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y mail 5 23

this week an important conference in London featured a showdown between powerful elites and brave dissidents.

No, I’m not talking about the National Conservatism conference, this week’s great political circus that led the news thanks to the attendance of senior Conservative politicians.

I mean Salome Nduta, a Kenyan human rights campaigner at OilWatch Africa, who believes she was deliberately excluded from the Africa Energies Summit in London as vested interests sought to dodge any awkward questions about fossil fuel expansion.

Nduta bought a £4,000 delegate pass to the event – whose sponsors included Royal Dutch Shell, TotalEnergies, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Eni – but was then told it was “sold out”.

Global Witness’s Hanna Hindstrom commented: “This is the classic fossil fuel playbook: push to extract; shut out and ignore the participation of those who will be hit first and hardest as a result of their toxic practices.” Read the full story by DeSmog’s Phoebe Cooke here.

Speaking of pollution, over at the NatCon event, talks were hosted with Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, Tory Deputy Chair Lee Anderson, former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Lord (David) Frost.

But as DeSmog’s Joey Grostern and I reported, the event was packed with speakers and groups hostile to climate action and with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

For example, the conference co-chair Christopher DeMuth was president of the American Enterprise Institute from 1986 to 2006, a US-based climate science denial think tank which has received millions from ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel funded Koch Industries. DeMuth has himself cast doubt on climate science in the past.

And so, it’s fitting that NatCon should have been headlined by Braverman, who – lest we forget – ran for Tory leader last year vowing to “suspend the all-consuming desire to achieve Net Zero by 2050”, while fellow speaker Lord Frost is a director of DeSmog faves the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  

But while NatCon speakers used their platforms to rail against “the elites”, genuinely brave campaigners like Salome Nduta are standing up to real power in defence of human rights and protecting the planet.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/global-warming-policy-foundation-net-zero-watch-koch-brothers/

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Steve Baker MP, a trustee of the lobby group, has led the opposition to the government's net-zero policies

An influential Tory-linked lobby group leading the backlash against the UK government’s net-zero policy has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from an oil-rich foundation with huge investments in energy firms, openDemocracy can reveal.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which also campaigns as Net Zero Watch, has also received more than half a million dollars through a fund linked to the controversial billionaire Koch brothers.

The GWPF has long refused to disclose its donors and claims it willnot take money from anyone with an interest in an energy company.

But tax documents filed with US authorities and uncovered by this website reveal the network of dark money behind it for the first time – including the $30m shares in 22 companies working in coal, oil and gas that are held by one of its donors.

shadow climate secretary Ed Milibandsaid: “US right-wing groups with links to big oil are desperate to stop action against the climate crisis. Now they are trying to extend their reach into UK political debate."

A registered UK charity, the GWPF is one of the most vocal groups in British politics opposing the government’s ‘net zero’ plans and has been at the forefront of recent calls to restart fracking.

The Tufton Street-based group’s trustees include former chancellor Nigel Lawson and Steve Baker, who leads the ‘Net Zero Scrutiny’ group of backbench Tory MPs and was recently criticised for sharing a paper by the group that denied the climate crisis.

Over four years the GWPF’s US arm, the American Friends of the GWPF, received more than $1.3m from US donors. At least $864,884 of this has been channelled to the UK group, with some being held back for expenses.

Of the £1.45m that the GWPF has received in charitable donations since 2017, at least 45% has come from the US.

American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy

The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s US ‘friends’ group did not have to declare the sources of this so-called ‘dark money’ – but openDemocracy has discovered through the filings of other groups that:

“It is disturbing that the Global Warming Policy Foundation is acting as a channel through which American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy,” said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Founded by Lawson and university lecturer Benny Peiser in 2009, the GWPF has long been accused of promoting climate denialism.

Last week, Peisermade the unfounded claim that Putin has “colluded with the green movementin Europe and all over the world”.

The GWPF – which Greenpeace UK said has “spent the last twenty years campaigning to preserve our addiction to fossil fuels” – has become increasingly prominent in recent years.

The group was forced to set up a new non-charitable organisation for its political lobbying in 2014 after the Charity Commission found its stance on climate change breached charity rules.

Labour MP Graham Stringer sits on its board of trustees, while two of Global Warming Policy Foundation’s staff recently became advisers to Tory MP Craig Mackinlay. Another trustee, Terence Mourdant, is a long-standing Tory donor who gave £25,000 to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign.

Steve Baker, who joined the GWPF last year and has called on Boris Johnson to resign over partygate, is a long time admirer of US libertarians. He has previously received expenses-paid trips to conferences organised by US conservative groups that have been accused of opposing environmental action.

‘Net Zero Watch’

In October last year, the UK government announced its strategy for reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

The same month, the GWPF’s campaigning arm – the similarly-named Global Warming Policy Forum – rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch, a name it continues to use alongside the original moniker.

In a statement announcing the change, Peiser claimed that in a “net zero future you will be poorer and colder” and “that a political backlash is long overdue” in response to the policy.

