What Reform UK’s History Tells Us About the Future of Net Zero

Apr 7

‘We will scrap ridiculous, harmful, wasteful, Net Zero policies. We will start producing our own oil and gas. We will end […] the full subsidies for renewable energy’. These were the words of Nigel Farage, addressed to rapturous applause in the packed conference hall at Reform UK’s 2025 Party Conference.[1]

Such statements emanating from the party that is the bookies’ favourite to win the next general election will be alarming to those working in renewables, or indeed anyone who is supportive of climate action in the UK.[2] How would the Net Zero sector, which has been growing three times faster than the overall British economy, fare if an actively hostile party gained control of the levers of power in Whitehall?[3] Perhaps the best hope for the industry is that Reform U-turn on their policies. This is something the party has been known to do, most notably when they scrapped their promise to deliver £90bn in tax cuts, a pledge which had been one of the cornerstones of their 2024 Manifesto.[4] Yet, while the party has been relatively politically mobile on some issues, on Net Zero, it has not yet budged. It may be that an anti-renewables stance is too deeply ingrained within the party to make a volte-face on the subject possible.

To explore this issue ahead of the 2026 local elections, I have trawled through manifestos and policy documents put out by Reform UK and their progenitors over the last 25 years to see how thinking on renewables has evolved, and what that might tell us about how a Nigel Farage-led government would treat Net Zero.

One point to emphasise at the onset is that while the brand of Reform UK is little more than five years old, the party has a long intellectual heritage. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, the new colours and branding of Reform UK disguise the fact that the party is the latest iteration of a succession of right-wing Eurosceptic parties that date back to the early 1990s.[5] One key throughline is, of course, Nigel Farage. As leader of UKIP, the Brexit Party, and Reform UK, he has occupied a central position in British politics for a quarter century, and, at the time of writing, tops YouGov’s rankings of the UK’s most popular politicians.[6] He also has a long history of climate denialism and anti-renewables outlooks. In 2015, for instance, he said ‘I haven’t got a clue whether climate change is being driven by carbon-dioxide emissions’, adding that human-induced climate change ‘is like a religion. And you’re demonised if you question it’.[7] Two years earlier, he had criticised ‘this loopy idea that we can cover Britain in ugly disgusting ghastly windmills and that somehow our future energy needs will come from that’.[8]

More recently, he has often tried to sidestep questions about climate change in interviews. ‘I’m not arguing the science’ was the line he gave on Panorama prior to the 2024 election.[9] This statement, together with a slight watering down of anti-Net Zero sentiment in Reform’s manifesto after Farage became leader, led Bob Ward and Pallavi Sethi of the Grantham Institute to actually question whether Farage’s influence was leading to a move away from climate change scepticism.[10] Yet going back over the historical record, it is Farage who emerges as the key driver of climate scepticism and anti-renewable discourses.

Prior to his election as leader, UKIP, while largely noncommittal in debates around human-induced climate change, had expressed support for renewable energy. Their 2001 General Election Manifesto, for instance, noted that while the impact of CO2 ‘on global warming remains unclear, the continuing use of fossil fuels undoubtedly impairs the long-term quality of life on our planet. We will therefore encourage and support initiatives in developing energy production from renewable sources’.[11] While their manifesto for the 2004 local elections stated that ‘UKIP supports the use of renewable energy sources where these are lead [sic] by science rather than political idealism’.[12]

By 2007, however, when Farage was at the helm of the party, the party was far more avowed in its climate denialism. ‘The over-reaction by other parties to global warming borders on the hysterical and risks damaging Britain’s economy and its people’s way of life’, the party declared. An anti-renewables stance was also more pronounced. The same policy document asserted that 'renewables will not supply more than minor energy needs in the future’, and put forward policies to remove subsidies for wind farms, limit them to offshore locations, and support ‘the efficient extraction and use of indigenous coal’.[13] This is not to suggest that Farage was the sole driver of this policy change, a poll of UKIP general election candidates in 2010 found 70% agreed that the party should campaign on climate change scepticism.[14] Yet certainly given the shift took place under his leadership, and Farage has consistently opposed renewables and espoused climate denialist rhetoric, he should be seen as its key orchestrator.

