The Global Warming Policy Foundation, big oil and dark money
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES: The UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation thinktank sits in a web connected to US billionaires with ties to the oil industry and dark money.
by Stephen Cantellow, Kent and Surrey Bylines
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a climate-sceptic thinktank founded by former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson in 2009 and based at 55 Tufton Street. According to its website, the GWPF is a “non-partisan thinktank and a registered educational charity focusing on climate and energy policy”.
The GWPF: Lawson’s repeated false claims
The Charity Commission for England and Wales describes the GWPF as an “educational charity” whose “main purpose is to advance the public understanding of global warming and of its possible consequences, and also of the measures taken or proposed to be taken in response to such warming”.
Yet, Lawson repeatedly spread false claims regarding the risks of climate change, proving that the GWPF did not comply with the Charity Commission’s guidance on campaigning and political activity, which states that any information used by a charity must be factually accurate.
More concerning is the fact that the GWPF has close connections to US oil billionaires and dark money funding. So, let’s look at its founder, a few carefully selected names on the Board of Trustees, and their connections to some questionable groups and organisations.
Nigel Lawson
Lawson was the climate-denying, free-market-loving, pro-Brexit former Conservative chancellor who believed in the idea of Brexit with such conviction that he applied for permanent residency in France, where he owned a farmhouse. Lawson claimed: “I love Europe! That’s why I live in France.” Maybe he just didn’t like the UK part of Europe very much.
In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2020, Lawson said: “I think that climate change is not a threat, it is happening very gently at a fraction of a degree per decade which is something we can perfectly well live with.” Clearly, Lawson was the perfect person to run a thinktank denying climate science.
Despite having died in April 2023, Lawson remains listed on the scientific board at the Austrian Economics Center (AEC), a “politically independent research institute”, while seemingly having no scientific qualifications. The founder and director of AEC is Barbara Kolm, who is also the president of the Friedrich A Hayek Institute in Vienna.
Hayek was an Austrian economist, famous for his book The Road to Serfdom, which promotes the idea that “government control of the economy ultimately leads to totalitarianism and the loss of individual freedom”. According to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, one account credits Hayek with conceiving the idea of using thinktanks as “disguised” political weapons. This probably explains why Hayek’s ideas still influence many in the UK and US today.
A British libertarian called Anthony Fisher was greatly influenced by Hayek and, after heeding Hayek’s advice, formed the Institute of Economic Affairs with British business owner Oliver Smedley in 1955. Fisher went on to found over 150 free-market thinktanks worldwide.
If it feels as though I’m going off on a tangent here, stick with me – the connections do tie up.
Kolm, CPAC and the Heritage Foundation
Kolm is a prominent figure in free-market ideology and has spoken about the apparent dangers of socialized healthcare at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) events in the US.
CPAC events are funded by the conservative organisation the American Conservative Union (ACU). ACU has received funding from the Mercer Family Foundation, the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation, DonorsTrust, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the National Rifle Association Foundation(NRA). ACU chair Matt Schlapp is the former vice president of federal affairs at Koch Industries.
The Heritage Foundation, the US conservative group behind Project 2025, is one of many groups that attend CPAC events. If some of these names sound familiar, they should do – these organisations are always linked.
Kolm’s AEC also has ties to the European Resource Bank (ERB), of which she was a founding member. This is not a bank in the financial sense, but an annual conference of European thinktanks, scholars and ‘experts’ who discuss free enterprise and ‘freedom’. This refers to their freedom for unrestricted and deregulated trade and has nothing to do with the everyday freedom of ‘the people’. A senior fellow at the AEC is Daniel J Mitchell, who was a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Cato Institute (who also admires Lawson), and at the Heritage Foundation.
What is also interesting about the ERB are the groups associated with them, particularly Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, yet another group that has received funding from Koch-related organisations such as DonorsTrust and the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation. Norquist was also on the board of directors at the NRA from 2008–2018.
As we can see, Lawson’s connections through Kolm and his involvement with the AEC, ranged from powerful free-market thinkers and oil billionaires to tax avoiders and gun rights lobbyists.
Tony Abbott
Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott is an adviser to the UK government’s board of trade and also a member of the advisory board for the ‘international community’ that is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). ARC’s advisory board has 11 members with very strong ties to the opaquely funded free-market thinktank the Legatum Institute, among them former CEO Philippa Stroud, Paul Marshall, the new owner of The Spectator magazine, investor behind GB News and currently looking to buy the Sundayand Daily Telegraph, founding partner Christopher Chandler and partner Alan McCormick.
Stroud is now CEO of ARC and founder of the new thinktank, Forum. The government’s website classes Stroud as a “British think tanker”, whatever that entails.
