Donald Trump is back, carrying kindling and firelighters to ignite a new blaze of climate scepticism that will sweep through the UK’s information landscape.
It is an astonishing and depressing prospect, given that less than four years ago there was a remarkable alignment of UK media in support of climate action ahead of COP26 in Scotland.
In what was thought to be the post-Trump era, newspapers that were once rife with climate denial rushed to embrace Boris Johnson’s agenda for making the UK a global leader in clean energy. The Sun launched a Green Team campaign and handed out vegan sausages. The Express gave its Crusader logo a verdant hue and implored readers to “Join Our Green Britain Revolution”.
All that seems a long way off now. The White House keys are back in the hands of a man who regards renewable energy as a “scam” and has ordered the US out of the UN’s Paris climate agreement, joining the other naysayers: Iran, Libya and Yemen.
In attendance at the President’s swearing-in were Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the tech bros who are defining a social media culture that dispenses with fact-checking and where truth is valued less than the right to make stuff up.
As CEO of Tesla, Musk was once an iconic figure for producing clean energy. But his irascible posts on X suggest he is more concerned with fighting “wokeness” than global warming. Tasked by Trump with improving government efficiency, Musk has publicly humiliated federal climate specialists for having “fake jobs”.
The UK’s news agenda has never been so susceptible to American influence. Musk’s personal intervention on grooming gangs spilled onto UK front pages and forced the Government to act.
And British politics has changed so much from 2021 when the world’s eyes were on Glasgow and the Conservatives and Labour were in lock-step in championing renewables. Today, Reform UK is surging in the polls. Its deputy leader Richard Tice has attacked “climate change nonsense”.
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Read MoreIts leader Nigel Farage has replaced Johnson as the politician who holds the right-leaning press in thrall. He follows the Trump media playbook and has his own megaphone on GB News. Playing catch-up, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch attacks Government targets for reducing emissions.
In the face of extreme weather events it has become implausible for serious media to promote outright climate denial in the way some once did. In 2013, James Delingpole wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “The man-made global warming scare story has not a shred of scientific credibility”. Today readers reject such gaslighting.
But a strategic shift has happened. Research by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit finds that only 5 per cent of UK newspaper editorials and opinion pieces on climate change question the evidence, compared to 20 per cent a decade ago. Instead, commentators – almost exclusively on right-leaning titles – denounce policies used for tackling global warming, notably net zero emissions targets. Such articles increased from 23 per cent to 24 per cent in the past decade.
Another study by Carbon Brief found that this manifested as an onslaught on the Environment Secretary Ed Miliband, who was the subject of 45 negative editorials in the latter part of 2024. He was described as an “eco-zealot” by the Daily Mail and a “hysterical eco-obsessive” by The Sun.
By far the most persistent outlet in platforming climate scepticism is The Telegraph. Research by DeSmog in 2023 reviewed 171 Telegraph opinion pieces on environmental issues and found that 85 per cent were “anti-green”.
Commenting in The Telegraph on the Los Angeles wildfires, Freddy Gray pointed the figure at “Democrat misrule” and criticised “the climate change lobby”. Musk, like right-wing influencers on YouTube and TikTok, put the blame for that catastrophe on diversity, equity and inclusion policies, tweeting “DEI means people DIE”.
Musk once declared himself “super pro climate”. Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment says the billionaire is now a “lukewarmer” who minimises the impact of the threat, while allowing lies to spread on his platform. “We are at a moment of great peril in the UK where we may see a resurgence of climate science denial in public debate,” warns Ward. “It will slow action and be to the detriment of everyone.”
The first Trump presidency brought striking children onto the streets in fear for the planet they will inherit. This time the threat might be greater, as will be the need for trusted quality information.
The British media seemed to be approaching a consensus over climate change. The risk is that it becomes another foggy and divisive culture wars issue, where opinions are formed according to tribal loyalties rather than scientific evidence. That is something the world cannot afford.
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