DeSmog’s analysis of Westminster’s influential Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) found that two-thirds of its supporters are no longer represented in Parliament following the July 4 general election.

Twenty-four of the 37 MPs supportive of the backbench grouping were voted out – a loss of 65% of its backers. Outgoing supporters include former energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, former NZSG co-chair Steve Baker and Net Zero Watch board member Andrea Jenkyns.

A further five stood down or resigned before the election, among them veteran climate denier John Redwood.

The group’s former chair Craig Mackinlay, who contracted sepsis in September, has been appointed to the House of Lords by outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak. Mackinlay has said he would use this platform to campaign for “sensible net zero.”

The NZSG has actively campaigned against climate action since it was formed in 2021. The group’s joint letters to the Telegraph made front-page news, as supporters urged the government to scrap “environmental levies on domestic energy,” “expand North Sea exploration” for oil and gas, and support “shale gas extraction” by lifting the ban on fracking.

In addition to the NZSG grouping, former prime minister Liz Truss, who has become an outspoken critic of net-zero since leaving Downing Street in 2022, was voted out on Thursday.

Campaigners have welcomed the departure of MPs opposed to climate action. “This landslide election victory has buried Sunak’s anti-green agenda once and for all, along with many of its principle architects,” Will McCallum, co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, told DeSmog.

“Most of the former MPs who sought to sow division and disinformation about net zero have lost at the ballot box.”

Meanwhile, 14 anti-net-zero MPs were re-elected, including Labour MP Graham Stringer, who is on the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the U.K.’s main climate denial group, and Lee Anderson, who defected from the Tories to Reform UK earlier this year.

Four new Reform MPs were also elected, including party leader Nigel Farage and chairman Richard Tice, both of whom have a record of climate science denial.

Despite this, campaigners are still positive. McCallum added that “the biggest winners [in the election] – Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party – contested this election on strong green policies that will slash emissions, lower bills, and deliver hundreds of thousands of new jobs.”

“There is and has long been a public consensus on climate action in this country,” he said, and “the new government should feel empowered to be bold.”

Here are some of the most prominent critics of net-zero who have lost their seats:

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lost his North East Somerset seat by more than 6,000 votes to Labour’s Dan Norris, was secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy under Liz Truss between September and October 2022.

While in office he reportedly argued for lifting the ban on fracking for shale gas and told the head of the U.A.E.’s state investment company, in a private meeting revealed by DeSmog, that people need to “stop demonising oil and gas.”

Since January 2023, Rees-Mogg has presented his own show on GB News, which regularly broadcasts climate science denial. Rees-Mogg has been a harsh critic of the government’s net-zero policies, stating that “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions.”

Steve Baker

Steve Baker has led the charge against climate policies in Parliament. Baker was a trustee of the U.K.’s main climate denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), from May 2021 to September 2022, when he stepped down to serve as Northern Ireland minister. He was co-chair of the NZSG, which operated as the GWPF’s caucus in Parliament.

At a 2021 Conservative Party conference event, Baker said that much climate science is “contestable” and “sometimes propagandised” while claiming that some UN climate scenarios were “implausible.”

In February 2022, Baker received £5,000, and a further £10,000 in February 2023, from Neil Record, chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the GWPF.

On Thursday, Baker lost his Wycombe seat to Labour’s Emma Reynolds by more than 4,000 votes.

Dame Andrea Jenkyns 

Andrea Jenkyns, who lost her seat of Leeds and South West Morley by more than 7,000 votes to Labour’s Mark Sewards, sits on the board of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the GWPF, the U.K.’s main climate science denial group.

In March 2023, Jenkyns told Parliament: “Personally, net zero, I think we need to ditch these targets, especially at the moment, and use whatever resources we’ve got under our feet.” She has described herself on Twitter as holding “no-to-net-zero views.”

Miriam Cates

Miriam Cates lost her Penistone and Stocksbridge seat by more than 9,000 votes to Labour’s Marie Tidball in Thursday’s general election.

Cates was tipped as a rising star of the Conservative party, a “darling” of the Tory right. She is the co-chair of the New Conservatives, a socially conservative faction of the Tory party which received £50,000 in January from GB News investors the Legatum Group.

