I am horrified to learn that our MP, Kemi Badenoch, has received £10,000 from the chair of climate science denial group, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, towards her campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party.
GWPF’s director, Benny Peiser, says that it is ‘extraordinary anyone should think there is a climate crisis’. His group believes that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution and, with incredible naivety, regards it as ‘a benefit to the planet’.
Its Net Zero Watch arm has called for rapid new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be ‘wound down completely’. In 2022 Kemi Badenoch herself criticised the UK’s climate targets, calling them ‘arbitrary’ and said that she would be in favour of delaying the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050.
Only last week in his super yacht, entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his family and friends drowned in a violent storm caused by massively overheated seas; the week before, Athens was threatened by colossal field fires while around the world heatwaves have broken all known records. Yet Kemi, in line with her GWPF sponsor, bears responsibility for the Conservative policies of mining coal in Cumbria, issuing licences to ‘max out’ on North Sea oil, postpone the phasing out of petrol and diesel cars and water down our net zero commitments.
She clearly has no sense of realism. The realism with which we cannot negotiate: the realism of violent storms, wildfires, droughts, floods, harvest failures, death by heat exhaustion and increasingly extreme weather events.
For Kemi to accept money from a group that is in denial about the causes of all these events, that disregards peer-reviewed science, the findings of the IPCC and our own government’s Climate Change Committee, is reckless in the extreme. She does not have the right to play fast and loose with our children’s future.