Net Zero Watch has repeatedly claimed that the cost of living crisis is the result of net-zero policies.In a report published in March, it said that renewable energy is responsible for the crisis and called for the government to reintroduce coal power plants and restart fracking.

Climate policy researchers said that the group is spreading “misinformation and propaganda” about net zero rather than providing analysis.

Net Zero Watch has found allies in Parliament among a group of 20 Tory MPs and Peers, who formed the Net Zero Scrutiny Group,  a cadre of backbench Conservative MPs modelled on the European Research Group that has emerged as a staunch critic of Boris Johnson’s net-zero plans.

Net Zero Scrutiny Group members include former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey; Robert Halfon, a former schools minister; and Tory peer Peter Lilley, who is a former trustee of the GWPF.

Craig Mackinlay and Steve Baker, the MPs leading the group, are regularly quoted on press releases from Net Zero Watch and have repeated some of its lines on the economic cost of net zero word-for-word.

In February, Harry Wilkinson, currently head of policy at Net Zero Watch, and Ruth Lea, a former GWPF trustee, began working for Mackinlay as parliamentary advisers. Wilkinson has previously tweeted that “The ‘climate crisis’ is a religious belief, nothing to do with science.”

The GWPF shares its Tufton Street address with a number of anonymously funded think tanks who have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to climate change mitigation policies.

Earlier this year, Nigel Farage announced he was forming a new campaign for a referendum on net zero.

Farage’s financial backers include the private equity billionaire Jeremy Hosking who openDemocracy recently revealed has huge financial interests in fossil fuels.

The GWPF disputed that the Sarah Scaife Foundation has an interest in oil companies, telling openDemocracy: “The wealth that ultimately created the Scaife Foundation was created at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. It would be ludicrous to suggest that three generations on, it represents an oil company interest.”

Steve Baker MP said: "I understand the GWPF has already given a response to these allegations, which appear to be ridiculous.

It is an extraordinary fact that the same newspapers and commentators who would usually be the first to protest any kind of poverty are wasting the public's time with these attempts to distract from the real issues at hand. It would be better if the political world focused their attention on how our current energy strategy has driven up energy prices and contributed to the terrible cost-of-living crisis that so many are experiencing.”

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om fossil fuels to their supporters. Following DeSmog’s story earlier this week about former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott joining the Global Warming Policy Foundation, The Guardian reports that Greenpeace and others are now urging the government to sack Abbott as an advisor on its board of trade.

Ex Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has joined the UK’s main climate denial group saying: “we need more science”.

Abbott announced he was “pleased” to join the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which had “consistently injected a note of realism into the climate debate”.

“All of us want to save the only planet we have but this should not be by means which impoverish poorer people in richer countries and hold poorer countries back,” he said in a GWPF press release today.

“We need more genuine science and less groupthink in this debate – that’s where the GWPF has been a commendably consistent if lonely voice.”

The GWPF, which was founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, is known for consistently spreading climate disinformation and undermining net zero policies designed to tackle carbon emissions. The organisation is currently facing down a complaint to the UK Charity Commission, made by a cross-party group of MPs and the Good Law Project, who say the GWPF is not a charity, but rather a political lobbying group.

Abbott, who was appointed as a trade adviser to the UK during Liz Truss’s term as secretary of state, has been a supporter of the GWPF since at least 2017, when he gave a speech to the organisation in which he said climate change was “probably doing good”.

As prime minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015, Abbott’s centre-right Liberal Party was widely seen as hostile to climate policy.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, told DeSmog Abbott would “find himself at home” at the GWPF.

“Tony Abbott’s government ignored the science of climate change and remained focused on a backward-looking agenda for the Australian power system and economy. He will no doubt find himself at home with lots of other blokes at the Global Warming Policy Foundation who have a backward-looking agenda for the UK’s economy,” Ward said.

Abbott will sit on the board alongside two other recent additions: Lord David Frost, former minister of state, and Michael John Cole, a businessman who claims there is “no causal link” between human-made carbon emissions and global warming.

Jerome Booth, the GWPF chairman, said the appointment brought “a global perspective and policy insight at the very highest level” and would “further assist our objectives and help our efforts to foster a culture of debate, respect and scrutiny in policy areas that are currently dominated by intolerance, high emotions, moral reasoning and confusion”.

DeSmog has approached the GWPF and Tony Abbott for comment.

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UK’s most prominent climate science denial group has a new feather in its mortarboard. The Global Warming Policy Foundation can now count an Oxford University professor among its trustees.

Peter Edwards, a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the university who researches technology for fossil fuel decarbonisation, told DeSmog he was drawn to the thinktank’s stance on “open debate” and its claim to embrace scientists who hold a “broad range of views”.

That is certainly one way of describing the thinktank founded by climate change denier Nigel Lawson. The organisation, which launched in 2009, describes the science of global warming as “contested” and was formed to combat “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change.

The association with the GWPF is clearly not a good look for one of the world’s top universities. Last year it announced it would divest from fossil fuel companies, but a recent report revealed it had received more than £11 million from oil, gas and petrochemical companies since 2015.

