Badenoch makes false claims in attack on Climate Change Act

By Bob Ward

Kemi Badenoch this week announced that the Conservative Party would repeal the Climate Change Act of 2008 if they win a majority at the next General Election, due by August 2029.

This announcement, made through an interview in The Spectator magazine, follows a similar statement in February that under her leadership the Conservatives would abandon the statutory target, contained in the emended Climate Change Act, requiring annual emissions of greenhouse gases from the United Kingdom to be reduced to ‘net zero’.

Ms Badenoch, the official Leader of Opposition, did not provide any analysis to support her new decision, and her announcement was accompanied by many false claims, both in the quotations attributed to her and the text of the article, as well as in accompanying coverage in The Daily Telegraph.

The article in The Spectator stated: “The Act mandates targets to hit net zero by 2050, which leads, Badenoch warns, to higher costs.” This assertion is not supported by the evidence. The most recent analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), published in July 2025, shows that for the ‘balanced pathway’ laid out by the Climate Change Committee in its recommendations for the Seventh Carbon Budget, the total net cost to the economy of reaching net zero emissions would be £116 billion between 2025 and 2050, an average of £4.46 billion per year – see Figure 1.

Figure 1. Estimates of the whole-economy costs and savings of the balanced pathway put forward by the UK Climate Change Committee in its advice for the Seventh Carbon Budget

Note: Energy supply includes both the Committee’s electricity and fuel supply sectors. The OBR has restated the investment and operating costs for carbon capture and storage from within the energy supply, industry and waste sectors to the removals sector. CB6 is the net cost estimated by the Committee for the Sixth Carbon Budget. CB7 is the net cost estimated by the Committee for the Seventh Carbon Budget.
Source: Fiscal risks and sustainability, Office for Budget Responsibility, July 2025

However, the analysis also shows that the projected savings from reduced fossil fuel costs increase steadily each year, and by 2041 would result in a net saving each year, reaching £38 billion by 2050. This means that by 2055 the total savings from net zero would be larger than the total costs, even without taking into account the benefits from avoided climate change impacts.

The OBR estimated that for a “below 3°C scenario”, climate change impacts would reduce UK GDP by a growing amount over the next 50 years, reaching an estimated 7.8 per cent lower than its “no climate change” baseline projection in 2073–74.

Hence it is clear that achieving net zero costs much less than abandoning climate change policies.

Backtracking

Ms Badenoch admitted in the article: “I’m not sceptical about climate change. That’s very obviously happening.” However, she failed to acknowledge the growing impacts that climate change is having on the UK. While she was Exchequer to the Treasury in Boris Johnson’s Government between February 2020 and September 2021, the Treasury published its Interim Report of its ‘Net Zero Review’. It stated: “Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Without global action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the climate will change catastrophically with almost unimaginable consequences for societies across the world. In recognition of the risks to the UK and other countries, the UK became, in 2019, the first major economy to implement a legally binding net zero target.”

The Spectator article quoted Ms Badenoch as saying: “Ministers have to do lots of stupid things just to hit the target, even if they are not cutting [worldwide] emissions or even if we can’t afford them or they’re impractical…We have to hit a certain number of heat pumps to meet the target, but at the rate we’re going, it’ll take us about 300 years.”

Ms Badenoch did not seem to think she had to do “stupid things” to reach net zero when she was a minister in Boris Johnson’s Government. Speaking in the House of Commons as the Exchequer to the Treasury on 15 September 2020, Ms Badenoch told MPs: “The Government recognise the importance of energy efficiency in achieving our climate change objectives and tackling fuel poverty.” On 27 April 2021, Ms Badenoch told the House of Commons: “At the summer economic update, the Government announced an ambitious £3.05 billion package for housing decarbonisation designed to cut carbon, save people money and create jobs.”

