Members of Parliament have rebuked a Donald Trump advisor for spreading misleading claims about the UK’s climate policies.
Professor Steve Koonin, a former chief scientist at oil giant BP who has long claimed climate science is “unsettled”, appeared on GB News on Friday to declare that the UK public is being “deliberately ill-informed” about the government’s plans to cut emissions, claiming net zero is “killing the economy for nothing”.
According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the UK’s net zero economy grew by 10 percent in 2024, employing almost a million people in full-time jobs with an average wage of £43,000 – £5,600 higher than the national average.
“If I were British, I would be enraged to find out there are important things the public has not been told”, Koonin, who was recently appointed as a U.S. energy advisor, added. “People should be asking much harder questions of the consensus scientists.”
He also attacked the scientific evidence for man-made climate change, asserting that climate models “only give a hazy picture” and are “not fit for purpose”.
Koonin’s interview is the latest intervention by the Trump administration in UK energy policy. President Trump urged the UK to reverse its ban on new North Sea oil and gas extraction on a visit to Scotland last month. In February, Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a conference in London that the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target was “a sinister goal” that would “impoverish people”.
Ellie Chowns, Green Party MP for North Herefordshire, told DeSmog: “Climate denial is at the heart of the Trump presidency with oil pumping through its veins.
“Koonin is a former chief scientist with BP, in denial about the realities of climate change. Such dangerous and toxic views – driven by self-interest, not by science – have no place in politics.”
This view was echoed by Pippa Heylings MP, Liberal Democrat energy and net zero spokesperson, who told DeSmog: “It’s important that the UK doesn’t get distracted by voices seeking to downplay the climate crisis. The science is clear, carbon emissions are driving global warming, and communities here and abroad are already living with those consequences.
“The UK should be seizing the opportunities of clean energy, lowering bills, creating green jobs and strengthening our energy security.”
The Labour government didn’t respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.
‘Toxic’ Climate Claims
Koonin was appointed to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) “2025 Climate Working Group” in July, and has since co-written a report denying basic climate science that has been widely debunked by experts.
The report, titled ‘A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate’, concludes that “CO2-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed” and that U.S. climate policies would have “undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate”.
It has been used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to propose dropping the “endangerment finding”, which gives the EPA a duty to protect the public from emissions.
Koonin’s claims on GB News are contradicted by the available evidence. The UK’s target of net zero emissions by 2050, which climate scientists say is needed to limit global warming to 1.5C, would cost less than 0.2 percent of GDP a year, with most of this covered by the private sector, according to the independent Climate Change Committee.
Meanwhile, climate models have accurately predicted global warming, with observed temperature rises tracking forecasts.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said Koonin’s work was part of the U.S. government’s crackdown on climate science.
“Steve Koonin is helping the Trump administration to carry out a Stalinist purge of climate science in the United States”, he told DeSmog.
“Evidence about climate change is being removed from official documents and websites, government climate scientists are being fired, university climate scientists are having their funding stopped, and climate monitoring stations are being closed down. All this to desperately try to justify Donald Trump’s daft claims that climate change is a Chinese hoax.”
He added: “Frankly, if the UK government wants American advice on climate change policy, it should consult the United States National Academies, the country’s top experts, rather than a political stooge like Koonin, who cannot be trusted to tell the truth.”
Marshall-ing the Troops
The Trump team is collaborating increasingly closely with a transatlantic network of climate deniers and fossil fuel advocates.
GB News, which interviewed Koonin, is co-owned by Paul Marshall, whose hedge fund Marshall Wace had £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels as of June 2023. One of Marshall Wace’s biggest investors, U.S. private equity giant KKR, has a large fossil fuel portfolio of its own.
GB News frequently broadcasts climate denial and attacks on net zero, including nearly 1,000 attacks on climate policies around the time of the 2024 UK general election.
The broadcaster also employs two Reform UK MPs, including party leader and Trump ally Nigel Farage.
Marshall helps to bankroll the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a conservative group which held a conference in London featuring a number of figures close to Trump, led by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Speaking via video link, Wright said that climate action is part of a plot to “grow government power” and “shrink human freedom”, and vowed to “get out of the way” of new coal, oil, and gas extraction.
In his speech at the ARC conference, Marshall claimed that the West has been infected by a “climate derangement syndrome” through which we seem willing to “sacrifice our economic prosperity and our people’s livelihoods all for the sake of making some fractional changes to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere”.
Richard Wilson, director of the campaign group Stop Funding Heat, said: “Britons overwhelmingly support climate action because we know that the dangers are all too real.
“It’s GB News itself that is misleading people with its relentless efforts to portray climate action in a negative light – perhaps not surprising when the channel is owned by billionaires, whose big money in fossil fuels is directly threatened by efforts to reduce carbon emissions and protect our future.”
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