The UAE’s ruling royal family is benefiting from tens of millions in EU subsidies to grow crops destined for the Gulf, it can be revealed.

A new cross-border investigation, shared with The Guardian, found that subsidiaries controlled by the Al Nahyans collected over €71 million (£61 million) in just six years for farmland it controls in Romania, Italy and Spain.

The Al Nahyan family is the second richest in the world, with an estimated wealth of more than $320 billion (£235 billion), mostly derived from the emirates’ vast oil reserves. 

Subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) make up a third of the EU’s entire budget, paying out around €54 billion (£46.6 billion) each year to farmers and rural areas across the bloc. But an unknown proportion of this ends up in the hands of foreign investors — including those controlled by autocratic states.

This story was published in partnership with The Guardian, eldiario, and G4media.

DeSmog, in partnership with El Diario and G4Media, reviewed data for thousands of CAP beneficiaries between 2019 and 2024, tracing 110 European subsidy payments to a network of companies and subsidiaries controlled by the UAE’s Al Nahyan family and one of its sovereign wealth funds, ADQ.

The largest of these payments came through the Romanian agricultural company Agricost, which owns the EU’s single largest farm, measuring 57,000 hectares, five times the size of Paris.

EU farm subsidies disproportionately benefit large landowners. In 2024 alone, Agricost received €10.5 (£9 million) in direct payments — more than 1,600 times the amount collected by the average EU farm.

Campaigners have expressed alarm that the UAE, which has been widely condemned for jailing activists, criminalising homosexuality and multiple allegations of torture – repeatedly denied by the UAE – benefits from regular EU farm payouts.

The Al Nahyans and companies named in this article did not respond to multiple requests for comment. ADQ declined to respond. 

The findings come as policymakers debate the future of the subsidy scheme. In July, the European Commission published a proposal for the next round of CAP payments for 2028 to 2034 — which could cap land-based payments to €100,000 per farmer each year. The proposal has been met with fierce opposition from European ministers, some MEPs, and industry lobby groups.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told DeSmog via email that it believed income support through CAP payments “should be better targeted including by reducing and capping payments for the bigger farms”, and is calling on the European Parliament and Council to support its proposed changes to the subsidy system.

“The CAP is not helping EU farmers; it continues to enrich the wealthiest landowners,” said Faustine Bas-Defossez, director for nature, health and environment at the Brussels-based advocacy group the European Environment Bureau. “And now, even worse, it is fuelling autocratic regimes.”

Agricultural Acquisitions

The Al Nahyans are the most powerful monarchy in the United Arab Emirates, which is made up of seven federated states, each with its own royal family. At the helm is Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE.

In just over 15 years, the Emirati dynasty has established itself as a major global agricultural player, acquiring swathes of land and agribusiness companies across Africa, South America and Europe. The UAE now controls around 960,000 hectares of farmland worldwide.

This expansion forms part of the Emirates’ wider food security strategy, aimed at securing supplies for a country where high temperatures, water scarcity, and sandy soil make growing crops a major challenge. The UAE currently imports up to 90 percent of its food.

The investigation found that in the EU, the expansion has been channelled through three main companies — in Spain, Italy and Romania. 

Agricost, Romania’s vast farm, was bought by the Al Nahyans in 2018 for an estimated €230 million (£198 million) through Al Dahra, the UAE agribusiness group. Al Dahra was founded by the president’s brother Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, before Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, ADQ, purchased 50 percent of the firm in 2020.

No information on Al Dahra’s current ownership structure is publicly available, but DeSmog understands that it remains linked to individuals on the board, which is chaired by Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed, and his son, Sheikh Zayed Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, who is married to the UAE president’s daughter.

Since 2012, Al Dahra has also acquired multiple farm companies in Spain, responsible for over 8,000 hectares of land. Together, these received more than €5 million (£4.3 million) in CAP subsidies between 2015 and 2024, DeSmog found.

The UAE’s Spanish and Romanian farms both cultivate alfalfa and other crops for animal feed, with the majority of produce designed for export, including to the Gulf. Al Dahra holds a long-term contract with the UAE government to supply animal feed for the country, partly used for its rapidly growing dairy sector.

In 2022, sovereign wealth fund ADQ also purchased Unifrutti, a fruit producer with an estimated worth of $830 million (£610 million). According to DeSmog’s analysis, Unifrutti’s Italian farms received at least €186,000 in CAP subsidies in the three years following the sale. 

The size of payouts to the UAE reflects major issues with the way CAP subsidies are calculated, which are largely based on the area of land farmed. The European Commission’s proposal to cap direct payments would impact only a fraction (0.5 percent) of the EU’s top landowners, who currently capture 16 percent of the entire CAP budget. The UAE’s receipt of EU subsidies is “a scandal hiding in plain sight”, says Thomas Waitz, an Austrian Green Party MEP and party coordinator for the agriculture committee.

“Ninety-nine percent of real European farmers receive less than €100,000 in subsidies. That money was never meant for fossil fuel dynasties, it’s meant to strengthen real European farmers.”

Al Nahyan Control

The subsidised farms make up just one strand of Al Dahra and ADQ’s agricultural push in Europe — an expansion which includes grain mills in Greece and Bulgaria, as well as massive dairy farms in Serbia.

Despite technically being state-owned, ADQ is closely controlled by the UAE’s ruling royal family, experts say. 

“There is no clear boundary between the state and family coffers,” Marc Valeri, associate professor in political economy of the Middle East at the University of Exeter, told DeSmog. “This is a very authoritarian and centralised regime, and the difference between state budgets and family budgets is completely blurred.”

The UAE has some of the largest sovereign assets in the world — as of 2025 its seven wealth funds hold almost $2.5 trillion (£1.84 trillion). 

These assets are largely managed by close relatives of the president. Between 2023 and January 2026, ADQ was chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president’s brother and the country’s national security advisor. Tahnoon is known as the “spy sheikh” over accusations that he has orchestrated cyberwarfare against dissidents, and individuals and institutions overseas, including in the UK. Tahnoon has never publicly addressed these claims.

Since January, ADQ has become part of Abu Dhabi’s newest sovereign wealth fund L’imad Holding, which is chaired by the Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the president’s eldest son and likely successor. 

‘Monopoly’

The subsidies traced by DeSmog may provide just a snapshot of the total EU payments benefiting Gulf royals, due to patchy official data and a lack of transparency by UAE corporations. 

All EU countries are required to publish information on the farms and farm owners receiving CAP subsidies. However, the entries only name the direct recipient — making it difficult or sometimes impossible to identify the ultimate owners and investors benefiting from the funds. Unifrutti, for example, owns farms in Sicily and the Almeria region of Spain, but no information about the subsidies received by these companies could be found. 

Experts say that these kinds of large-scale foreign investments have contributed to major shifts in the EU’s farming landscape. 

Official figures show that the EU lost 5.6 million farms between 2005 and 2023, the vast majority of which were small-scale, with many bought out by larger producers. Romania saw the greatest decline of all member states.

In Spain, farmers selling alfalfa to be processed by Al Dahra said that the company’s control over the region poses major risks for their income. 

“Here in the village they have a lot of power; we all end up having to go through Al Dahra. They set the price, and that’s that,” Josep Ripoll, a farmer in Fondarella, Catalonia, home to Al Dahra Europe’s headquarters, told El Diario. 

“It’s a monopoly — [we have to] take it or leave it. I was much better off before they arrived.”

Christian Henderson, lecturer in modern Middle East studies at the University of Leiden, says that these kinds of large-scale foreign investments in land can also pose major challenges for countries like Romania, which has been hit by a major cost of living crisis in recent years, with soaring food prices.

“What does it mean for a society when [agricultural] resources are turned over to foreign investors? Most of the commodities are immediately exported.”

Morgan Ody, general coordinator of the smallholder union La Via Campesina and a vegetable farmer in Brittany, France, describes the flow of subsidies to the UAE as “a waste of public money”.

“This is not how European citizens want their money to be spent — these farms aren’t even producing food for them,” she told DeSmog.