Cates also sits on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a right-wing group fronted by prominent climate denier Jordan Peterson.

Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in London last year, Cates suggested that “epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion” are being caused by teaching children that “humanity is killing the Earth.”

Philip Davies

Philip Davies, who lost his Shipley seat by more than 8,000 votes to Labour’s Anna Dixon, has a long record of opposing climate policies. Davies was one of only five MPs to vote against the U.K.’s Climate Change Act in 2008.

He currently works as a presenter for GB News, as does his wife and fellow Conservative politician Esther McVey, who was re-elected on Thursday.

Liz Truss

A number of net-zero-skeptic MPs existed outside the NZSG grouping, among them the former prime minister Liz Truss, who resigned in October 2022 after just 49 days in the job. As well as appointing Rees-Mogg energy secretary, Truss overturned the U.K.’s moratorium on fracking for shale gas – a key demand from the Net Zero Scrutiny Group.

Since leaving Downing Street – and in between giving paid speeches to U.S. anti-climate groups like CPAC and the Heritage Foundation – Truss has become an open opponent of net-zero policies.

In her 2024 book Ten Years to Save the West, Truss called for the independent Climate Change Committee to be abolished and attacked the UN COP process, which coordinates international action on climate change. Truss also claimed that while in cabinet she argued against the U.K. hosting the COP26 climate summit.

On Thursday, Truss lost her South West Norfolk seat by 630 votes to Labour’s Terry Jermy.

‘Watching Closely’

“It’s obviously fantastic news that 30 Tory MPs who’ve lobbied against climate policies are no longer in Parliament,” said Jessica Townsend, founder of the MP Watch campaign group, which used DeSmog research in a recent event on “top ten climate denial MPs.”

Townsend noted that seven of the campaign’s list have won seats, including Reform’s Farage and GWPF director Graham Stringer.

“MP Watch will be watching these MPs closely in coming months, as well as the influence fossil fuel companies and their think tanks may have on Labour in Westminster now that the power base has shifted,” she added.

This article by DeSmog is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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In 2006, David Cameron, then leader of the Conservative Opposition, travelled to the Arctic to be photographed “hugging a husky.” The image was carried in every U.K. newspaper and was part of the party’s attempt to “detoxify” after years in opposition. There was a growing recognition that a serious party needed to be seen to care about tackling environmental problems, and shortly after Cameron promised voters he would lead the country’s “greenest ever” government.

Seven years later, as prime minister, Cameron was overheard demanding that his ministers “cut the green crap.” The United Kingdom had hit a turbulent economic patch, and despite years of telling the world that it was in the green transition that jobs, growth and opportunities were to be found (a claim borne out since by experience), Cameron had abandoned ship at the first bump.

Although his record in office on the environment wasn’t exactly glowing, his apparent U-turn dashed in an instant the credibility the Conservative Party had steadily rebuilt after years of neglect, and it took years of heavy lifting to regain it. 

Theresa May’s stint was brief, but cross-party pressure did result in a world first: a legal commitment to achieving net-zero emissions in the U.K. by 2050. 

It was Boris Johnson, whose 2019 manifesto placed “climate leadership” as a top international priority, who turned the U.K. into a recognized world leader on climate and the environment. As his environment minister, I was put in a position where I could do more for the environment than I thought possible in a lifetime.

At the COP26 climate summit, hosted by the U.K. in 2021, we secured commitments from world leaders that if delivered would turn the tide on deforestation. We played a defining role in securing agreement for a new global treaty on plastic pollution, and at the biodiversity summit in Montreal, U.K. leadership led directly to a new global agreement to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by the end of this decade. With our international aid, we committed to doubling nature and climate finance spending to £11.6 billion over five years.

Domestically, the government introduced perhaps the toughest environmental legislation in the developed world, not least through the landmark Environment Act, which I had the privilege of taking through Parliament. We saw stronger laws on pollution, more funding for nature, more protected areas, and a radical overhaul of farming subsidies to protect the environment. The U.K. remains one of the only countries in the world with legal targets to reverse biodiversity loss. 

But in the months since Johnson left office, all of this has changed. The shift began after a close by-election result in the seat of Uxbridge, where, against the odds, the Conservatives managed to win. This was credited to the party having taken a stand against a London-wide “ultra low emissions zone,” which involved new costs for drivers of polluting vehicles. 

