Shocked, Shocked! Climate Liar UK Tory MP Hires Staffers From Lobby Groups Pushing Climate Lies
The Tory MP leading a backbench campaign against the government’s net zero policies is currently employing two aides linked to the UK’s most high-profile climate science denial group, DeSmog can reveal. Craig Mackinlay, chair of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG), recently hired Harry Wilkinson, head of policy at the anonymously funded Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), to work for him in Parliament. Wilkinson was previously employed by GWPF founder and former chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson, who recently said climate change was “not a problem”.
Official rules, which give aides a 28-day window to register, mean Wilkinson has yet to be declared on the House of Commons register, despite having a parliamentary pass. Wilkinson joins existing Mackinlay aide Ruth Lea, a trustee of the organisation until last year who has said people should “move on” from worrying about “climate change” and serves as an adviser to a bank run by a former Conservative Party treasurer. Two other members of the NZSG, including former Brexit minister Steve Baker, also have connections to the GWPF.
The revelations should deal “a fatal blow” to the credibility of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, according to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, who warned that MPs should be wary of “regurgitating [GWPF] propaganda” and instead start thinking “rigorously” about the climate.
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The NZSG claims to accept climate science and Mackinlay recently said he is “not a climate-change denier”. But his two taxpayer-funded aides have both regularly challenged mainstream climate science. Wilkinson has previously criticised BBC coverage of climate change as “alarmist”. He stated in 2018 that the idea “global warming can be somehow ‘irreversible’ is pure propaganda; the climate has always been changing and it always will”. Wilkinson has also said that a temperature rise of more than two degrees is “not inherently dangerous”.
Wilkinson is regularly invited to speak about climate policy in right-leaning media, including on television and radio channel GB News and talkRADIO. In the past year he has tweeted that “the ‘climate crisis’ is a religious belief, nothing to do with science” and that anyone who believes all forms of extreme weather are getting worse because of climate change is a “climate change denier”. He was one of at least 11 climate science deniers who attended the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, during which he falsely claimed the conference was being powered by diesel generators, a move environmental experts described as “desperate”.
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https://www.desmog.com/2022/02/16/revealed-how-the-aides-of-anti-net-zero-mp-craig-mackinlay-are-linked-to-a-leading-climate-denial-group/