“This kind of scandalous spending of EU money shows the failure of the current CAP system, where payments are based on the farm area. We need to refocus CAP on land workers, on those who work the land and produce food.”

This investigation was published in partnership with The Guardian, eldiario.es and G4Media.

Fact-checking and additional reporting by Brigitte Wear
Editing by Phoebe Cooke

The post Gulf Royal Family Banks Over €70 Million in EU Farming Funds appeared first on DeSmog.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has banked more than £2 million in earnings and gifts since becoming an MP, DeSmog can reveal.

Farage has come under fire in recent days for failing to declare a £5 million gift from major Reform donor Christopher Harborne prior to the 2024 general election, potentially in violation of parliamentary rules.

Despite this tax-free handout, Farage has used his time in Parliament to earn millions from second jobs, speaking events, and trips abroad.

DeSmog’s analysis shows that Farage has registered more than £2 million in financial interests since July 2024, when he was elected as the MP for Clacton.

His principal employer has been the right-wing broadcaster GB News, which has now paid Farage £700,000 since July 2024. The Reform leader – who presents a show on GB News – registered another £40,662 from the outlet last week.

This income has been received on top of Farage’s £94,000-a-year public salary.

He also listed a new gift from South African businessman Avi Lasarow, who gave the Reform leader three tickets to a boxing match on 4 April worth £1,749.

“Nigel Farage is a multi-millionaire who is out for himself and working for the interests of his super-rich friends,” a Green Party spokesperson said. “His whole career has been focused on personal gain and public division. He is failing his constituents and has no positive plan to help ordinary people with the cost of living crisis, housing or improving public services.”

Since becoming an MP, Farage has accepted £272,000 in gifts, including several private jet flights to the United States, and F1 tickets provided by the Abu Dhabi government.

“That Farage has amassed £2 million from personal earnings and gifts while a sitting member of Parliament should concern anyone who thinks an MP’s job is to represent their constituents,” said Kamila Kingstone, a senior campaign lead at Spotlight on Corruption.

“It’s a systemic issue and highlights a wider failure of the rules that are supposed to ensure integrity in public life. It risks blurring the lines between public service and private interests, creating the perception – and in some cases a reality – that some politicians are in it for themselves.”

DeSmog revealed in April that over 70 percent of Farage’s patrons are based abroad – including Harborne, the Thailand-based crypto investor who has gifted flights and accommodation to Farage worth £85,453 since July 2024.

Harborne, who owns a jet fuel supplier, has donated £22 million to Reform on top of the £5 million that he gifted to Farage before the 2024 general election.

His contributions to the party are now in jeopardy after Labour introduced new rules that cap political donations from overseas residents to £100,000 a year. In response, Harborne has committed to finding a loophole through which he can donate even larger sums to Reform.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he told The Telegraph – adding: “I don’t believe the government has a right to stop me, and they won’t.”

Reform UK is the UK’s leading anti-climate party, with several of its senior figures – including Farage – having denied basic climate science. The Reform leader has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant, while his deputy Richard Tice has called it “plant food”.

“The government urgently needs to impose tougher limits on MPs’ second jobs,” Kingstone added, “so that the public can be confident that their representatives are working in the public interest rather than to line their own pockets.”

Reform and Farage were approached for comment.

A version of this article was published by The Guardian.

The post Nigel Farage Has Accepted £2 Million Since Becoming an MP appeared first on DeSmog.

For years, Canadian officials and oil industry backers have pitched carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the solution that would allow Alberta’s oil sands — and the nation’s proposed west coast pipeline — to proceed with a lower climate impact. Now, in a speech at this year’s Canada Strong and Free Network (CSFN) conference in Vancouver, keynote speaker and former British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell warned the costly, troubled technology has failed to deliver, undercutting a central justification for billions in public subsidies and new oil infrastructure.

This reporter was there in person at the April 24 CSFN gathering. Formerly the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, the CSFN self-describes as supporting “conservative and libertarian activists and ideas in Canada”. Imagine a MAGA-adjacent gabfest featuring speakers mostly cheerleading extractive industries or fear-mongering about First Nations rights. My already low expectations were not exceeded. 

However, there was an unexpected utterance of truth from Campbell, who was the first elected leader in North America to bring in a carbon tax. And what does he think about the technology being touted to clean up ballooning emissions from the Alberta oil sands and justifying a new pipeline to the BC coast? 

“It’s time to take off the blinders. Carbon capture and storage is something we’ve talked about in Canada for more than a generation, more than 25 years,” he told the conference. “We’ve invested billions of dollars trying to convince ourselves that carbon capture and storage will work. It doesn’t work. It costs money. And that money is money that we take out of other potential productive resources that we could have for Canadians.”

Campbell was certainly not suggesting that fossil fuel extraction be scaled back. His comments instead pointed out that pretending to solve emissions problems with expensive and ineffective carbon capture and storage is an unwise waste of scarce public resources. This unusual truth-bomb from a public figure stands in stark contrast to the theater playing out in Alberta and Ottawa, where CCS is being heavily promoted and backed by billions in public money as a panacea for oil sands climate costs. 

Even a Pathways Alliance co-founder is now publicly coming out against the CCS project in a recent Globe and Mail op-ed, equating long-delayed efforts by the oil patch to limit its massive carbon emissions with a cash-strapped household wasting money on a vacation or meal deliveries. Is Big Oil now pivoting away from a marquee carbon capture project it never intended to build?

Meanwhile the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that the $20 billion CCS project  being promoted by the Pathways Alliance will make “Alberta oil among the lowest carbon intensity-produced barrels of oil in the world.” This multi-billion-dollar boondoggle has been offered as a “grand bargain” between Ottawa and Alberta to facilitate a new bitumen pipeline outlined in their now-overdue memorandum of understanding.

This confident public posturing was made despite internal briefing notes accessed by DeSmog showing Pathways had “…few front end engineering (FEED) studies done and initial cost estimates based on very limited project information”.

DeSmog previously reviewed 12 large scale CCS projects around the world and found “a litany of cost-overruns and missed targets, with a net increase in emissions.” Only 50MT of CO2 are sequestered each year by CCS, representing a mere 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gases. 

A recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature showed that a shortage of suitable geological formations worldwide limit CCS to mitigating only a puny portion of dangerous emissions. And even if injecting all production emissions underground was somehow perfectly effective, it would do nothing to alleviate the other 80-90 percent of downstream tailpipe greenhouse gases.

Such shaky fundamentals have apparently had little impact on government enthusiasm for throwing billions in public money towards dubious CSS schemes. The federal government has committed to covering half of the $20 billion estimated cost of the Pathways CCS project in tax credits, and the Alberta government is pledging to shovel billions more towards the highly profitable members of the Pathways Alliance. 

Pathways Alliance companies — recently renamed as the Oil Sands Alliance —  include Canada Natural Resources Ltd, Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil, MEG Energy, and Suncor, representing 95 percent of Alberta’s bitumen production. These giants enjoyed $37 billion in combined profit in 2023 and will reap billions more in windfall profits with oil above $100 per barrel due to Trump’s war on Iran. 

A ‘Generous Transfer Provision’

A good yardstick of whether the Pathways project is credible is revealed in action, not words. Despite years of public spin and lobbying by Pathways members, the largest bitumen producers still stubbornly refuse to pony up any of their own money towards beginning construction even as Canadians struggle with historically high prices at the gas pump. 

If carbon capture is so safe, why has the oil patch lobbied to wash its hands of long-term CCS liabilities? In a system unique to Alberta, the province assumes the long-term risks associated with CO2 storage once a closure certificate has been issued, a concession to the oil industry described as one of the most “generous transfer provisions” of any CCS scheme in the world. 

Documents obtained by the Narwhal also revealed that Pathways Alliance president Kendall Dilling asked Ottawa for “assurance that the Pathways pipeline, hub and capture projects would not require a federal review under the Impact Assessment Act.” 

In Alberta, regulators allowed the largest CCS project in the world to be broken into over 120 separate proposals to avoid triggering a provincial environmental assessment. Does this kind of maneuvering inspire confidence? 