Indeed, climate change scepticism and anti-renewables posturing are two pillars of what has been a largely consistent environmental and energy policy in Farage-led parties. In 2010, UKIP gleefully proclaimed that ‘we are the first party to take a sceptical stance of man-made global warming claims’. Four years later they referenced ‘increasing doubts about the theory of man-made climate change’, and just last year the Reform UK-led Kent County Council put forward a motion that anthropogenic climate change is ‘unproven’ and based on ‘inaccurate data’.[15] On renewables, the party’s 2010 manifesto called for ‘an immediate halt to unjustified spending on renewable sources’, while the 2015 equivalent decried how wind had ‘blighted landscapes’ and was ‘pushing up bills’.[16] More recently, in 2024, Farage wrote that ‘Net Zero has sent energy costs soaring. It is making us poorer and colder, damaging British industry’.[17]

Another key throughline is a pro-fossil fuels agenda. UKIP’s support in 2007 for ‘indigenous coal’ has already been referenced, something which was repeated in their Energy policy published the following year.[18] By 2014, the focus had shifted to support for fracking, as the party declared that ‘Natural gas offers the best solution to Britain’s twin crises of rising energy prices and the capacity crunch’.[19] This remains a key element of the party’s energy platform, with Richard Tice recently suggesting Labour’s decision not to pursue fracking was ‘bordering on criminal financial negligence’.[20]

These continuities not only relate to the policy positions themselves, but also to how these policies are framed. One element of this is a consistent emphasis on localism. This is evident in Reform UK’s recent opposition to renewable infrastructure, which is rooted in the idea that the interests of those who live near a development, and may experience negative impacts in terms of view or house prices, override the interests of the non-local population that stand to benefit from the green transition. Deputy Leader Richard Tice, for instance, said that with solar expansion, ‘those living in a village or small town in the countryside might all of a sudden find themselves surrounded not by glorious fields, but by black plastic. There is no justification for that, or fairness in it.’[21] A similar framing was used in UKIP’s 2010 manifesto, which stated that the party ‘regards onshore wind turbines and the accompanying power lines as eyesores in the beautiful countryside’.[22] Going back even further, in 2006, the party said that on the environment, ‘as in other policy areas, UKIP believes that greater local control is the key to success’.[23]

The other clear continuity in framing is utilising whataboutery to deflect suggestions that Britain needs to reduce emissions. This was present in UKIP’s 2008 energy policy, which argued against green policies as ‘the UK produces less than 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions’, and there ‘is no present indication that China, India and Brazil … will comply [with reducing emissions]’.[24] Similar sentiments were evident in their 2014 energy policy and 2015 manifesto.[25] More recently, this whataboutery has become a key discourse in Reform UK’s opposition to Net Zero. Zia Yusuf, the party chairman, for instance, recently said, ‘look at China, which continues to produce billions of tonnes of Carbon every year, they certainly don’t seem to give a darn about carbon emissions’.[26]

So, clearly, there are continuities in how Nigel Farage-led parties have approached energy and the environment, but that is not to suggest that policy has been completely static. Specific policies have been jettisoned. A commitment to produce 50% of the UK’s electricity from nuclear energy, for instance, which appeared in UKIP’s 2008 energy policy and their 2010 manifesto, has not appeared in any subsequent party material.[27] Policy positions have also reacted to changes in the broader energy landscape, most clearly in the case of the evolving subsidy regimes for renewables. In 2014, when the Renewables Obligation generously subsidised green energy, UKIP declared that their issue was with this government support: ‘We have no problem with private companies investing their own money in renewables, if they can do so without subsidy’.[28] As the Renewable Obligation and other subsidies such as Feed-in Tariffs have been discontinued in recent years, this position has shifted. Reform UK now promotes a ‘generation tax’ on renewable energy to recoup money previously paid in subsidies.[29] There has also been an evolution of thinking on solar. While early-UKIP was a staunch opponent of wind, the party was far less averse to solar. The party’s 2008 energy policy expressed tepid support for renewable sources other than wind, including ‘electricity generation using solar or thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cells’.[30] Yet as solar saw more uptake, and accordingly became more controversial, policy evolved. By 2014, the party were offering the same virulent criticism of solar as they were of wind.[31] More recently, Reform UK have reserved their most aggressive criticism of renewables for solar. Richard Tice tweeted in May 2025 that ‘Solar farms are wrong at every level: destroy food security, destroy jobs & destroy property values for villages being surrounded by them’.[32]