And on 7 September 2021, during a debate on ‘Net Zero Emissions and Green Investment’, Ms Badenoch drew the attention of MPs to the ‘The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution: Building back better, supporting green jobs, and accelerating our path to net zero’: “The Prime Minister’s 10-point plan demonstrates our commitment to net zero. It sets out £12 billion of new Government investment in green industries. This will create and support up to 250,000 highly skilled green jobs in the UK. In addition to this £12 billion, our plan will attract up to three times as much private investment by providing regulatory certainty and robust green finance frameworks.”

Among the 10 points was ‘Greener Buildings’, including the following pledge: “As is the common theme across this plan, we want to stimulate investment and manufacturing in the UK. We will aim for 600,000 heat pump installations per year by 2028, creating a market led incentive framework to drive growth, and will bring forward regulations to support this especially in off gas grid properties.” It is perhaps surprising that Ms Badenoch now claims that the target she promoted is “impractical”.

It is also disappointing that Ms Badenoch now promotes the myth that other countries are not cutting their emissions. The UK has been a leader on cutting emissions, reducing its annual output of greenhouse gases by 54.2 per cent by 2024 compared with 1990, while its GDP has increased by 82.8 per cent. However, other countries are also cutting their emissions. According to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, compiled by the European Commission, the UK’s annual greenhouse gas emissions (not including land use, land-use change and forestry) were 50.3 per cent lower in 2024 than in 1990; for comparison, in Canada they were 30.1 per cent higher, in France 28.8 per cent lower, in Germany 45.4 per cent lower, in Italy 26.5 per cent lower, in Japan 17.9 per cent lower, and in the US 4.9 per cent lower. Hence, the UK is leading the G7, but almost all our major economic competitors are also taking action.

The Spectator article also states about Ms Badenoch: “She’s critical of the Climate Change Committee, the quango that dictates policy, whose plans to reach net zero will cost Britain £319 billion over 15 years, according to some Tories.”

This is misleading. The Climate Change Committee does not dictate policy, but instead advises the Government and Parliament on how to comply with the Climate Change Act 2008. The figure of £319 billion was cited by Andrew Bowie MP, the Conservative Shadow Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, in the House of Commons on 25 March 2025. It was apparently calculated from the annual net costs published in February 2025 by the Climate Change Committee in its advice to the Government about the Seventh Carbon Budget, which covers the period 2038 to 2042. Mr Bowie appears to have excluded the period beyond 2040 because the Committee indicated that from that point onwards the annual savings would be bigger than the annual costs, with the total net cost of achieving net zero emissions decreasing to £108 billion by 2050. The figures suggest that overall savings would exceed overall costs by 2055.

‘Compliance’ with the Paris Agreement

Ms Badenoch also told The Spectator: “We’re the only country in the world that is compliant with the Paris Agreement [on climate change].” It is unclear what this claim really means, but perhaps she was referring to the extent to which the projected annual emissions of the 195 Parties to the Paris Agreement are consistent with Article 2(a), which commits countries to “[h]olding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.

An assessment of the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement of major countries by Climate Action Tracker currently shows that only the UK and Norway have submitted plans that are compatible with the domestic modelled pathways to limiting warming to 1.5°C. Hence, even by this narrow definition, the UK is not alone in being “compliant” with the Paris Agreement.

However, even if the UK is among few countries that is currently planning to cut its emissions in line with a target of limiting warming to 1.5°C, it is unlikely that threatening to weaken action would persuade other countries to increase their efforts. The UK’s annual emissions represent less than 1 per cent of total annual global emissions. This means that more than 99 per cent of current annual emissions that are damaging the UK are emitted by other countries. To limit the damage to the UK, the Government should be seeking to encourage other countries to act more strongly.

Other false representations of the Climate Change Committee and Act

Ms Badenoch also told The Spectator: “The Climate Change Committee wants us to eat insects and less meat”. This is a falsehood, and represents an ongoing campaign by some Conservative politicians to try to whip up public anger about the independent experts on the Committee. The truth is that the Committee published a report in 2019 on ‘Net Zero – The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming’, which stated: “Shifts towards healthier diets relying less on carbon-intensive animal products (like lamb, beef and dairy) would bring down emissions from agriculture in the UK. Transitioning from a high-meat diet to a low-meat diet can enable a person to reduce their dietary emissions by 35%.”