Not for local residents facing risks of a potentially deadly CO2 leak from a pipeline rupture, as occurred in Sataria, Mississippi where 49 people were hospitalized in 2020. Rural Albertans living close to the proposed 600 kilometre CO2 pipeline from the oil sands to Cold Lake have recently come together in an unlikely alliance of farmers and Indigenous leaders opposed to the Pathways project called “No CO2 Pipelines.” 

“Thousands of Albertans like me live directly in this project’s ‘hazard zone’”, said Penny Fox, No CO2 Pipelines co-founder, in a press release.  “In an explosion, people in our communities are facing anything from breathing issues to brain damage to instant death. So I have one question for the Prime Minister: if you wouldn’t live next to this pipeline, why should we?” 

“We’re talking about hundreds of kilometers of pipeline that pass directly through areas where we live, hunt, fish and exercise our treaty rights”, Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation has said. “This project endangers our people, our land, our water and wildlife. And yet there has been no consultation, no information sharing, and no formal environmental assessment.”

Gordon Campbell makes a good point. The Pathways project will cost the taxpayers billions and do nothing to contain the vast majority of ultimate oil sands emissions. Other Canadian industries have managed to cut greenhouse gases by one quarter since 2005, while bitumen producers have seen their emissions explode by 143 percent over the same period. 

Why should highly profitable oil industry laggards still expect public handouts before cleaning up their own mess? 

The post Former BC Premier Gordon Campbell: Carbon Capture ‘Doesn’t Work’ appeared first on DeSmog.

Hosted by Covering Climate Now

Thursday, May 7 12:00 p.m. EDT

In April, a climate denial conference hosted in Washington, D.C., and boasting US Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin as a keynote speaker signaled a new era in US politics: from a slow but growing embrace of climate science in federal policy to outright rejection of the scientific consensus.

Join Covering Climate Now for a special webinar, with DeSmog reporter Rei Takver alongside Manon Jacob, Climate Digital Investigation Reporter for Agence France-Presse, and Maxine Joselow, Climate Policy Reporter for The New York Times, as they explore how the Trump administration’s overt embrace of climate denialism in Washington is creating a permission structure for more denial at the highest levels of government in the US and beyond.

Rei will discuss her story, co-published with The Guardian, “Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz,” which covers Donald Trump’s assaults on the legal foundation for U.S. regulations on global warming emissions, and how climate deniers have been celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda.
 
“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the “World Prosperity Forum,” a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, Rei reports.

The World Prosperity Forum’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration.

“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.

Join in on Thursday, May 7, at 12:00 p.m. EDT for this virtual conversation about the Trump administration’s embrace of climate denialism, what that could mean for the future of US climate policy, and how to cover it

You won’t want to miss it.

Register and submit your questions here.

The recording will be available on Covering Climate Now’s YouTube page.

The post Event | How Climate Denialism Is Evolving With Trump in Office appeared first on DeSmog.

A prominent ultra-conservative think tank with a long history of climate denial and close ties to the Trump administration is questioning whether all Americans should be allowed to cast ballots in elections. 

“Look, I’m going to say something very controversial: Not every adult over the age of 18 should have the right to vote,” Jim Lakely, communications director of the Heartland Institute, said during an early April episode of the group’s In the Tank podcast. 

Heartland was a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for Trump’s second term.
 
 “We did not have universal suffrage when the framers of the Constitution founded this country. It varied a little bit state-to-state, but basically you had to be a white man. You had to be an owner of property, and a certain amount of property, and that pretty much was only white men,” Lakely said. “We’re never going back to that, of course, and I wouldn’t actually argue for that. But there’s something to be said for the way they set that up on purpose, and it was because they wanted only people who have a stake in the country — mainly the people paying taxes to support the government — should have the franchise and be able to select the direction of the government.”

Lakely’s comments, which DeSmog has quoted in full at his request, came just days before Heartland hosted a two-day conference in Washington, D.C. keynoted by Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Zeldin has been floated to replace Pam Bondi as Trump’s attorney general. 

Zeldin praised the Heartland Institute, which has long been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation and strongly backed the EPA’s recent repeal of the “endangerment finding,” the Obama-era determination that under-girded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating air pollution.

It was time to “celebrate vindication” of the group’s decades of anti-climate campaigning, Zeldin said.

All Americans should be worried that a top Trump cabinet official openly lauded a group that questions universal suffrage, said climate scientist Michael Mann, the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. 

“Heartland’s authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda is now exposed for all to see,” Mann told DeSmog in email. “The assault on climate action and the assault on democracy are one and the same, an effort to advance the authoritarian agenda of fossil fuel interests and the politicians in their pay.”
 
 When approached for comment, the EPA told DeSmog: “Administrator Zeldin is doing something genuinely different at EPA, refocusing the agency on its core mission of protecting human health and the environment and exercising its statutory authority as written, not as expansively reimagined in prior years. Administrator Zeldin will continue advancing President Trump’s agenda on behalf of the Americans who elected him to do exactly that.”

‘Reduce the Franchise’

During the podcast, Heartland senior fellow S.T. Karnick backed up Lakely’s comments about voting. “The original plan in America was that votes would go one vote to each property-holding family,” Karnick said. “That has been hacked away at throughout the decades and for a two and a half centuries now.”

“Now, can you go back?” he added. “Well, anything’s possible, but it wouldn’t be the same country we’re living in in any way to start to reduce the franchise.” Karnick said that an alternative solution would be to “repeal the doggone 17th Amendment,” the 1913 addition to the Constitution that established the direct election of U.S. senators, and return to having senators elected by state legislatures. “It would be a way of pulling away from the popular votes,” he said.  

Heartland Research Fellow Linnea Lucken and Editorial Director Chris Talgo also appeared on the podcast.

During the Heartland podcast, Lakely made the false claim that the use of mail-in ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic created “quite a bit” of “easy natural election fraud,” saying that “if you could go to the grocery store, if you could go to a BLM [Black Lives Matter] march, you can get in line at your local polling place and vote and participate in the election.” When DeSmog approached Lakely for comment about this last claim, Lakely responded: “I stand by that.”
 
 Zeldin, a longtime Trump supporter, has previously endorsed similar claims. Following Trump’s loss of the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Zeldin — then a House member representing New York’s 1st Congressional District — “sided with Republicans who were amplifying doubts about its legitimacy,” according to The New York Times, and shared ideas with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on how to discredit Biden’s win. On January 6, 2021, Zeldin voted against certifying the election results.

The following year, while running as the Republican candidate for governor of New York, Zeldin was disqualified from getting his ticket an additional ballot line for the Independence Party, because nearly 13,000 of the petition signatures his campaign submitted to the state elections board were photocopied duplicates.
 
 Soon after taking over the EPA in 2025, Zeldin promised that the agency would begin “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Since then he has revoked billions in climate funding, slashed thousands of EPA staff, and rolled back dozens of clean air and water protections.
 
 In his Heartland keynote address, Zeldin argued that these rollbacks were “what the American public voted for” when they re-elected Trump. 

The EPA chief praised the Heartland audience for being “right there on the front lines” of opposition to the endangerment finding. “I appreciate all of you for having the thoughtfulness years and decades ahead of your time.”

Attorney General Zeldin?

If Zeldin replaced Bondi, he would oversee the Justice Department’s defense of his EPA actions in court, including lawsuits by states and environmental groups over the endangerment finding repeal.

“The Supreme Court, in my opinion quite correctly, would say that the EPA should not be putting forth trillions of dollars in regulations without there being a vote in Congress,” Zeldin said in his speech, adding that members of Congress are “the ones who, as recently as this upcoming November [mid-term elections], put their name on the ballot, go before the people, and the American public will decide who in this republic will represent them.”

Zeldin’s record of election denial would fit right in at the top of the current Justice Department.

Since Trump took office, the department has shifted from enforcing voting rights laws — including scrutinizing whether states are conducting fair elections and prosecuting threats against election officials — to investigating alleged voter fraud. Most of the lawyers working in the Voting Section of the agency’s Civil Rights Division have left, according to reporting by Wired, and many of their replacements have ties to election denial groups.