Given that policy has clearly evolved on some issues, this raises the question of whether Reform UK might abandon its anti-Net Zero stance entirely. Polls continue to show that there is overwhelming support for renewable energy, and there is a possibility that Reform UK may feel that softening their stance might make them more appealing to some voters.[33] Indeed, there have been hints that the party is trying to attract eco-conscious voters with their hiring of veteran Conservative environmentalist Ben Goldsmith to pen their nature policy.[34] However, for Net Zero and renewables, I would suggest that a fundamental shift in policy is extremely unlikely at this moment. For one, the recent founding of the Restore Britain party by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe means that Nigel Farage will be conscious of not being outflanked to the right.[35] Moving to a more mainstream position on renewables would only strengthen Restore Britain’s claim that Reform has become too moderate. Yet more pertinently, the party has deep institutional and financial links to the fossil fuels industry and climate deniers. Analysis by the New York Times showed that 40% of the funds Reform UK raised in 2024 came from individuals and organisations that ‘openly questioned climate change or have investments in fossil fuels or other climate polluting industries’.[36] While in January 2025, Farage spoke at the launch of Heartland UK/Europe, a new branch of a climate-denying American thinktank that had previously compared people who believe in global warming to the Unabomber.[37] The climate-denying head of the think-tank, Lois Perry, who also happens to be a previous UKIP leader, has claimed to ‘be able to consult and influence the Reform Party at the highest level’.[38] These deep ties to interests that stand to gain from a continuation in Reform UK’s climate sceptical and anti-renewables perspectives hardly suggest an incoming policy U-turn.

What we are left with then is the Farage-led environmental and energy policy that has remained remarkably consistent over nearly two decades. The limited revisions that have taken place, for instance on solar, have largely been responses to shifts in the energy landscape, rather than the result of fundamental changes in thinking. This policy agenda, centred on climate scepticism, opposition to renewables, and support for fossil fuels, and framed through localism and whataboutery, looks set to endure.

This exploration of the energy and environmental policy of Reform UK and their predecessors does not, therefore, do much to allay the concerns of those working in renewables. Developers would do well to take Richard Tice at face value when he warns energy companies that Reform UK would ‘strike down all contracts signed’ under Contracts for Difference Allocation Round 7.[39] As implausible as it might seem, we may well be faced with a British equivalent to Donald Trump’s violently anti-renewables policies if Nigel Farage ever enters No.10.[40]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBG7KBVWo6M.

[2] https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics.

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/24/britain-net-zero-economy-booming-cbi-green-sector-jobs-energy-security#:~:text=The%20net%20zero%20businesses%20accounted,a%209%25%20jump%20in%202023.

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/13/eform-uk-abandoning-manifesto-pledge-tax-cuts-deputy-leader-admits

[5] The Reform UK name and brand were adopted in January 2021, replacing the Brexit Party, which itself was founded in 2018. While Reform UK is not a formal successor to any other political party, there are significant continuities in terms of personnel and policy between the party and UKIP, as well as links to other early Eurosceptic groups such as the Referendum Party and the Anti-Federalist League.

[6] https://yougov.co.uk/ratings/politics/popularity/politicians-political-figures/all.

[7] https://www.spiked-online.com/2015/03/09/im-taking-on-the-establishment-and-they-hate-me-for-it/.

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/mar/04/ukip-energy-climate-policies.

[9] https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/has-nigel-farage-quietly-forced-reform-uk-to-u-turn-on-climate-change-denial/.

[10] https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/has-nigel-farage-quietly-forced-reform-uk-to-u-turn-on-climate-change-denial/.

[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20011031164140/http://www.ukip.org/html/manifesto.html.

[12] https://web.archive.org/web/20040817020707/http:/www.ukip.org/index.php?menu=manifesto&page=manifestolocalenvironment.

[13] https://web.archive.org/web/20071214042938/http://www.ukip.org/ukip/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=227&Itemid=66

[14] https://figshare.le.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/The_UK_Independence_Party_Understanding_a_Niche_Party_s_Strategy_Candidates_and_Supporters/10135766?file=18266822.

[15] https://web.archive.org/web/20100429141926/http://www.ukip.org/media/policies/UKIPmanifesto1304.pdf ;

https://web.archive.org/web/20131008000001/http://www.ukipmeps.org/uploads/file/energy-policy-2014-f-20-09-2013.pdf ;

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/09/16/reform-uk-council-backs-climate-denial-motion-saying-man-made-climate-change-is-unproven/.