The Conservative Party has elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader, who describes herself as a “net zero sceptic” and has received funding from the head of a climate science denial campaign.

Badenoch was announced as the winner of the Tory leadership contest on Saturday, beating her rival Robert Jenrick by 56 percent to 44 percent.  

The former business and trade secretary campaigned for leader as a straight-talking conservative who would tackle the “woke” left. 

But as DeSmog has reported, Badenoch has also repeatedly suggested that the UK’s net zero targets would “bankrupt the country”, has boasted of standing up to “the green lobby” while in government, and has called Labour’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences “foolish”. 

Badenoch has also received money and office space from Neil Record, the chair of the climate denial group Net Zero Watch (NZW), and produced a leadership manifesto which attacked the “radical environmental policies” previously introduced by the Conservative Party.

Net Zero Sceptic

Making her pitch to Conservative MPs at the party’s annual conference on 2 October, Badenoch described herself as a “net zero sceptic” but “not a climate change sceptic”. 

Badenoch said in 2022 that the UK’s 2050 legally-binding target for achieving net zero emissions was “arbitrary” and last year suggested she would support delaying it. 

In her Conservative conference speech, Badenoch said that net zero is “making energy more expensive and hurting our economy”, a claim which the International Energy Agency, a leading authority on energy policy, says is false. 

Badenoch did not confirm in her speech that she would delay or scrap the UK’s net zero targets but said, “I did not become an MP to deliver an agenda set by Ed Miliband”, who currently serves as the secretary of state for energy security and net zero.

She has repeatedly said that she wants to reduce emissions but not in a way that would “bankrupt” the country.

The Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on its net zero policies, has estimated that the cost of achieving net zero will be less than one percent of UK GDP. 

The government independent spending watchdog – the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – has said that, “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.

Badenoch claimed during the Tory leadership campaign that, while serving as business secretary, she “had to work hard to push back against the green lobby”, and condemned Labour’s “foolish decision to ban new licences for North Sea oil production” as part of its “fanatical approach to net zero”.

As DeSmog revealed, during the leadership contest Badenoch published a 40-page manifesto which cited the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a U.S. group led by former advisors to Donald Trump, which has likened climate science to believing the earth is flat. 

Badenoch used evidence produced by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity to claim that net zero policies are only supported by high-earning graduates living in cities.

Badenoch’s document, titled ‘Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class’, attacked what it called “radical environmental politics” – such as the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars introduced by the previous Tory government – and praised fracking, the controversial method adopted in the U.S. to extract more oil and gas. 

Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, have said that without “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” limiting global heating to 1.5C is beyond reach.

Restricting global temperatures to this target, which was agreed as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, would prevent the worst and most irreversible impacts of climate change.

Climate Denial Ally

In August, DeSmog revealed that Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her leadership campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s principal climate science denial group. 

Bloomberg further revealed that Badenoch was running her leadership campaign out of Record’s London home.  

NZW has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”. 

Record – who is also lifetime president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a think tank that received funding from oil giant BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018 – in July wrote that achieving net zero by 2050 “will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive”. Record has donated to both the IEA and GWPF.

The GWPF has claimed that carbon dioxide has been mischaracterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. The group has been accused of spreading “daft conspiracy yarns” about net zero.