Right now, Trump’s cratering approval ratings with voters paint a grim picture for Republicans in the November elections  — but as part of his efforts to manipulate the mid-terms, the Trump Justice Department has been openly coming to their aid. 

Under former AG Bondi, the department began collecting voter data from cooperative states — and suing dozens of states to get more — apparently hoping to direct purges of the rolls. The FBI in January raided an election office and seized 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, which Trump lost, although It’s well-established that voter fraud is very rare in the United States, and didn’t happen in 2020.

A number of red states have already answered Trump’s call to create more House seats for Republicans by redrawing their election districts. Now more are on the way because in late April the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, handing down a ruling that effectively lets states redraw their election districts in ways that weaken the voting power of Blacks and other minorities.

Within hours of the decision, several southern states began taking steps to create election maps that will increase the number of Republican House seats.

Badge of Dishonor

The Heartland Institute, which has denied that humans are driving climate change, calling it a “delusion,” has boasted of its “strong” ties to “big individuals” in the Trump administration.

During Trump’s first term, as DeSmog reported at the time, Heartland advised the EPA on staffing and policy decisions. “They recognized us as the pre-eminent organization opposing the radical climate alarmism agenda and instead promoting sound science and policy,” said Tim Huelskamp — a former Republican congressman who was then leading Heartland — in 2018.
 
 Heartland also advised a member of the administration’s National Security Council, longtime climate denier William Happer, on how to discredit the fact that burning fossil fuels was driving dangerous levels of global heating.

When Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, he invited Heartland’s then-CEO Joseph Bast to attend the announcement at the White House.

The Heartland Institute received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil. It has received donations from Republican donors in the Mercer family, as well as foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a fossil fuel giant and a leading sponsor of climate science denial.

“What a badge of dishonor it is to be a keynote speaker at this plutocrat-funded propaganda event masquerading as a ‘conference,” Mann said to DeSmog, referencing Zeldin’s ties to the group. “Polluting interests can only advance their agenda of a fossil fuel-dependent America by keeping Republicans in power.”

The post Heartland Institute Podcast Questions Whether All Americans ‘Should Have the Right to Vote’ appeared first on DeSmog.

In mid-April, Indigenous leaders from British Columbia traveled to Ottawa to protest against the federal government’s aggressive support for fossil fuel expansion.

Mark Carney’s Liberal government is fast-tracking multiple LNG projects in British Columbia, including the recent approval of Enbridge’s $4 billion natural gas pipeline expansion.

Securing Indigenous support for fossil fuel projects has been a cornerstone strategy of Canada’s oil and gas sector in recent years, with companies promising considerable benefits on the one hand while highlighting Indigenous involvement as an aspect of corporate responsibility on the other.

Not everyone is on board however, and Indigenous communities have been some of the most vocal opponents of major Canadian energy projects, including Union of BC Indian Chiefs representative Kitisha Paul, who argued at the Ottawa protest that fossil fuel expansion is causing the “deterioration of our land, our water.” 

Kai Nagata, an energy campaigner with the B.C.-based environmental non-profit Dogwood, has spent years working with Indigenous communities on the front-lines of opposition to new oil and gas infrastructure, a role that’s included deep research into the benefit agreements offered by industry as well as the foreign investors set to cash-in from new gas pipelines and export terminals. In an extensive Q&A with DeSmog, Nagata illuminates some of the tensions around promises of Indigenous participation in new fossil fuel projects, and the ways in which these supposedly “nation building” projects are tied to the U.S. and the MAGA movement.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To what extent are Indigenous communities participating in the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure in British Columbia?

Coastal GasLink, a gas pipeline built across Northern BC, has zero percent Indigenous equity ownership. Sixty-five percent of the pipeline is owned by KKR, which is a New York private equity firm, and 35 percent remains with TC Energy Corporation.  

The LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat has zero percent Indigenous ownership, as it’s owned by Royal Dutch Shell and a consortium of Asian oil companies, some of which are state-owned.

The financing for these projects came from U.S., Canadian, Japanese and some Chinese banks. So the investors, the shareholders, the owners, and indeed many of the senior project staff and people involved in engineering and building the thing are not even Canadian, let alone Indigenous. 

The only LNG project that has Indigenous ownership right now in BC is Cedar LNG. So the Haisla Nation has a 50 percent stake in the terminal, but they’re buying the gas from Coastal GasLink, which is owned by KKR. And KKR also has a midstream infrastructure partnership with Pembina Pipelines, which is the Haisla’s partner on Cedar LNG. So they’re not outside the orbit of KKR by any means.

With Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline (PRGT) or the Ksi Lisims project, which are being advanced by this Texas company [Western LNG] with Wall Street investors, they’ve really been at pains to make it seem like this is an Indigenous-owned project. That’s how it’s been pitched by the provincial government. And that’s just not true.
 
 (Author’s note: filings with the BC Environmental assessment office show Western LNG is the primary owner and operator of the Ksi Lisims project).

Companies are riding this wave of concern over the poor treatment of Indigenous people historically in Canada and the need to make that up to them.They’re calling this ‘economic reconciliation’: here’s an opportunity for a small number of your governing elite to cash in, with hopefully some long-term benefits for the broader population on your reserve or in your nation.

Can you speak more to the kinds of agreements companies have signed with Indigenous communities?

Every deal is different, and they’re all secret. So that’s the first sign they might not stand up to scrutiny.

During the initial negotiations around the PRGT, which was back in 2014, you had band councils and hereditary chiefs signing impact benefit agreements. That was the same era as Coastal GasLink. Prior to that era of projects, the older model involved people from industry coming into Indigenous communities and saying “you people need to get out of the way now, the bulldozers are coming.”

Recognizing that that approach carried material risk for projects, the energy companies started crafting impact benefit agreements. They follow a similar template, basically an Indigenous community gets some limited financial benefits upfront. They get a promise of ongoing financial benefits, often very modest, but in return, they have clauses that are pretty draconian, like you have to prevent any of the members of your Indigenous group from speaking out against this industry or this project, and that can include on social media.

How do you get people to agree to that?

If your chief and council signs a closed-door deal with a pipeline company, it may contain clauses like your band members can’t shit talk this project on Facebook. That came out of a leaked benefit agreement that was signed with Coastal GasLink.

The chief and council weren’t sure if it was a good idea. So they put it out to a plebiscite and the community voted against it. Then they said there were ‘problems with the process’, so they took it to an in-camera vote. The council was split down the middle, so the chief himself passed the tie-breaking vote.

It actually came down to one guy—the band chief—after a democratic majority of band members rejected the deal. And the deal contained disparagement clauses. If community members disparaged the industry, the community could be held financially liable. I would characterize that as coercive. That’s not a deal anyone should sign. But when you have no leverage and when you’ve been dealing with the effects of poverty for 150 years, there’s a lot of immediate needs that these projects promise to fulfill.

Like what?

Kitselas First Nation recently signed an impact benefit agreement with Western LNG, the company developing the PRGT pipeline. They’re going to find some spaces for child care on the reserve, so that more people can go to work.

But childcare is a provincial responsibility. Except for First Nations. So you have a situation where they’re being deprived of services the non-Indigenous population receive from the provincial government, and are then forced to sign very one-sided deals with industrial projects to fund those basic social services.
 
 You create a situation where it feels like a pretty good deal if the pipeline goes through and you get a little revenue and maybe some childcare too. Obviously you’re gonna take the deal where you get something instead of nothing.

What are the risks of pursuing these projects for Indigenous partners?

There’s some really big risks around LNG right now, like what’s happening in global markets in Asia and Europe. Who carries those risks? Which investors are first in line to be paid? Which creditors are first to line if things go wrong? You might be the last in line to recoup your investment depending on the structure of the deal.

The trend is that the lawyers and the industry consultants—the people who jump from project to project around the world and arrange these big financing deals—they get paid right away. They don’t stick around to build the project. And I’m concerned by the fact that this current crop of LNG projects are all backed by Wall Street, because Wall Street doesn’t know anything about building pipelines or operating energy infrastructure.

But they do know how to ride a bubble.

