Four years after Boris Johnson’s Conservative government hosted the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the party has ditched its environmental credentials – declaring that it would scrap the UK’s net zero emissions targets and repeal the flagship Climate Change Act.

As DeSmog has reported previously, this dramatic change has coincided with the party coming under increasing pressure from anti-climate media outlets, lobby groups, and U.S. political interests.

But among the biggest factors has been the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which has led the charge against clean energy policies, calling for renewable power subsidies to be scrapped and for a renewed era of fossil fuel exploration. 

Following the Conservative Party’s annual conference earlier this month, the party’s climate agenda now reflects Reform’s, with little separating their two platforms.

To track exactly how this has happened, DeSmog has catalogued the climate policy announcements of the two parties – showing how the Tories have been stealing Farage’s homework since 2022.

The Policy Pipeline

At the Conservative Party’s annual conference in October, party leader Kemi Badenoch announced that a Tory government would repeal the Climate Change Act, the UK’s landmark climate law passed in 2008 and made legally binding in 2019 by her predecessor Theresa May.

The Act included establishing the target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, which climate scientists say would avert the most catastrophic climate impacts, such as mass displacement and poverty, and allow global temperatures to stabilise.

This was acknowledged by Boris Johnson during the 2021 COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

“The clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines,” he said, “with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster – quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and an abruptness that is entirely man made.”

However, over recent years the 2050 target – and the science behind it – has been fiercely attacked by a well-funded anti-climate ecosystem.

At the forefront of this campaign has been Reform UK and Nigel Farage, who in 2022 launched a campaign for a Brexit-style referendum on net zero, which his deputy Richard Tice pledged to scrap in 2021.

As Reform has gained in the polls – Farage’s party stands at 30 percent against the Conservative Party’s 15 percent – and against a media drumbeat of attacks on net zero, the Tories have abandoned their climate agenda.

In September 2022, during her short-lived tenure as prime minister, Liz Truss lifted the ban on fracking for shale gas. Her successor, Rishi Sunak, reversed the decision, but pursued a number of policies hostile to climate action.

In September 2023, he delayed the phaseout of gas boilers and petrol vehicles, and approved roughly 100 new oil and gas licences.

His government also adopted increasingly adversarial rhetoric in relation to net zero – pledging to “max out” the UK’s North Sea oil and gas reserves while claiming that the UK’s climate policies were “losing the consent of the British people”.

Badenoch became Tory leader in November 2024 after welcoming donations from Neil Record, the chair of the Net Zero Watch climate science denial campaign group, as well as from a director of the oil major Chevron. Soon after, she proceeded to hire advisors with a history of attacking net zero.

This February, after a policy retreat at Record’s Gloucestershire estate, Badenoch publicly shunned the UK’s 2050 net zero target, despite having championed it when she was a government minister.

In March, she declared that the 2050 target was “impossible” and that the Tories no longer support it. This was followed by a pledge to repeal the Climate Change Act announced at the Conservative Party conference in October.

Badenoch has doubled down on her party’s support for oil and gas, promising in August to maximise North Sea extraction. This was in keeping with Farage’s campaign, which echoes U.S. President Donald Trump’s slogan to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels.

At this year’s Tory conference, Shadow Energy Secretary Clare Coutinho said the Tories would remove carbon taxes on energy bills – mirroring Reform’s call for an end to “green levies” in its 2024 general election manifesto.

She also said the Conservatives would “scrap Ed Miliband’s rip-off wind farm subsidies”, a copy of Reform’s manifesto, which promised to “scrap renewable energy subsidies”. Farage’s party also vowed to block wind and solar projects during May’s local elections campaign.

Badenoch has yet to adopt Reform’s policies of lifting the ban on fracking or opening new coal power plants, but did not rule these out when asked by The Telegraph in March, saying the party was still working on its plans.

Reform’s Climate Denial

Behind Reform’s anti-climate campaign is a belief that climate change is not a problem, and is not caused by humans.

In February, Tice told Sky News: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change the climate. Given that it’s gone on for millions of years, it will go on for millions of years.” He has also claimed that “CO2 is not poison; it’s plant food”.

As DeSmog has reported, 92 percent of Reform’s donations between the 2019 and 2024 general elections came from climate science deniers, fossil fuel interests, or major polluters – a total of £2.3 million.

Farage has repeatedly blamed climate change on “sunspot activity” and “underwater volcanoes” – false claims that have long been debunked by experts. At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in February, he said it was “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant. 

In the year following his election to Parliament, Farage received £400,000 from GB News, an anti-climate broadcaster whose co-owner Paul Marshall (who also bankrolls ARC) had £1.8 billion invested in oil and gas via his hedge fund as of June 2023.

Reform’s mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, former Tory minister Andrea Jenkyns, said in an interview with Times Radio in July: “Do I believe that climate change exists? No.”

By contrast, in one of the few current areas of divergence between the Conservatives and Reform on climate, Kemi Badenoch has described herself as a “net zero sceptic” but “not a climate change sceptic”.

Even so, the Tories have received significant donations from climate science deniers. As revealed by DeSmog, the party has accepted at least £7.2 million from funders and directors of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, over the past two decades.