet exist or is not yet proven to be economically viable.” He also claimed it was “inevitable” that net zero policy would result in “a reduction in most people’s living standards and quality of life”.

February 24, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked, on the power outages that had taken place in Texas following an ice storm, claiming that: “Texas’s misfortune has rightly put a huge question mark over the American climate agenda.”²⁶

Criticising comments made by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had tweeted: “The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you don’t pursue a Green New Deal,” Pile questioned the effectiveness of renewable energy, stating: “Solar panels and wind turbines cannot work if the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow.”²⁷

Pile also disputed that climate change had contributed to such instances of extreme weather, writing: “No evidence yet exists that America (or the world) is becoming any more vulnerable to extreme weather.”

February 16, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked voicing support for the development of a new coking coal mine in Cumbria. He wrote: “Despite local support for the coal mine and the opportunities it will create, it looks likely that Cumbria County Council’s decision will be made for them by the sheer weight of the billionaire-backed green blob,” adding: “If it was not for that powerful, unaccountable and self-serving lobby, and its influence over the UK government, the routine decision-making of a humble local council would be of no consequence to even the next county, let alone the international community.”²⁸

February 15, 2021

Pile released a video on his YouTube Channel ‘Climate Resistance,’ which disputed the methodologies used by climate scientists. Referring to environmental science as “a fantasy produced by a computer with no test in reality,” Pile concluded the video by saying: “Climate science has departed from reality, and climate scientists are now lost in their own simulation, and eco-hyperreality from which they are unable to escape.”²⁹

February 8, 2021

Pile wrote a report for The Global Warming Policy Foundation asserting that the UK’s climate assembly, a group assembled from UK citizens to discuss responses to climate change, was an antidemocratic imposition by green policymakers lacking a democratic mandate. He stated: “the Assembly was convened by political campaigning and lobbying groups, funded by special interests. Its composition did not reflect that of the broader public.”³⁰

He cited the report in an article for The Conservative Woman characterising the government’s efforts to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as undemocratic, stating: “The Net Zero agenda has been shown to the world for what it is: a power and wealth grab, at the public expense, which has been so poorly conceived that none of its advocates bothered to ask themselves ‘What if the public object to it?’”³¹

The article also cited a talkRADIO interview featuring climate “lukewarmer” Matt Ridley and host Julia Hartley-Brewer, in which Ridley criticised the government’s proposals for higher carbon taxes, stating: “It was always going to be clear that the cost was going to land on ordinary people because there’s no way you can change people’s behaviour without putting up their gas bills.”³²

February 5, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked which argued that environmentalists intended to use the COVID-19 lockdown to impose longer, harsher restrictions to reduce consumption.

He wrote: “Society has failed to grasp the extent to which green imperatives are ideological fantasies. Green claims are routinely taken at face value, rather than interrogated, to see what kind of world greens really want,” adding: “One thing we can be sure of now, however, is that as soon as the climate lockdowners get what they want, they will simply move the goalposts.” Pile also stated: “It seems clear that green thinking is first and foremost driven by authoritarian impulses.”³³

January 22, 2021

Pile wrote an article for Spiked criticising President Joe Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, claiming that it would “saddle the public with tens or even hundreds of trillions in debt, skyrocketing costs of living, immobility and terminal industrial decline,” which Pile described as “the conditions for civil war, in other words.”³⁴

Pile cited an article by climate science policy writer Roger Pielke Jr, which argued that reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 was a near-impossible target.³⁵

December 31, 2020

In an article for The Conservative Woman entitled “2020: The year of climate craziness,” Pile criticised Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plans to ban new gas boilers and the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.³⁶

Pile also criticised the UK’s Climate Assembly, a representative body of 108 randomly-selected citizens tasked with strategising a net-zero approach to carbon emissions, stating that it was controlled by “technocrats and green activists,” and “solved the problem of the public’s lack of interest in the climate agenda”. Pile added: “And this is how abstract targets will be turned into an agenda for very real changes in society. 2020 marked the beginning of a new phase of environmental politics.”

December 10, 2020

Pile appeared in a debate with Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam, hosted on the YouTube channel Reasoned with Darren Grimes, which says it works to challenge “the pervasive left wing bias in online content.”³⁷

December 7, 2020

In a video on his YouTube channel “Climate Resistance,” Pile characterised Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s 10-point plan for a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ as “the most expensive political project in history,” stating “it will cost the public many trillions of pounds. Domestic gas boilers will be abolished, and homes will need to be retrofitted to make them compliant with new legislation, costing each household tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of pounds over the coming decades.”³⁸

Pile disputed the cost implications of Johnson’s plan, stating: “It [the plan] will increase the cost of energy and other utilities, increase the cost of living and increase the prices of other goods and services.”