They know to make money into other money, and they know how ruthlessly exploit a dying industry. Don’t forget, what we call ‘private equity’ today used to be called ‘leveraged buyouts’. And that may sound high-minded and complicated financial stuff, but really it’s just the same core business it was 40 years ago: either you turn around a troubled asset, or you fire all the workers and sell off the parts.

Vulture capitalism is a key component of private equity.

What happens when Indigenous communities resist projects, like in the case of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary chiefs and land defenders opposing the Coastal GasLink project

Pipelines in particular come with a whole playbook and a set of actors which are very practiced in operating in conflict zones and sites of recent political or environmental upheaval.

The companies that are building PRGT include Bechtel, which is a major U.S. military contractor, and one of the biggest privately-owned companies in the world. They manufacture weapons, build defense installations, and they do oil and gas work in shall we say the ‘imperial borderlands’, contested spaces. They’re deeply integrated with the U.S. security state and with U.S. foreign policy. And they have a playbook for dealing with the ‘restive local tribes’ or any other local community that might give the Americans a hard time over their globe-spanning infrastructure.

We saw an example of this with the Wetʼsuwetʼen when they contested Coastal GasLink. The company that bought the pipeline, KKR, has its own internal intelligence division, which is run by David Petraeus, who’s the former CIA director and was prior to that a top-ranking general who literally wrote the U.S. Armed Forces manual on counterinsurgency warfare.

And if you read his book, you see there’s a lot of familiar tactics that we saw adapted to Northern BC. We saw veterans of the War on Terror step in and take control of a physical space in a way that was new to people covering Canadian resource extraction projects.

You had American, British, Belgian, South African mercenaries essentially working as private security for the pipeline who were really directing the actions and collecting intelligence and evidence for the police who just got called in to do the hands-on stuff and make the arrests.

I would characterize what we witnessed there as a corporate counter-insurgency.

Do you view Indigenous participation in new fossil fuel projects part of the marketing scheme or a guarantee against another Wetʼsuwetʼen crisis?

Both the federal and provincial levels of government are doing all they can to de-risk these projects and entice these very small communities with limited fiscal capacity to invest in these multi-billion dollar projects which include loan guarantees and other kind of bespoke deals around transmission line access and that kind of thing. 

They’re bending over backwards to make these projects work because they know that [between the] combination of Indigenous ownership and the green branding around electrified LNG terminals, most people in Vancouver who see one news article will think “oh, a First Nation has decided to build a gas terminal in a place I’ve never visited. Sounds like they’re trying to protect the environment and it’s good to see native people get a stake in these projects after being on the sidelines for so long, good for them.”

In the case of the Haisla nation that has ownership over Cedar LNG, It’s up to them to determine whether these projects benefit their community, but we do need to consider how much information—and the quality of the information—the public, Indigenous or otherwise, has when making these decisions. In the small towns of Northern BC, there’s really no media scrutiny to speak of. The energy companies send their press releases to the local newspaper, the focus of which is how many jobs will be created, but there’s really no scrutiny of what the impact will be. And many of these decisions are happening behind closed doors anyways. We only find out the terms if they leak.

What was the calculus for investors in wanting to develop these projects?

Apollo Global Management invested in Western LNG and the development of the Ksi Lisims terminal back in 2018. They got in on the ground floor at a time when there were low LNG prices worldwide. There was a down cycle starting in about 2015, 2016, where we saw a huge wave of these projects get canceled because the markets weren’t there yet. The prices didn’t take off until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and that’s what kicked off the current gold rush.

Some of these people had the idea of using an emerging technology—modular floating LNG terminals—as a way to both lower the risk and lower the cost. The floating terminals are basically converted LNG bulk carriers, which can be moved around the world and hooked up wherever they’re needed. Instead of building a massive onshore terminal, the floating terminals are built in Korea and they can be hooked up in series to expand capacity.

Apollo saw the potential in that, not just the export terminals, but there are equivalent facilities that are built on ships for the import of LNG, which Apollo also invested in, in the same year. They really saw the opportunity for vertical integration in emerging markets where people need access to reliable electricity. And this is the cheap modular way to do it.

Leon Black is the former CEO who made that call and who got Apollo Global Management to be the first major Wall Street backer of the Ksi Lisims project, and it’s the only project that Western LNG has ever developed. The company was incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Texas, but it’s only ever existed to develop this project in BC.

You have talked about how the backers of the Ksi Lisims project are tied to the MAGA movement, can you tell me more about this? 

Steve Schwartzman, who runs Blackstone, (the other major investor in this project) is a top-10 donor to Trump. He’s bankrolling the MAGA movement. He’s a major advisor and donor to Trump, who is steering and financing what I would characterize as like an authoritarian political movement that is taking over institutions in the U.S. and openly wants to annex Canada for its resources.

It puts the question of Indigenous ownership in perspective, given the players. I really don’t think that they have the best interests of local people in their minds as they’re structuring these deals. They’re not here on a charitable project. The reason why they would empower the companies that they’re invested in to strike these deals with local First Nations is to give them the kind of political cover they need to get permits and authorizations and the loans.

The post How Canada’s LNG Push is Benefiting Trump and Shortchanging Indigenous People appeared first on DeSmog.

Senior executives, directors, and major investors from the world’s largest fertiliser and grain companies have sold shares worth more than $66 million (£49 million) during price hikes linked to the Iran war, DeSmog can reveal.

Since the outbreak of the conflict in February, provoked by a U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran, fertiliser prices have increased by almost 45 percent – leading wheat producers in Australia to pare back planting, and some UK farmers to warn they may not sow for the summer season, risking soaring global grain prices.

The increased costs come after Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route. Around one-third of the world’s fertiliser, 20 percent of liquefied natural gas, and 25 percent of seaborne oil usually passes through the strait. The vast majority of chemical fertilisers are made from fossil fuels. 

DeSmog’s new analysis found that insiders at three firms – fertiliser giants CF Industries and Nutrien, and grain company Archer Daniels Midland – have sold shares worth tens of millions since the outbreak of the conflict.

As commodity prices have increased, so have the share prices of the world’s largest fertiliser and grain companies. In March, Nutrien saw its share value grow by over 50 percent, and CF Industries by nearly 40 percent. Although grain company shares have increased less markedly, they have also shown an upward trend.

DeSmog found that Kenneth Alvin Seitz, the CEO of the world’s largest fertiliser company, Nutrien, sold shares worth almost $5 million (£3.7 million) in March 2026 after the outbreak of the Iran war, making a $1.8 million (£1.3 million) profit on the transaction.

Three senior vice presidents at Archer Daniels Midland also banked nearly $8.5 million (£6.3 million) selling shares.

The Financial Times reported last month that insiders at CF Industries sold more than $30 million (£22 million) in shares after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on 2 March. DeSmog’s analysis found that, in total, insiders at the firm have sold almost $50 million (£37 million) of shares since the war began.

In the U.S., Canada and, some European countries, publicly traded corporations must declare the sale of shares by insiders, including senior executives, board members, significant shareholders, and their close family members.

The findings come weeks after the United Nations’ World Food Programme warned that the conflict in the Middle East could push roughly 45 million more people into acute hunger. In the UK, food prices will rise by “at least” nine percent this year, according to warnings from the country’s Food and Drink Federation in late March.

“These findings are outrageous, but we shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mónica Vargas Collazos, head of the global programme at Grain, a sustainable food campaign group.

“When there are conflicts or other supply shocks, these companies use their monopoly power to jack up prices, extract mega profits, and enrich shareholders. Farmers and consumers pay the price.”

All the companies and individuals named were approached for comment, and there is no suggestion that they breached any rules or laws.

Fertiliser Boom

Bosses also cashed in during the Ukraine war. DeSmog’s findings reveal that insiders at five of the world’s largest fertiliser and grain companies – also including Bunge and Mosaic – sold shares worth nearly $515 million (£380 million) during price hikes liked to both the Iran and Ukraine wars.

W. Anthony Will, CEO of the world’s third largest fertiliser company CF Industries until January, sold shares worth over $150 million (£111 million) during price spikes linked to the conflicts. Will acted as an advisor to CF Industries until mid-March, and remained on its board until April.