These ties appear deeply entrenched. Edwards is co-founder of a centre that conducts research on behalf of the fossil fuel industry and was recently highlighted in a report by students detailing the university’s ties to the sector.

It does make one raise an eyebrow at the GWPF’s ongoing claim to have “complete independence” from the energy industry.

Campaigners with the Oxford University Climate Justice Campaign said they were “saddened to see Oxford academics helping to undermine legitimate scientific research and enable the further ecological destruction brought about by the fossil fuel industry”.

It seems not all its dons have got the memo.

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The Global Warming Policy Forum is a London-based think tank which conducts campaigns and activities which do not fall squarely within the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s remit as an educational charity.

This arrangement reflects those used by other organisations with dual structures, such as Amnesty International UK and Greenpeace UK.

In recent years, the GWPF’s influence has grown rapidly, among both UK and international policy makers and the news media and is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading think tanks on global warming policy issues.

The Forum is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Key campaigning issues

For balanced science & policy research

Climate science and climate policies are faced by rising doubt and criticism. There is growing concern about the integrity of climate scientists and the maltreatment of sceptical researchers. The Forum will be campaigning for more balanced and more transparent assessments of climate science and policy research.

For open & sceptical science

Climate alarmism suffers from a manifest lack of scientific scrutiny. Instead of carefully assessing the quality and reliability of climate data, many climate scientists cherry-pick numbers and interpretations that seem to confirm their alarmist conviction. Reliable and trustworthy science requires a sober and detached consideration of all relevant evidence. The Forum will campaign for an open scientific debate which allows for all reasonable arguments and criticism to be voiced and published.

Against bias and alarm

The coverage of climate change in the news media has been strongly biased in favour of alarm. For far too long, scientific organisations and the mainstream media have failed to give appropriate space to authoritative critics of climate alarmism. The Forum will campaign for more objective media reporting.

For economic scrutiny & realism

European and other governments have burdened their countries with unilateral and hugely expensive climate and green energy targets. As a direct result, energy prices and fuel poverty are rising in many countries, making them poorer and less competitive. Rejecting economically damaging climate and energy policies, the Forum will be campaigning for cost-effective alternatives that will help to make our societies more resilient and more competitive.

Against green unilateralism

The inability of the international community to agree legally binding CO2 reduction targets shows that unilateral climate policies have failed. The Forum will be campaigning for the development of alternative approaches that are politically realistic and economically feasible.

Funding

The Global Warming Policy Forum will be funded by private donations. In order to make clear their complete independence, neither the Foundation nor the Forum accept gifts from either energy companies or anyone with a significant interest in an energy company.

The Global Warming Policy Forum Team

Board Members

Lord Lawson (Chairman) – Edward Atkin CBE — Neil Record

Director: Dr Benny Peiser

Science Editor: Dr David Whitehouse

Energy Editor: Dr John Constable

Researcher: Harry Wilkinson

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Attorney Generals: The Climate Change-Gang

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The Obama administration lawlessly rewards its supporters and punishes its enemies.

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product.

Some of our states have forgotten this founding principle and are acting less like Jefferson and Adams and more like George III. A group of Democratic attorneys general has announced it intends to criminally investigate oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming. Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda. Pretended offenses, indeed.

We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime. The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.

The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken, and the representatives of the American people had no opportunity to object or offer their own suggestions. The checks and balances built into our system of government were simply ignored as inconvenient impediments to the president’s agenda.

But in our states, we believe in and govern with respect for the rule of law, rather than by ambition to use the power of our governments to stifle political opponents. That is why we are part of a very different kind of coalition, a coalition of 29 states seeking to vindicate the rule of law by challenging the legality of the Clean Power Plan in our courts. The 29 states and state attorneys general who are part of this effort respect our proper role, which is neither to pick winners and losers in the energy sector nor to silence those with whom we disagree. Rather, our job is to hold the EPA accountable to the laws that created it and to fulfill our statutory duties to ensure that consumers in our states have access to reliable, affordable energy. We will continue to pursue those goals and to present our arguments in the courts and in the public square, treating our opponents with the respect they deserve.

It’s unfortunate that this respect is not always returned. In their press conference, the group of state attorneys general called themselves an “unprecedented coalition.” On this point, they are correct. Rarely in our nation’s history has the police power of the state been so eagerly used to intimidate citizens into silence. But even more troubling are internal e-mails and other documents that indicate that this coercion was orchestrated not by the attorneys general themselves, but by green-energy advocacy groups using these officials as puppets to further their extreme agendas. This should frighten us all. Outside groups should not be able to use the power of the government as a sword to go after their political opponents.

We do not doubt the sincerity of the beliefs of our fellow attorneys general about climate change and the role human activity plays in it. But we call upon them to press those beliefs through debate, not through governmental intimidation of those who disagree with them. Few things could be more un-American.

— Scott Pruitt is the attorney general of Oklahoma. Luther Strange is the attorney general of Alabama.

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