Green has been a thread that runs through Conservative history.

Extrapolating from the result, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calculated that if voters oppose one environmental policy, there might be political mileage in dropping the others. So in his own version of Cameron’s “cut the green crap” moment, Sunak promised to “max out” the remaining North Sea oil fields. His ministers, meanwhile, were sent out on the airwaves to denounce “eco fanatics” and the opposition’s “dangerous plans.”

It was the end of nearly two decades of broad consensus on the need for action (albeit with disagreements over the best ways to deliver it). Sunak had chosen as his election strategy to make the environment into a U.S.-style political wedge issue.

As it happens, the party went on to lose two previously safe seats just a short while later and currently languishes at record lows in the polls. So the strategy hasn’t worked. But the question is why? Who was Sunak trying to appeal to?

The answer offered by the left is that he was throwing “red meat” to right wingers, and that is undoubtedly what he thought he was doing. But the evidence suggests both he and the left have miscalculated. 

Sunak was appealing to a certain type of conservative: people convinced the environmental agenda is a Trojan horse for socialism and who therefore latch onto any available theory that debunks any element of climate science. They, like some climate campaigners too, have reduced the “environment” down to mere carbon, and they do not dwell on the damage being done to natural systems like forests that we depend on. 

These conservatives exist, of course, but they are by no means the majority – at least in the U.K., where the Conservative Environment Network boasts roughly 150 active members of Parliament.

Nor are they representative. Indeed, no matter how the question is phrased, the answers in every poll are the same: people want more nature and climate leadership. In one recent study, for example, 77% of 2019 Conservative voters in the U.K. agreed that “improving nature in your local area” is very or somewhat important – more than in any other group.

The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same.

 

– Margaret Thatcher in 1988

And this isn’t a new phenomenon. Green has been a thread that runs through Conservative history. It was Conservative administrations that introduced the Clean Air Act (1956), the Landfill Tax (1996), the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981). Conservatives introduced the first disposable plastic levies (2021), legally binding biodiversity recovery targets (2021), a net-zero target (2019) and the most recent Environment Act (2021). Further back, it was Robert Peel who passed the Mines Act and Factory Act (1842/44) and Benjamin Disraeli who passed the Public Health Act (1875).

When today’s conservatives in the U.K., U.S. and Canada dismiss the environment as “wokery,” it is worth considering that it was Margaret Thatcher who not only intervened to strengthen the Montreal Protocol to limit ozone-depleting chemicals; she was also the first leader of a developed nation to sound the alarm on climate. She told her party in 1988: “The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy – with a full repairing lease. This government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full.”

It was President Theodore Roosevelt who used executive orders to establish 150 million acres of protected land in the U.S. “The time has come,” he said, “to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone . . . when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”

It wasn’t despite being conservatives that Thatcher and Roosevelt took this approach; it was because they were conservatives. They understood that stewardship, looking out for future generations, living within natural limits, valuing critical natural systems, making the polluter pay – these are core conservative values.

Edmund Burke, often described as the father of conservative philosophy, wrote, “Society is a contract . . . a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The late conservative intellectual Roger Scruton added that if environmental damage is treated as a mere “externality,” unpayable costs are inevitably heaped upon future generations.

Somewhere along the line, modern-day conservatives confused problems with solutions. They dislike the approach of the left to problem-solving, but rather than develop alternatives, they have chosen simply to ignore the problem. 

But the challenges we face today cannot simply be wished away. Whatever the arguments over the precise trajectory of our changing climate, there is no disputing the near-suicidal levels of ecosystem and biodiversity loss we are witnessing today. There is no technological substitute for the great biomes like the Amazon or Congo, which regulate the world’s climate and produce the rainfall that makes agriculture possible. 

We face our greatest challenge, and there’s nothing conservative about turning our backs to it. A conservative who is not also an environmentalist is, in fact, no conservative at all.

Zac Goldsmith was the U.K. minister for the international environment, climate, forests, ocean under Boris Johnson.

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The U.K. has a new prime minister, and, even though she once served as environment minister, questions are swirling about how committed Liz Truss and her government are to tackling climate change. 