Insiders at Archer Daniels Midland sold more than $90 million (£67 million) during the two wars, while insiders at Bunge unloaded shares for over $175 million (£129 million) during price spikes tied to the Ukraine war.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caused fertiliser prices to quickly peak, followed by further increases between August and December as Russia’s squeeze on Europe’s gas supply caused fertiliser manufacturers to pause some operations.

Insiders at CF Industries banked just under $180 million (£134 million) in share sales in the year following the invasion.

Jennifer Clapp, food security expert with IPES-Food, and a professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, told DeSmog that the findings underlined the need to move away from fossil fuels in food production.

“This crisis has revealed, in all too vivid terms, just how dependent our food system is on fossil fuels,” she said. “It is long past time to break free from this insecure oil-addicted model, and shift to more ecological forms of farming and more local, territorial food systems.”

Big Beneficiaries

In total, DeSmog identified 11 months where the Ukraine and Iran wars contributed to soaring fertiliser and grain prices. Insiders sold 45 percent more shares in these 11 months than in the three intervening years combined.

Company executives often pre-plan sales and acquisitions ahead of time to demonstrate that they are not trading based on insider knowledge or gaming the market. Of the 136 sales analysed, only 28 were linked to these plans – suggesting that the vast majority were deliberate, in-the-moment decisions based on high share prices.

Beneficiaries included CF Industries’ Christopher Bohn, the company’s current CEO, who sold more than 150,000 shares for over $13 million (£9.6 million) in February and August 2022. He was the company’s chief financial officer at the time.

Other beneficiaries included an executive vice president CF Industries who sold shares worth nearly $30 million (£22 million) during key moments of the Ukraine war.

Executives and board members are often awarded shares by firms as part of compensation plans. CF Industries awarded W. Anthony Will, its then CEO, more than 150,000 shares on 28 February 2022 at the end of a three year compensation plan. 

As part of compensation packages, companies can also give executives and directors the right to buy shares for several years at a fixed price, incentivising the individuals to increase their value. In multiple transactions, insiders were able to use this arrangement to purchase shares below market price, and then sell them for a significant profit.

Alongside his freely awarded shares, Will also purchased more than 1 million shares at below market price on 28 February. He then sold over 1.2 million shares worth $100 million (£74 million) the same day – four days after the Ukraine war broke out.

In one transaction, on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, CF Industries’ Christopher Bohn purchased more than 100,000 shares under price guarantees dating back as far as 2014. He sold these shares at up to double the price – making $4 million (£3 million) in profit.

“My actions were simply a rebalancing of my portfolio holdings during the first ’open window’ in which I was no longer in a senior management role, nothing more, nothing less,” Will said.

Grain Prices

Global wheat prices could rise by 4.2 percent if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for a sustained period, according to the Kiel Institute.

Rising grain prices have been caused in part by disruptions to oil and gas supply – increasing the cost of fertilisers and therefore of intensive food production.

Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge are part of the “ABCD” firms that collectively control more than 70 percent of the global grain market.

In 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the value of shares in the two companies increased by almost a third.

Beneficiaries included Juan R. Luciano, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, who purchased 300,000 shares at below-market price before selling them for almost three times the value in October 2022. He made a $18 million (£13 million) profit from the transaction.

The transaction was pre-planned, but will have been scheduled to take place on a particular date or once share prices reached a certain high.  

Archer Daniels Midland’s share price soared in October 2022 – the month when Russian leader Vladimir Putin upped threats to leave the Black Sea Grain Deal, which allowed for the safe export of grain, food, and fertiliser from Ukrainian ports.

The single biggest wins were made by Paul J. Fribourg and Continental Grain, a private investment firm and agribusiness conglomerate led by Fribourg and established by his family. Fribourg was a board member at Bunge until the end of 2022. He and Continental Grain sold shares worth nearly $170 million in March 2022, although they also appear to have begun selling off part of their stake in the months prior to Russia’s invasion.

Bunge told DeSmog that “Continental Grain has no current ownership position and exited its stake in Bunge in 2023.”

A spokesperson added that “Bunge’s role is to help keep essential food, feed and fuel supply chains moving safely and reliably, in compliance with all applicable laws.”

Fact checked by Brigitte Wear

The post Fertiliser and Grain Bosses Bank $66 Million Selling Shares During Iran War appeared first on DeSmog.

Reform UK has received £24 million from oil and gas interests, accounting for more than two thirds of its total income, DeSmog can reveal.

Led by Nigel Farage, the party is calling for new North Sea oil and gas drilling ahead of UK-wide elections in May on the ill-founded claim that it will cut energy bills.

DeSmog’s analysis reveals that 67 percent of Reform’s funding to date has come from donors with financial interests in fossil fuels, totalling more than £24 million.

A further £2.4 million has been donated by individuals who have disputed basic scientific facts about climate change.

“What these extraordinary numbers make clear is that Reform is less a political party and more a very highly paid public-facing lobby group for oil and gas interests,” said Jolyon Maugham, executive director of the Good Law Project campaign group.

The biggest chunk (£22 million) has been gifted by Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, whose firm AML Global sells jet fuel, which is made from crude oil. More than half (£12 million) of this figure was donated in 2025.

Another £1.7 million has come from hedge fund boss Jeremy Hosking, whose investment firm Hosking Partners has $440.8 million (around £326.5 million) invested in oil, gas, and coal. As revealed by DeSmog, Hosking Partners has ramped up its fossil fuel investments in recent months during the war in Iran, which has caused energy shortages and windfall profits for oil giants.

Reform has received more than £2 million from its deputy leader Richard Tice, a property millionaire who has denied that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing climate change – instead calling it “plant food”.

Farage has himself claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant.

The party has also accepted £230,000 from management consultancy First Corporate Consultants, whose owner Terence Mordaunt is a former chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The GWPF is the UK’s foremost climate denial group, and has claimed CO2 emissions are a “benefit to the planet”.

In total, Reform has received almost £26.7 million from climate deniers and fossil fuel interests since it was set up by Farage as the Brexit Party in 2019 – roughly three quarters (74 percent) of its total £36 million income.

IN NUMBERS: Reform’s smoggy £26 million

Reform – which is leading UK-wide polls at 25 percent – has vowed to “scrap net zero”, end subsidies for wind and solar power, approve new oil and gas exploration, lift the ban on fracking for shale gas, and open new coal power plants.

The party has doubled down on these policies during the Iran war. Earlier this month, Tice called for the UK to extract “every last drop” of oil and gas in the North Sea, and described new drilling as “our patriotic duty”.

Green Party MP Ellie Chowns told DeSmog: “When you receive nearly two thirds of your funding from vested interests, it is no surprise you dance to their tune.

“This exposes precisely why Reform wants to promote fossil fuels and undermine the green transition to renewables that would provide us with cheaper, secure energy.”

New climate modelling has indicated that a critical Atlantic current is significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought, while scientists have warned of a “rapidly closing window” to limit temperatures rises to 1.5C and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

In March, the UK’s independent Climate Change Committee said the entire cost of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050 would be less than a single fossil fuel price shock – two of which have been experienced by the UK in the past five years.

Meanwhile, a report by the New Economics Foundation last year concluded that Reform’s anti-renewables agenda could cost 60,000 jobs and wipe £92 billion off the economy.

“It isn’t exactly a shock to discover that the party most reliant on fossil fuel funding is also ignoring climate science and claiming that more drilling will solve all of our energy problems,” Angharad Hopkinson, political campaigner for Greenpeace UK, told DeSmog.

“But can they continue to hold that line as Trump’s war in Iran makes it more and more obvious that our dependence on oil and gas gives control over our energy prices to dictators and petrostates with no loyalty to the UK?”

Hopkinson added: “Reform is trying to walk a tightrope, presenting themselves as the party of patriotism while working to preserve foreign influence, rather than saving Britain money by switching to home-grown renewable energy and taking back control.”

Reform was approached for comment.

Reform’s Fossil Fuel Donors

Reform’s biggest donor is crypto investor Harborne, whose company AML Global supplies aviation and maritime fuel to a distribution network that includes “main and regional oil companies”, according to its website.