Pile continued: “If this radical agenda, which is highly dependent on expensive, uncosted and unproven technology, goes wrong, it could plunge Britain into an endless economic depression.”

Pile also characterised the Green Alliance and other civil society organisations as corrupt ideologues attempting to subvert democracy, stating: “Civil society is a lie. It is a fig-leaf for the wholesale dismantling of democracy, the removal of political power from the public. In reality, organisations like the Green Alliance are the voice of powerful private and financial interests. They claim to be saving the planet, and they may even believe it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not corrupt and dangerous ideologues.”

July 1, 2020

Pile wrote an article for Spiked characterising environmentalists as Malthusian eugenicists motivated by a desire to control population growth and limit the consumption levels and material wealth of people in poorer countries. He stated:³⁹

“The green ideology is racist. It presupposes that others’ poverty and others’ futures are determined by weather rather than by the changes that can be brought by man-made technological, economic and political development. The disparity between the wealthiest and poorest people in the world allows this presupposition to become an imposition.”

The article also stated: “Green neo-Malthusianism is the last redoubt of racist eugenics in mainstream society.”

May 12, 2020

In an article for Spiked entitled: ‘COVID-19 is a frightening dress rehearsal of the climate agenda’, Pile wrote that technocratic control of the economy established during the COVID-19 lockdown could lead to authoritarian solutions to climate change.

Pile stated that, “from the outset, there has been a palpable sense of green jealousy of the virus, as it stole attention from the climate fearmongers. For half a century, greens have been prognosticating the imminent collapse of society.”

Pile continued: “in reality, the world’s population has become healthier and wealthier, and we live longer lives than ever before”, concluding that “there will be no chance of an economic recovery if Britain, the EU and the rest of the world follow their existing climate-change agendas – there will only be a lockdown, or something like it, forever.”⁴⁰

March 17, 2020

In an article for Spiked entitled: ‘The myth of climate-change refugees’, Pile argued that, “climate campaigners have long sought climate victims. But this desire for puppets to act out a green morality play means that problems which require public debate are removed from their wider context, or are framed so as to preclude any solution.”⁴¹

May 22, 2012

Pile prepared a “proof of evidence” document on behalf of UKIP MEPs Godfrey Bloom and Paul Nuttall. According to document, Pyle was contracted to provide research for the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group in the European Parliament on climate and energy matters.”⁴²

In the document, Pile argues against renewable energy initiatives, citing analyses by Roger Pielke Jr. to push against climate policies. Pile argues in the report that it is not urgent to reduce CO2 emissions:⁴³

“[T]he IPCC is itself not yet a perfect check on such misconceptions about how quickly CO2 could cause climate change, and thus how urgent the need to remedy it,” the document claimed. “There is a growing recognition that unfounded urgency is dangerous, likely to undermine confidence in science, and make it harder to find a solution to the real problem of climate change. “

It concluded:

“Whatever the true extent of climate change, it seems clear that an atmosphere of urgency has not created the best conditions for dealing with the problem. In particular, a rush towards renewable energy – ‘a dash for wind’ – has lacked a firm basis and a consensus is emerging that it seems to have been incautious.”⁴⁴

January 2012

In a Spiked article, Pile defended the right of climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), to keep its donors hidden. He argued that the £50,000 donation at the heart of an investigation by journalist Brendan Montague (later DeSmog UK’s first editor) “fades into insignificance” when compared to funding for environmental groups. He concludes the article: “there should be more GWPFs.”⁴⁵

Efforts to get the GWPF to reveal its funders eventually went to tribunal, with leading scientists including NASA’s James Hansen submitting evidence that the GWPF “routinely misrepresents and casts doubt on the work of climate scientists,” the Guardian reported.⁴⁶

November 2012

Pile produced and directed an anti-wind power campaign video called Lost Horizons, with the subtitle: “How the EU’s obsession with wind energy is destroying Britain’s coastlines and communities.”⁴⁷

November 2012

The Guardian revealed Pile received around £2,000 for research work for climate science denialist and former UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.⁴⁸

April 2009

Pile was quoted by climate science denialist and Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker in an article criticising former prime minister Gordon Brown’s “£100 billion green energy package.”⁴⁹