The Committee also published a report in 2020 on ‘Land use: Policies for a Net Zero UK’. This included the following statement about plant-based and meat-based diets: “Plant-based protein sources have significantly less GHG emissions than animal-sourced proteins when compared on a like-for-like basis”.

The report also noted: “In recent years there has been growing interest in ‘alternative’ meats that aren’t animal-based.” In a detailed discussion about this issue, the report stated: “Insects are efficient converters of their feed into edible calories and protein, and are consumed by humans in some parts of the world. If they could achieve widespread acceptability with consumers and lower production costs more insects may be eaten in western diets.”

Obscuring the reality of the cross-party consensus and previous Tory leadership on climate

Ms Badenoch also said to The Spectator: “Like many Labour policies, they put a lot of bad stuff in a bill and then they give it a nice name. The Climate Change Act sounds like it’s tackling climate change. It doesn’t.” This is extremely misleading. Although the Draft Climate Change Bill was put forward by Tony Blair’s Labour Government in March 2007, its origins were in a Private Member’s Bill introduced in April 2005 by Michael Meacher, a former Labour Environment Minister, John Gummer, a former Conservative Environment Secretary of State, and Norman Baker, then Liberal Democrat environment spokesperson.

Mr Gummer (now Lord Deben), the former Chair of the UK Climate Change Committee and a Conservative member of the House of Lords, strongly refutes Ms Badenoch’s claim in the article, and told me in an email: “The Climate Change Act 2008 was written by the Conservatives when in opposition. The Shadow Secretary of State for Environment in David Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet was Peter Ainsworth. He prepared the Bill with the help of Tony Juniper and Friends of the Earth. The Bill was introduced into Parliament as a Private Members’ Bill and would have passed but it ran out of time. Peter Ainsworth then got all the opposition parties to sign up to the Bill – Liberal Democrats, Scots and Welsh Nationalists, the Ulster Unionists, and the DUP. A group went to Gordon Brown and revealed they had enough Labour MPs to pass this as a Private Member’s Bill but they wanted it to be cross-party and not forced on him. So it become a Government Bill. The Labour Secretary of State for the Environment was Ed Miliband, but Geoff Rooker and Hilary Benn introduced the Bill, which was passed with only five votes against (Ann Widdicombe, Christopher Chope, Philip Davies, Andrew Tyrie, Peter Lilley).”

Energy claims

The article in The Spectator also described Ms Badenoch as “especially concerned by Labour’s failure to exploit Britain’s own energy assets such as North Sea oil and gas”. It quoted Ms Badenoch as stating: “Countries that have cheap energy are growing. Countries that don’t are stagnating. We’ve got to get cheap energy.”

However, Ms Badenoch failed to acknowledge that oil and gas that are extracted from the North Sea are sold on international markets and not at a discount to British consumers. When the price of natural gas on international markets spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Conservative Government was forced to spend £56.2 billion on protecting consumers against the cost of electricity and heating, even though most of the demand for natural gas in 2022 was met by domestic production.

In a speech on 2 September, Ms Badenoch announced that the Conservatives would allow new development of oil and natural gas in the North Sea. She stated: “Offshore Energies UK has found that up to 7.5 billion barrels could still be produced from our waters, 3.2 billion more than the government even admits.”

However, in addition to her mistake in using barrels instead of billions of cubic metres for the amount of natural gas that could be economically extracted, she failed to admit that the ‘No Constraints’ scenario commissioned by Offshore Energies UK “is considered to be beyond realistic assumptions given the current regulatory and fiscal conditions and investor sentiment” and assumes “significant changes to tax, licensing and regulatory approvals, and favourable commodity prices”. Ms Badenoch apparently does not want to acknowledge that maximising production from the North Sea means higher market prices, and hence higher, not lower, prices for consumers.

Overall, it is extremely disappointing that the Leader of the Conservatives relies on so many false claims in making the case for abandoning climate change policy.