As reported by Private Eye, the price of jet fuel has doubled since the start of the war in Iran, which would benefit Harborne’s business interests.

One of AML Global’s past clients is the U.S. military, which made payments worth £115 million to AML Global’s Hong Kong division between 2020 and January 2026. It’s unclear if the U.S. military is still a client. 

Harborne and AML Global didn’t respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. In response to a similar enquiry in 2024, he posted a lengthy statement on the AML Global website, stating: “Firstly, I am not a climate science denier and secondly, I do not seek to influence any government through donations or lobbying regarding their policies on climate change or in favour of corporate interests.”

However, Harborne is by far the biggest donor to the UK’s leading anti-climate party. In addition to his £22 million in donations to Reform, The Guardian has revealed that he gave £5 million personally to Farage before the 2024 general election.

DeSmog analysed Electoral Commission data going back to Reform’s founding, along with company accounts and investment registers.

Reform has also received £1.7 million from hedge fund boss Hosking, whose firm Hosking Partners has extensive fossil fuel holdings.

Its latest filings at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show the hedge fund has $369.7 million (around £273.7 million) invested in oil and gas companies, and $71 million (around £52.6 million) invested in coal firms.

Hosking’s total fossil fuel investments increased by almost 54 percent in the first three months of 2026.

Hosking previously told DeSmog: “I do not have millions in fossil fuels; it is the clients of Hosking Partners who are the beneficiaries of these investments.” 

Reform also received £50,000 last year from Nova Venture Holdings. The company’s sole director, Jacques J. Tohme, is an oil executive with a long history in the industry. He is founder and managing partner at Samos Energy, which finances oil and gas projects in Southeast Asia. He previously founded Tailwind Energy – later merged with Serica Energy – an oil and gas company which operated in the North Sea and which “transacted” with Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil.

In November, the party accepted a further £200,000 from Ashley Mark Levett. He currently sits on the board of Monaco-based company, Levmet – a global commodities trader whose interests include fossil fuels.

Climate Denier Donors

Reform has also received more than £2.5 million from donors who have promoted climate science denial. 

The party’s deputy leader Tice has provided £2.3 million via his companies TISUN investments, Britain Means Business, and Leave Means Leave since the party’s founding in 2019.

Tice has described carbon dioxide as “plant food”, and told Sky News: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change the climate. Given that it’s gone on for millions of years, it will go on for millions of years.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, has said it is “unequivocal” that human influence has caused “unprecedented” global warming.

Tice has been accused of hypocrisy for calling renewable energy “a massive con” while fitting solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations on his commercial properties.

In 2023, Reform received £230,000 from First Corporate Consultants, a company owned by Terence Mordaunt, who chaired the GWPF from November 2019 to October 2021.

The GWPF has claimed that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised” when in fact it should be “two or three times” higher than current levels.

In reality, the IPCC has said CO2 emissions are causing dangerous climate change, fuelling extreme weather, crop failure, and excess deaths around the world.

Despite their opposition to climate science and their fossil fuel donations, Reform MPs represent some of the constituencies most at risk from extreme heat and flooding, including Farage’s constituency of Clacton and Tice’s seat of Boston and Skegness.

Other Big Donors of Note

Outside the scope of this analysis is Zia Yusuf, a multi-millionaire former tech entrepreneur and Reform’s home affairs spokesman, who has donated £206,000 to the party.

While he has attacked climate action, Yusuf has not explicitly denied the role of man-made CO2 emissions to global warming.

Yusuf donated to Reform ahead of the 2024 election, after which he was appointed as the party’s chairman.

Following the election, Yusuf attacked the Labour Party’s clean energy policies, saying: “Labour champagne socialists are restricting supply of the cheapest form of energy for ordinary citizens.”

He has called net zero “religious madness” and described North Sea oil and gas as “a gift from god”. He welcomed Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president in 2024 as a rejection of “net zero fanaticism”.

The same year, Reform received £247,000 from David Lilley, a metals and mining executive and a director at the investment firm Drakewood Capital. The company holds a 20 percent stake in VSA Capital, which claims to have “a deep knowledge of mining and oil and gas” and which provides banking and brokerage services to the industry. 

Lilley – an old friend of Farage – is also a director of Resolute 1850, a Reform-linked think tank rebranded as the Centre for a Better Britain. It was launched last year by right-wing academic James Orr to “support Reform with policy development, briefing and rebuttal”. Orr joined Reform as head of policy in February, having previously been a senior advisor to the party.

Reform has received a further £990,000 from property billionaire Nick Candy, who is Reform’s treasurer and who claims to have sought party funding from oil and gas executives. 

As DeSmog has reported, Candy also has financial interests in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a Gulf petrostate. In late 2024, his firm Candy Capital entered into a “strategic joint venture partnership” with Modon Holding, which is chaired by a board member of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

Between 2023 and 2025, the party accepted £95,000 from Panther Securities, a property investment company chaired by former UKIP donor Andrew Perloff, who has blamed rising inflation on climate policies and defended climate science deniers.

In June 2022, Perloff wrote: “Whilst they [scientists], of course, could be correct that global warming is happening, I feel it is worrying that those with different opinions are often prevented from presenting them for consideration.”

Reform has also received £36,000 from Heathrow Airport, which was found to be the world’s second most carbon-emitting airport in 2019. Heathrow has also donated to Labour and the Conservatives in recent years.

Farage’s Millions

Alongside these donations, Farage has received £664,000 since July 2024 from the anti-climate broadcaster GB News, which employs him as a presenter. The platform is co-owned by Paul Marshall, whose hedge fund had £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels as of June 2023.

As revealed by DeSmog, Farage has received gifts from the UAE, and has been lavished with £150,000 worth of flights to give speeches to U.S. anti-climate groups. 

Last year, Farage helped launch a UK-Europe branch of the Heartland Institute, a U.S. climate denial group which has described itself as “the world’s most prominent think tank supporting skepticism about man-made climate change”.

In total, Farage has received almost £2 million in earnings and gifts since his election in 2024, including £675,000 from foreign sources.

The post Revealed: Reform’s £24 Million from Fossil Fuel Interests appeared first on DeSmog.

For years, advertising executives have largely escaped criticism for glossing the images of major polluters.

But as climate protestors turn up at ad agency offices and dozens of U.S. states file lawsuits accusing oil companies of deliberately spreading disinformation, the industry is coming under increasing scrutiny. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called ad execs working with the fossil fuel industry “Mad Men fuelling the madness.”

Now, a new DeSmog report reveals which advertising companies have helped oil giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell spend a collective $1.5 billion on buying U.S. ad space since the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change in 2015.

Below we’ve ranked their CEOs — the real life “Mad Men” — according to the estimated amount of oil company ad spend serviced by their company on their watch. (Click on the portraits to read a profile of their firm).

Note: Two of these companies — IPG and Omnicom — merged in November but have been considered separately as they were individual entities throughout the analysis period.

Mark Read, who stepped down last year amid nosediving profits, was one of the more outspoken ad industry leaders on climate change, despite WPP consistently having the most fossil fuel clients of any advertising company in the world under his leadership. In 2022, Read argued against a burgeoning industry movement to divest from fossil fuel clients, telling an audience of financial analysts: “We are there to support them on [their energy] transition.” Since then, an ad made by WPP agency VML has been banned by the UK advertising regulator for misrepresenting Shell’s business as greener than it actually is; a U.S. Congressional committee report cited a series of ExxonMobil ads made by WPP agency Group SJR as examples of greenwashing; and campaigners lodged a complaint (yet to be ruled upon) with the OECD alleging WPP had broken guidelines on climate and human rights. At the time, a WPP spokesperson said, “Contrary to the claims being made, we adhere to the highest regulatory standards in our work for clients.”

