By AntifaCog
Since the last election, Reform UK has accepted some £2.3 million in donations from Fossil fuel Interests and Climate Change Deniers. It’s no surprise, then, that their leaders, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, do not support the “mainstream” view on Climate Change.
Reform UK are not a “mainstream” party, it’s fair to say. Mainstream parties elect their leaders. Reform simply declares that Nigel Farage has taken over as leader without the need for a vote. Only “woke” people need to vote for their leaders. True patriots let themselves be told who the leader is and meekly submit.
Richard Tice was challenged about his views on Climate Change during the leadership interviews, and took the position of ‘the climate is really changing, and some of that is manmade’, but denying that CO2 emissions were the driving force behind the modern climate crisis. This way, he can argue against net zero to keep his fossil fuel donors happy, while he is also “not really denying” the existence of climate change.
Of course, his position is entirely inconsistent with the mountains of evidence from the IPCC suggesting carbon emissions are the main driver of global warming since the 19th century, and the 3000 page IPCC report from 2022 which drew on over 34,000 studies. But Richard Tice reckons that a few scientists agree with him, which is basically the same thing.
Perhaps the most duplicitous lie that I have discovered when scouring through Reform’s denialist nonsense was a claim that was repeated by Richard Tice in his ITV interview on Tuesday night:
“Do you know how much The National Grid thinks Net Zero is gonna cost? Is it 2 trillion or is it 3 trillion? I’ll tell you, it’s 3 trillion.”
It is a popular claim among denialists and one that will bite people like Starmer and Sunak in the proverbial behind if they don’t start getting to know their opponents’ claims so that they can counter them effectively. The figure is taken from the National Grid Future Energy Scenarios projection from 2020. You’ll notice that the word “scenarios” is plural. Because they were talking about multiple scenarios.
Can you see where this is going? The worst case scenario, where the government takes no action on green investment or net zero, and the costs skyrocket as a result, produced a projection of $3 trillion in costs to the UK economy.
In other words, that was their absolute worst case scenario if we delay getting to net zero. The dishonesty of pointing to the cost of climate denial in order to support climate denial is a level of unscrupulousness few in UK Politics have attempted.
But who can blame them? After all, it’s worth £2.3 million to them, and all it will cost us is the habitability of the planet. No big deal.
Unfortunately, they’re not the only party with climate denial in their ranks, with Labour re-selecting Graham Stringer, who is the director of the “Global Warming Policy Foundation” (sometimes called “Net Zero Watch”), which is a 55 Tufton Street think tank set up specifically to lobby against decarbonisation. To benefit fossil fuel interests.
And their funders?
Oh, they are partially funded by the Koch Foundation, the lobbying wing of the Koch Oil Baron empire. They appear regularly on GB News to cast doubt on the idea of anthropogenic climate change, and are often cited by Reform UK. Stringer may be a Tufton Street lobbyist for fossil fuel interests, but at least he’s not a left wing candidate!
That would be awful. So are Reform and Labour just as bad when it comes to Climate Denialism? Of course not: the Labour leadership doesn’t deny (through minimization) the importance of anthropogenic climate change, where Reform’s leadership does. Labour are just willing to tolerate it for their factional ally.
However, we are becoming far too tolerant of lobbyists, lies, and broken promises on climate at a time when we cannot afford to be complacent. Our media needs to challenge this, and they simply aren’t doing enough. There are flowers blooming in Antarctica, and it is the UK media that seems frozen.
@antifacog
Politically Enraged 