The Conservatives received a hefty sum from oil and gas investors and those with roles at anti-climate campaign groups during the period when the party rolled back a key climate commitment.

New records released today reveal that Kemi Badenoch’s party accepted £50,000 in January from Neil Record, the chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s foremost climate science denial group.

In March, Badenoch announced that the Conservatives would no longer be advocating for the UK to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 – the goal currently pursued by the government. In a speech hosted by an advertising group that works for the oil giant Shell, Badenoch suggested that we are “bankrupting ourselves” in the pursuit of the 2050 target.

While the UK’s oil and gas reserves are dwindling, the country’s green economy grew by 10 percent in 2024.

Badenoch said that the country should still seek to reduce its climate impact, but shouldn’t set a date for achieving net zero.

Record – who is also lifetime president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a pressure group that received funding from BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018 – has claimed that achieving net zero emissions 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 regularly contradicts basic climate science, suggesting that CO2 emissions are “not pollution”.

A month before her net zero announcement, Record paid for Badenoch, her family, and members of her shadow cabinet to have a week-long retreat in Gloucestershire. The Net Zero Watch chair is close to the Tory leader, having provided funding and office space to her 2024 leadership campaign.

Over the past two decades, the Conservative Party has accepted £7.2 million from senior figures at the GWPF, while Badenoch’s campaign also received funding from a director at the fossil fuel major Chevron.

The party accepted a further £117,600 in the first quarter of this year from Alasdair Locke, a longstanding Tory donor who made his fortune in the oil industry. Locke is currently the chair of the UK’s largest independent petrol station operator Motor Fuel Group, and the non-executive chair of Well-Safe solutions, a firm that decommissions oil and gas wells. He is the founder of Abbot Group, a major oil and gas services company in the North Sea.

Badenoch’s party also received £75,000 in March from IPGL, a family investment firm belonging to Tory peer Lord Michael Spencer. A billionaire financier and former Tory treasurer, Spencer has investments worth at least £100,000 in each of the oil and gas companies Deltic Energy and Pantheon Resources.

“Is it any wonder that Kemi Badenoch’s Tories are so vehemently against net zero? No sooner do they get a quarter of a million from fossil fuel companies, do they decide to ditch the net zero commitments that they were so evangelical about just a few years ago,” said Harmit Kambo, campaigns manager at Good Law Project. “Given the existential climate threats we face, the Tories’ capitulation to climate change deniers perhaps sets a new low for their policy-making integrity.”

The Conservatives, Neil Record, Alasdair Locke, and Michael Spencer were approached for comment.

Reform’s Missing Millions

The new records show that the Conservatives raised £3.3 million from donations during the first quarter, compared to £1.5 million raised by Nigel Farage’s rival right-wing party Reform UK.

Despite the party claiming that it had secured over a million in pledges from businesspeople at a fundraiser in January, more than a-third of funds raised by the party in the period were pledged by Farage’s deputy Richard Tice via his company Tisun Investments.

Reform campaigns to scrap the UK’s net zero commitment entirely. The party, which is attempting to raise money from oil and gas executives, supports new fossil fuel extraction and spreads doubt about the science of human-caused climate change.

Farage has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” that CO2 is considered to be a pollutant, despite admitting that he knows little about climate science, while Tice has claimed that “CO2 is not polluting; it’s plant food.” 

In reality, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate science body, has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, and has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.

Climate scientists working for the IPCC have also said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

As DeSmog previously revealed, Reform received £2.3 million from climate deniers, polluters and fossil fuel interests between the 2019 and 2024 general elections, equivalent to 92 percent of its funding during the period.

Reform has been approached for comment.

Additional research by Joey Grostern