The American Enterprise Institute has cast doubt over climate change science.

While the Tories pay lip service to tackling climate change, senior ministers in the government continue to have links with groups who deny the effects of climate change and who spread misinformation.

openDemocracy reports that Trade secretary Kemi Badenoch ‘met secretly with a US think tank that has taken millions of dollars from climate denial groups and claimed it would be “irresponsible” for the UK to follow climate science’.

Badenoch met representatives of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), according to details published by the Department for International Trade last week.

The AEI has cast ‘doubt over climate change science, describing a landmark 2021 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “alarmist” and “deeply dubious”.

The report, which set out the disastrous impacts of climate change, was played down by Benjamin Zycher and Peter J Wallison, senior fellows at the AEI, who claimed that “we don’t understand all the elements in the complex climate system – the effects of clouds alone are understood poorly”.

According to Greenpeace the AEI has a long track record of distorting the science and solutions of climate change. The site reports: “Its arguments tend to de-emphasize the environmental and economic risks of climate change, exaggerate the costs of addressing the problem and question the value of putting a policy in place at all.”

The AEI also criticised COP 26, the annual UN climate conference hosted by the UK in 2021, in a piece titled: “It’s Time to Cancel the Climate Crisis”. It went on to add: “The prevailing narrative that we must immediately undertake massive actions to eliminate global emissions by mid-century is not supported by the science.”

So much for the Tories taking climate change seriously when its senior ministers are meeting groups like the AEI.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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