In depth: From ‘lukewarmers’ to ‘daft’ arguments – how climate deniers are reshaping political discourse

 

In depth: From ‘lukewarmers’ to ‘daft’ arguments – how climate deniers are reshaping political discourse

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/04/tuesday-briefing-inside-the-rights-heated-climate-denial-debate

 

As the world heats up, denying the reality of climate change has become implausible. “This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now,” the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley wrote recently in an article persuading the right to “get serious” about the subject.

 

Instead, a tendency to downplay the seriousness of the crisis has emerged. In this week’s issue of the Spectator, Matt Ridley, a former Conservative peer whose ancestral estate features two coalmines, suggested that a “cult of rewilding” – whose converts allegedly include the RSPB and National Trust – is connected to the risk of wildfires in England (this suggestion was repeated in another Spectator piece on Saturday, £). The Spanish far-right party Vox recently made a similar argument about wildfires in Spain, blaming them on a failure to clear rural areas and invest in firefighting services, rather than on the climate crisis (read Sam Jones’s piece on Spain’s climate deniers here).

 

Another line of argument is to acknowledge that the climate crisis is real, but insist that nothing can be done to address it. “The war against global warming has been lost, with only grievous collateral damage to show for it,” Allister Heath, the Sunday editor of the Telegraph, wrote last week (£) in a piece arguing that people in Britain should learn to love their new Mediterranean climate, and take inspiration from other “blossoming” hot regions, such as Dubai and Israel.

 

Who are the ‘lukewarmers’?

“All of this commentary reflects a battle on the right between climate sceptics – people often referred to as ‘lukewarmers’ – versus the Conservative voters who actually care about conservation, nature and so on,” Ward told me. The term “lukewarmer” was popularised by Ridley, who is affiliated with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a campaigning body that has spent decades undermining climate science, and its campaigning arm, Net Zero Watch. “Lukewarmers accept the reality of human-made climate change, but believe the impact of it won’t be as big as people argue, and that policies involved in mitigating these impacts will be expensive and difficult,” Ward says.

 

Net zero has become a particular focus for them. Basic physics dictates that reaching net zero is necessary to stop global temperatures rising even further. Although it was Theresa May, a Tory, who committed Britain to reaching net zero emissions by 2050, voices in the rightwing press have sought to paint the target as a bureaucratic conspiracy devised by lanyard-toting Labour wonks and enforced on an unsuspecting population, spreading “desolation across the loveliest countryside in the world”, as one writer recently put it (£).

 

If Britain doesn’t contribute that much to global emissions, does net zero even matter?

Another common refrain (I counted at least five articles about the climate crisis published in the Telegraph last week that made variations of this argument) is that, since other countries emit far more carbon than Britain, striving for net zero in the UK is, at best, an irrelevance and, at worst, a decision that will make the country much poorer than other industrialising nations. As the “anti-woke” libertarian podcaster Konstantin Kisin said in a speech to the Oxford Union in 2023, the future of climate change will be decided by “poor people in Asia and Latin America who could not give a crap about saving the planet … because they are poor”.

 

People who make this argument often point to China, which produces about 35% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Since the UK produces less than 1%, why should the UK bother decarbonising when it’s not even responsible for that much damage? “That’s a totally daft argument,” says Ward. “If more than 99% of the emissions damaging the UK come from other countries, then we have a vested interest in persuading those countries to accelerate their transition. And we’re not going to persuade them by dragging our feet.”

 

In fact, China has massively expanded its renewables sector, and has a far higher proportion of electric cars on the road than in Britain. Meanwhile, commentators in Britain are trying to forestall the transition by making misleading arguments about China.

 

How is this shaping politics?

The 2024 Conservative manifesto committed to reaching net zero by 2050, but Kemi Badenoch ditched the target, perhaps hoping to win back Reform voters (a month before U-turning on the pledge, Badenoch spent a week on a “retreat” hosted by the Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch). And among the reported reasons why Ed Miliband didn’t get the role of chancellor were his commitment to net zero and his opposition to new exploration licences in the North Sea.

 

Most British voters are in favour of net zero. Despite this, media coverage of it is more than twice as likely to be negative than positive. This could be helping to drive a false perception that climate action is overwhelmingly unpopular with voters, encouraging MPs to significantly underestimate public support for these policies, and overestimate opposition.

 

In other words, a small chorus of climate sceptics aren’t trying to represent public opinion or persuade us to embrace Mediterranean summers, so much as convince politicians that climate action is deeply unpopular.