Another former Legatum director is former government trade adviser Shanker Singham. Currently an Academic Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Singham was involved with the Celtic Freeport(Milford Haven and Port Talbot) and was also an adviser for Prospera LLC’s highly controversial charter city in Roatan, Honduras.
It’s worth noting that the aforementioned CPAC is not only based in the US. Their Hungarian event has a division of activists entitled Wokebusters with the motto, “We, the Wokebusters of CPAC Hungary, pledge in the name of freedom, order and security to drain the swamp and take the West back”. One of the endorsing signatories of this group? Tony Abbott, who has also attended events for CPAC Hungary.
Note that the phrase ‘draining the swamp’ used by politicians over the last few decades is commonly associated with Donald Trump who frequently tweeted the phrase in the weeks leading up to the 2016 US election.
Lord Frost
Former chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost is another name on the GWPF board of trustees. In 2022, he was one of a group of MPs who signed a letter to Boris Johnson asking him to lift the ban on fracking. He is also a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, “the UK’s most influential think tank” co-founded by Michael Gove.
Frost has spoken at events held by the Heritage Foundation (yes, them again) and at an event held by the Legatum Institute with the Heritage Foundation’s President, Kevin Roberts in which he said: “I listed just now a set of values that Heritage, and I think everyone on the centre-right, does or should stand for.” Remember, this is the same Heritage Foundation behind Project 2025, so we know what Heritage and therefore Frost clearly stand for.
Frost has conducted interviews for CapX, the news outlet for the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), another free-market thinktank with ties to the Koch network. The CPS’s former research director and head of tax, Tom Clougherty, has written a blog and featured on many podcasts for the Cato Institute, where he was editorial director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Clougherty is now executive director at the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Terence Mordaunt
Conservative party donor Terence Mordaunt is chair of the GWPF and owner of Bristol Port Company and First Corporate Shipping. He is also the director at Bristol Oil and Gas Limited, which should certainly raise suspicions as to why Mordaunt is so against climate change. One could almost think that he had vested interests.
Mordaunt is no relation to the former Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt, who has publicly distanced herself from him. However, she has still received £30,000 in donations from Terence Mordaunt’s company First Corporate Consultants since 2019.
Boris Johnson also accepted £25,000 from Mordaunt’s First Corporate Shipping in May 2019, which might be seen as money well spent in terms of Johnson’s subsequent backing of Bristol as one of the candidate freeports. Bristol’s application was rejected in March 2021 and the Great Western Freeport, as it was called, never materialised.
Graham Stringer
The most unusual member on the GWPF’s Board of Trustees is Graham Stringer, the Labour MP for Blackley and Middleton South. Brexiteer Stringer was a board member at Vote Leave, and a guest speaker at the Bruges Group event called How the EU’s Climate Alarmism is Costing You Money in 2014. Commentators at the Bruges Group include Daniel Hannan, Patrick Minford, and Nigel Farage. Among those who have addressed the group’s regular public meetings are John Redwood, Farage, and Dr John Hulsman, a former senior research fellow at – brace yourselves – the Heritage Foundation; they certainly get around, don’t they?
It is unlikely that many would associate a Labour MP with any of these groups and activities, and yet Stringer was reselected by Labour as a candidate in the 4 July 2024 general election. Stringer is the GWPF’s longest-standing board member, having been appointed in 2015 (Mordaunt in 2019, Abbott in 2023, and Frost in 2022).
In 2019 the UK government placed a moratorium on fracking due to safety concerns about minor earthquakes, which is of special concern to the Surrey campaigners against the Horse Hill fracking. Liz Truss lifted the ban in September 2022. But Stringer disagreed with the moratorium, which was reinstated by Rishi Sunak in October 2022. Stringer also said that fracking is “a proven safe technology”; perhaps he hasn’t looked too far into the evidence that suggests otherwise.
Stringer was due to attend a net-zero rally in 2022 alongside Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Julia Hartley-Brewer, and has appeared with Farage on the classily titled Talking Pints on GB News.
One needs to question why the Labour Party continues to support Stringer when his beliefs regarding climate denial, achieving net zero and his close connections to 55 Tufton Street appear unaligned with the values of a party that normally prides itself on giving a voice to ordinary working people.
Funding and the Koch connection
Due to the GWPF being registered as a charity, the law does not require its sources of income to be disclosed. The GWPF has, however, received funding via their aloof US fundraising branch American Friends of the GWPF, and from DonorsTrust and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.
The Sarah Scaife Foundation has shares in Exxon, Chevron, and 20 other energy companies. DonorsTrust has been described as the “dark-money ATM of the Conservative movement” and has many connections to Koch-tied organisations. DonorsTrust has received donations from the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Mercer Family Foundation, and many more with connections to Koch-tied companies and groups.
If this all sounds confusing, it’s meant to be. The people behind these groups don’t want you to know who they are, to understand how they work, or how they are all connected.