KEMI Badenoch accepted a donation from a board member of a fossil fuel giant during the Tory leadership election, it has emerged.
DeSmog has revealed the Tory leader received a £10,000 donation on August 6 from House of Lords member Dambisa Moyo, an economist and banker who has served on Chevron’s board since 2016 and holds shares worth more than £100,000 in the company.
Chevron is the third largest oil and gas company in the world by market capitalisation and does not have a net zero commitment or a commitment to align its activities with the temperature goals set by the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement.
Badenoch has called herself a “net zero sceptic”, suggesting that the UK’s goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 would “bankrupt the country”.
Between 2010 and 2018, Chevron reportedly dedicated only 0.2% of its long-term investments to sources of low-carbon energy.
Moyo became a peer in November 2022 having been nominated by the then prime minister Boris Johnson. She sat as a Tory peer until July 2024 but is now non-affiliated, according to her profile.
“It’s sadly no surprise that Kemi Badenoch’s anti-net zero agenda is being fuelled by a Chevron board member,” said Hannah Greer, Good Law Project campaigns manager.
“The climate crisis is accelerating, but at a time when we need urgent action, Badenoch wants our country to take its foot off the gas and ditch key green policies – much like her predecessor.”
During an address to Conservative MPs at the party’s annual conference on October 2, Badenoch described herself as a “net zero sceptic” but “not a climate change sceptic”.
She also claimed that net zero is “making energy more expensive and hurting our economy”.
The Climate Change Committee, which advises the UK Government, has estimated that the cost of achieving net zero will be less than one percent of UK GDP.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, have said that without “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” limiting global heating to 1.5C is beyond reach.
In August, it was also revealed Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her leadership campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group.
Net Zero Watch has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”.
