Allison Pearson

Background

Judith Allison Pearson (née Lobbett) is a Telegraph chief interviewer and columnist,¹ host of The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast,² and regular guest on GB News.³ Since May 2023, she has also served as a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), one of the UK’s principal climate science denial groups.⁴

Since at least 2019, Pearson has frequently shared positions denying or minimising climate change in her columns⁵ and podcast episodes,⁶ on her X account,⁷ and in GB News appearances.⁸

Pearson has argued that “the Climate Change Act should be repealed”,⁹ and that net zero is “unaffordable, unachievable, in blatant defiance of any rational scientific analysis or project management”.¹⁰

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pearson was accused of spreading disputed claims about the virus.¹¹ Pearson expressed support for Brexit,¹² has written that Britons should “stop being scared of Islamophobia” and “start being scared of Anglophobia”,¹³ and has also stated that “trans ideology” is “evil”.¹⁴

Pearson, who grew up in Carmarthenshire in South Wales, and previously worked at the Daily Mail, Independent, Evening Standard, BBC Radio 4, Channel 4, and the Financial Times. She is also the author of romance novels.¹⁵

Other current and former GWPF members who have contributed to The Telegraph, which has a history of anti-climate coverage,¹⁶ include Conservative peers David Frost, Matt Ridley, Peter Lilley, Charles Moore, and former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.¹⁷

The GWPF is a member of the Tufton Street network – an interconnected hub of right-wing think tanks and pressure groups that lobby against state spending, including in the realm of climate action. The GWPF has criticised the policies adopted by governments to address climate change, and denied the science underpinning these policies.¹⁸

The GWPF has expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”.¹⁹

Stance on climate change

Science denial:

In her work at The Telegraph, Pearson has sown doubt about climate science, arguing in March 2024 that climate denial scientists are being “silenced” when their “findings don’t fit the climate narrative”.²⁰ On a post on social media platform X in January 2024, she suggested that the independent Climate Change Committee is “either stupid or corrupt”,²¹ and in a column in September 2023 called for the Climate Change Act of 2008 to be repealed.²²

Net zero:

On the UK government’s 2050 net zero emissions target, she argued in a May 2023 blog post published by GWPF that it “threatens to have massive downsides”,²³ adding that “while the pursuit of a cleaner, greener world is entirely admirable, our country cannot afford another vast act of self-harm. We desperately need the open, rational debate which the GWPF encourages.”

Energy security:

Pearson argued in a May 2023 column that the Labour government’s plans to stop future North Sea drilling would be “economic suicide” and threaten “energy security”.²⁴ She argued that stopping drilling in the North Sea would mean Britons would have to “sit in the freezing cold and dark because we’ve had a week of the wrong kind of wind and our last coal-fired power station was destroyed in a fit of net zero zealotry so there’s no back-up to create electricity”.

Key quotes

April 30, 2025

After a massive, sudden power outage blanketed Spain and Portugal on 28 April, causing blackouts across both countries,²⁵Pearson wrote a Telegraph column claiming the situation was caused by the “follies of net zero”, and that it proved that “renewables don’t replace reliables”.²⁶

She said:

“The inescapable truth is that intermittent, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar can never compete on level terms with hydrocarbon fuels. Renewable energy is naturally unreliable”.

In the days after the outage, experts told Politico the cause of the outage was not related to renewable energy infrastructure in the countries.²⁷

March 19, 2025

Responding to Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch’s announcement in March 2025 that she would scrap the UK’s 2050 net zero target if she entered government,²⁸ Pearson applauded her for “having the guts to stand up to the green zealots in her own party”.²⁹

February 26, 2025

In a comment article in The Telegraph, Pearson claimed that the UK’s high energy prices had been caused by “hidden green subsidies” and the Labour government’s “clean energy mission”,³⁰ despite evidence that gas prices are the cause of high energy costs in the UK.³¹

September 28, 2024

After the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero posted a video on X about installing domestic heat pumps, Pearson reposted a criticism of the video by climate denialist Matt Ridley, writing herself: “During Covid, ignorant politicians pushed blatant scientific absurdities onto a frightened population. They’re at it again with net zero. Unaffordable, unachievable, in blatant defiance of any rational scientific analysis or project management”.³²

October 1, 2024

In a column for The Telegraph, Pearson imagined that a lithium battery fire had broken out at a solar farm in East Anglia due to an explosion,³³ and used the hypothetical scenario to argue Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband’s support for solar farm development is “endangering the UK”.

June 17, 2024

Pearson reposted a Net Zero Watch video of Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice on X claiming: “We reckon that if you scrap Net Zero, then the saving to the taxpayer, every year, for the next 25 years, would be in the order of £30 billion per year”.³⁴

She commented:

“Every word Richard Tice is saying is what the Government didn’t tell you. Green taxes are secretly slapped on your energy bills. You subsidize renewables firms owned by extremely rich people. Huge costs for your family will be imposed in the attempt (doomed) to achieve net zero”.