Since taking office September 6, she has pledged to expand oil and gas production from the North Sea and ended a ban on fracking, while during her campaign, she said she would change rules so that farmers could not put solar panels on their fields. 

Meanwhile, some of her ministerial appointments have also sparked alarm. This included making Jacob Rees-Mogg, who looks like a top-hat wearing Victorian factory owner and has many of the same attitudes, secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, and therefore responsible for energy policy. He has cast doubt on the urgency of the climate crisis in the past and is an enthusiastic advocate of both fracking and more North Sea development. 

Tom Burke, co-founder of the environmental think tank E3G, told The Guardian that Rees-Mogg “has showed no sign of understanding the complexity or opportunity of net zero.” Burke added that “the single most important thing to do in energy policy now is to bring demand down. I have no confidence that he will take this forward.” 

Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace U.K., added that “Rees-Mogg is the last person who should be in charge of the energy brief, at the worst possible moment.” She blamed him for pushing former prime minister David Cameron to cut funding for energy-efficiency programs, wind and solar, a move that has added £150 to every energy bill as gas prices have soared. 

During the Tory leadership campaign, both Kemi Badenoch, the new trade secretary, and Suella Braverman, home secretary, said that the U.K.’s net-zero target – which is legally binding – should be suspended. 

There are some encouraging signs, though: the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, a former energy minister and then business secretary, was heavily involved in the rollout of the U.K.’s Net Zero Strategy and has frequently been a strong advocate for the strategic importance of the energy transition. He has spoken out recently against fracking in the U.K., arguing that it “won’t materially affect the wholesale market price.” 

He was also an advocate for the previous government to invest more in energy efficiency and to end the ban on onshore wind, clashing with other members of the Cabinet and the Treasury in the process. He runs the Treasury now, so that could herald big changes on energy efficiency, at least. In addition, he is in a position to limit the damage Rees-Mogg can do because he holds the purse strings. 

Rees-Mogg is the last person who should be in charge of the energy brief, at the worst possible moment.

-Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace U.K.

While there was no mention of energy efficiency in new measures to tackle one of Europe’s most serious energy-price crises that Truss announced in Parliament on Thursday, the government’s Climate Change Committee and National Infrastructure Commission jointly wrote to the PM, calling on her to “develop credible policies for energy efficiency in buildings. Investing in efficiency now will provide meaningful reductions in the amount of energy wasted over the long-term and support the necessary transition to low-carbon heat.”  

Simon Clarke, the new “levelling up” secretary, is also a strong advocate for net-zero, while Graham Stuart, who has long supported bolder climate action, will be climate minister and is expected to provide a strong counterpoint to his boss, Rees-Mogg.  

There is no doubt that the new Cabinet is divided on the urgency of tackling climate change, but there are powerful voices in favour of action. And the Conservative leadership campaign – during which climate advocates were able to get all the candidates to commit to the U.K.’s net-zero target – showed that the climate action lobby is now a significant political force within the Tory party. If necessary, it can join forces with opposition MPs to thwart poor policies.  

Perhaps that’s why Truss asked Chris Skidmore, former energy and climate minister and one of the biggest Tory supporters of climate action, to conduct a review into meeting the U.K.’s net-zero commitments in the most economically efficient way.  

Given the simple economic and political fundamentals – gas in Europe is nine times more expensive than renewable energy at the moment, and renewable projects can be developed in months (if the permitting process is sorted out), while fracking and the North Sea will take years to come online – this report, to be completed before Christmas, could help build support for climate action in the party. 

Fracking has just 17% support in the U.K. compared to 76% for renewable energy projects, and any proposals would be subject to widespread protests. 

Most importantly, Truss does not command the overwhelming support of her party in Parliament. A majority of her MPs wanted someone else as leader, raising questions about the extent to which she will be able to get any policies through Parliament, including anti-climate ones.  

Her party is a long way behind in the polls. Her ability to command a majority for contentious anti-climate policies is unproven at best. And don’t underestimate the impact of the new king: Charles III’s views on climate change are well-known and harder now than ever to ignore, even if he is now limited in what he can say in public. In the end, her ability to impose climate-unfriendly actions may be severely constrained. And in the absence of a global event on home turf such as last year’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, it seems unlikely she will be as forceful an advocate for climate action globally as her predecessor was.  

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