March 14, 2024

January 21, 2024

Reposting a Telegraph article on X titled “Climate chiefs admitted net zero plan based on insufficient data, leading physicist says”,³⁶ Pearson repeated some of the article’s claims, including the claim that “the Climate Change Committee [CCC] relied on just one year’s weather data when deciding whether we could rely on wind and solar power by 2050”.³⁷ She concluded: “Two possibilities: they [the CCC] are either stupid or corrupt”.

January 19, 2024

After the announcement that Port Talbot steelworks would be closing its blast furnaces, Pearson wrote in The Telegraph that the works had been “sacrificed on the altar of net zero”, and argued that net zero is an “absurd and misanthropic creed which calls British workers losing their jobs ‘progress’ while their carbon will now be emitted in India and China”.³⁸

December 12, 2023

In a piece in The Telegraph written during the COP28 climate summit titled “It is morally wrong to blindly adhere to net zero – we must abandon it before it’s too late”,³⁹ Pearson defended the climate positions of controversial COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber, who was appointed despite being CEO of the UAE’s national oil company.⁴⁰

Pearson agreed with Al Jaber when he challenged UN special envoy for climate change Mary Robinson to “show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves”. She then concluded that: “We are certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist in trying to reach that goal by 2050”.

September 21, 2023

In a Telegraph comment article, Pearson stated that “the Climate Change Act should be repealed”, and suggested that wildfires in Spain were caused by a “local Spanish arsonist” rather than climate change.⁴¹

May 31, 2023

Writing in The Telegraph, Pearson argued that the Labour government’s plans to stop future North Sea drilling would be “economic suicide” and threaten “energy security”.⁴² She argued that stopping drilling in the North Sea will mean Britons will have to “sit in the freezing cold and dark because we’ve had a week of the wrong kind of wind and our last coal-fired power station was destroyed in a fit of net zero zealotry so there’s no back-up to create electricity”.

May 2, 2023

In a statement released by the GWPF to announce her directorship,⁴³ Pearson made a statement that contained a number of misleading claims about green technologies and the relative costs of pursuing net zero.

She said:

“I have grown increasingly concerned that our country has adopted a legally binding Net Zero 2050 target which threatens to have massive downsides for ordinary Britons, causing hardships of which the majority of people are wholly unaware. This policy has received remarkably little scrutiny yet its success is dependent on the rapid development of technologies which ae either erratic, unproven or non-existent.”

Pearson added that:

“While the pursuit of a cleaner, greener world is entirely admirable, our country cannot afford another vast act of self-harm. We desperately need the open, rational debate which the GWPF encourages.”

Her statement played on a common falsehood that wind and solar power are unreliable and costly. In winter 2022, renewables provided more UK electricity than gas power stations,⁴⁴ with 27 percent of UK electricity generated by wind.⁴⁵ In 2021, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reported that two-thirds of newly installed renewable power in G20 countries had lower costs than the cheapest fossil fuel-fired option.⁴⁶

April 18, 2023

After a Just Stop Oil activist disrupted a snooker championship in Sheffield, Pearson took to The Telegraph to attack environmental activists from Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion as “pampered”.⁴⁷ She argued that “to force the Government to stop giving out permits for new oil and gas wells” is making the UK “more dependent on erratic renewables”, and that green policies would cause “life as we know it” to “[return] to the pre-industrial age”.

November 8, 2022

In a Telegraph column titled “We don’t owe developing countries ‘climate reparations’ – they owe us”, Pearson said that “demanding compensation for everything the United Kingdom has contributed to the world would be absurd. Equally absurd is committing billions we simply don’t have to settle historic ‘loss and damage’ claims”.⁴⁸

August 30, 2022

Following Boris Johnson’s resignation as prime minister, Pearson said that he should “never be forgiven for sacrificing Britain to his net zero fantasy”.⁴⁹

February 23, 2022

In her Telegraph column, Pearson criticised wind power’s “downside”, arguing that “our entire nation’s future electricity supply depends on the Goldilocks theory – not too windy, not too still, just right”.⁵⁰

October 9, 2019

Responding to Extinction Rebellion protests in London, Pearson said that she was “ready to hear that I should shop locally, use public transport and consume fewer cows”.⁵¹

Key actions

September 20, 2024

Pearson was scheduled to speak at a private event held by the Together Declaration, which launched a campaign to scrap the UK’s net zero emissions targets in 2023, but cancelled at the last minute due to illness.⁵²

December 7, 2023

On The Telegraph’s ‘Planet Normal’ podcast, Pearson spoke to climate denialist scientist and GWPF trustee Michael Kelly, who argued that the net zero transition “violates all the laws of engineering”.⁵³

May 2, 2023

Pearson joined the GWPF’s board of trustees, saying that she was “delighted” to join the group and claiming it does “a vital job of scrutinising a potentially ruinous groupthink”.⁵⁴“Allison Pearson joins the GWPF,” Global Warming Policy Foundation, May 2, 2023. Archived March 28, 2025. Archive URL: https://archive.is/wip/MbyZc⁵⁵

September 1, 2022

On ‘Planet Normal’, in an episode that also featured climate denial politician Howard Cox, Pearson discussed the argument that “Brits who cannot afford stratospheric energy bills are being ‘sacrificed on the altar of the green religion’ due to the fixation on net zero.”⁵⁶