The longest serving CEO in this list, John Wren has overseen Omnicom’s lucrative longstanding relationship with ExxonMobil — which has a long history of funding climate science denial. Most notably, a group of Omnicom ad agencies developed ExxonMobil’s long-running algae-fuel ads. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on advertising a “climate solution” that few experts believed would ever leave the lab. Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG in November means Wren’s combined oil and gas client list is now the longest of any advertising CEO in the world. Although Omnicom has made some promises to reduce its operational emissions, the firm has never made any public move under Wren to restrict the nature of its work for the fossil fuel industry.

An accountant by trade, Michael I. Roth’s 15 years at IPG saw the company sign with ExxonMobil in 2011. Since then, a group of IPG media-buying agencies have managed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ad space for the oil giant to help it reach its desired target audiences. Roth’s reign also saw IPG become the go-to advertising partner for Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company — although those ad dollars are not included in this analysis. Roth left IPG in 2020, having earned nearly $200 million across 15 years, according to executive intelligence firm Equilar. When inducting him into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame, the federation described him as “a champion-level voice for what is good and right.”

Arguably the most famous (and richest) man in the ad industry. WPP’s founder Sir Martin Sorrell turned wire basket maker Wire & Plastic Products into the biggest advertising company in the world — and until recently the biggest provider of communications services to the fossil fuel industry. Sorrell was knighted in 2000 for his contributions to the business world. By 2015, his annual salary was over $90 million. He eventually left WPP in a cloud of controversy over allegations of personal and financial misconduct. A Financial Times investigation at the time said anonymous interviews with WPP staff painted “a picture of routine verbal abuse of underlings and a blending of Sir Martin’s corporate and private life”. Sorrell denied all the allegations against him.  

“I strongly believe that a brand that [does] not invest into this [clean energy] transition will be out of business in 10 years,” declared Yannick Bolloré in August 2023. The following month, Havas won a multimillion-dollar contract to handle Shell’s global ad placement strategy. Shell had U-turned on its renewable energy targets in favour of maintaining oil and gas production just months earlier. Insiders told DeSmog at the time that employees were taken aback, having watched Bolloré cultivate a personal brand of caring about the climate (though the deal was less surprising if you knew the Bolloré family’s business empire is partly built on transporting oil). Facing Extinction Rebellion die-ins at the Havas offices and the loss of a climate-focused client, the youngest “Mad Man” on this list has dug in, repeating in various interviews that “the most effective change comes from within.” In the end, four Havas agencies ended up losing their B-Corp certifications for ethical businesses over the Shell deal, and Havas had to warn investors the reputational damage could impact its financial performance.

Dentsu’s CEOs have tended not to make personal statements in the media on advertising’s relationship with the fossil fuel industry. Nevertheless, under Hiroshi Igarashi’s leadership, Dentsu took a significant step when it decided to quietly publish its “advertised emissions” in an investor risk report — representing the amount of carbon pollution associated with the uplift in sales resulting from its advertising campaigns, such as an airline ad leading to greater demand for flights. Dentsu found these were 32 times higher than the emissions from its core operations, such as powering its offices. Igarashi has shown no sign of moving Dentsu on from its lucrative contracts with Chevron and Shell — two of 18 fossil fuel clients Dentsu currently serves, according to research by industry campaign group Clean Creatives.

Toshihiro Yamamoto started his career with Dentsu back in 1981. A full 26 years later, the Dentsu veteran replaced the outgoing Tadashi Ishii as CEO, tasked with steadying the ship after Ishii left in a cloud of controversy. Yamamoto’s five years in charge saw the Japanese ad giant add Shell to its client roster, when its business-to-business ad agency Merkle gained control of a share of the hundreds of millions the oil giant spends on advertising each year. By the time Yamamoto departed in 2021, Dentsu had upped its fossil fuel contracts from five when he started his tenure to at least 11, according to DeSmog research.

In September 2022, Philippe Krakowsky announced an “industry first” climate policy that would restrict its work with fossil fuel companies. The new policy didn’t apply to existing clients. In an internal memo at the time, Krakowsky — like Read and Bolloré — told staff, “it is important to be in the room” with clients such as ExxonMobil to “positively impact their business transformation journeys.” Since Krakowsky sent this email, ExxonMobil has said it plans to increase production by more than a million barrels a day by 2030 and build four new gas projects. In August, a DeSmog investigation published with the Financial Times revealed allegations from staff that IPG was in breach of Krakowsky’s climate policy, after leaked documents showed it was helping Saudi Aramco — the world’s biggest oil company — target government policymakers. IPG and Krakowsky did not respond to the allegations. Krakowsky became the Chief Operating Officer at Omnicom in November after IPG was bought by its New York rival, a deal which earned Krakowsky a $48.6 million payout.

Under Tadashi Ishii, Dentsu led Chevron’s advertising strategy in the U.S., making ads that painted the oil giant as a steward of the environment and promoted speculative climate solutions like carbon capture. One ad from 2012 said “protecting people and the environment is a core value” at Chevron. In 2013, Ishii oversaw the $3.2 billion purchase of UK ad agency Aegis.  The Aegis acquisition saw Dentsu inherit major fossil fuel contracts not included in the analysis, such as French oil giant TotalEnergies.

Note: Big Oil ad spend figures for each CEO only cover the years they were in charge from the 2015 Paris Agreement onwards, even if they were in the job prior to this.

Art by Sabrina Bedford. Design by Sari Williams.

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British advertising conglomerate WPP has helped oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP spend an estimated $1 billion on ads in the United States since the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, a new report shows. 

The figure is nearly twice the respective amounts linked to U.S. rivals Omnicom and Interpublic Group (IPG), which merged in November. London-based WPP was the leading advertising group serving America’s oil industry over the past decade, according to the analysis by DeSmog. 

During this period, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP had employed “deceptive and misleading” communications strategies designed to thwart policies to tackle the climate crisis by curbing the use of fossil fuels, a congressional investigation concluded in April 2024.

WPP’s services — from developing ideas for ads and designing logos, to securing ad space and analysing target audiences — were “crucial” to maintaining the oil industry’s public image, current and former WPP employees said. WPP is estimated to have earned millions of dollars a year from this work.

“The UK prides itself on climate leadership, and yet WPP, the supposed jewel of the British advertising industry, is facilitating dangerously misleading advertising in the U.S.,” said Victoria Harvey, holder of a PhD in the ad industry’s response to the climate crisis from the University of East Anglia, who reviewed DeSmog’s methodology.

“By creatively articulating the deception from big oil and gas, WPP has set the climate agenda back and continues to do so,” Harvey said.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP spent an estimated combined total of $1.5 billion on buying U.S. ad space such as TV slots and social media feeds since the Paris Agreement, according to the analysis. That’s roughly equivalent to running ads on every billboard in New York’s advertising hotspot Times Square every day for the last decade.

WPP’s global network of subsidiary advertising agencies made an estimated two-thirds’ worth of those ads, the analysis found. WPP, which is one of Britain’s biggest companies by revenue and also works with clients such as Coca-Cola and Unilever, was the only major ad company to partner with all four oil giants on advertising projects during this time.

This work may have breached a policy WPP adopted in 2022 not to accept projects that may “frustrate” the goals of the Paris Agreement, the current and former employees said, since the oil majors were committed to increasing oil and gas production and promoting speculative climate solutions.

A version of this article has been published by the Guardian.

WPP agencies Ogilvy and Wavemaker have both worked on U.S. campaigns for BP and Chevron respectively which received misleading advertising complaints, for taglines such as “We see possibilities in planes that fly on garbage.” Neither complaint was taken forward, although BP voluntarily withdrew its ads.

A 2022 U.S. Congressional committee report cited several ExxonMobil ads made by WPP’s Group SJR as examples of greenwashing, including one that compared fossil gas paired with renewable energy to “a peanut butter and jelly sandwich”.

Staff who raised concerns about this work have been told by seniors that they are helping clients communicate about their shift to cleaner business models, the WPP employees said. But many who have worked on these projects fear they serve primarily to deflect criticism from polluters.

WPP clients BP and Shell have both weakened their own climate targets in the past three years. At the same time, their advertising output has pivoted to promoting the necessity of fossil fuels, a report published in March by industry campaign group Clean Creatives found.

BP’s 2023 campaign “And, not or” suggested that renewables should exist alongside oil and gas rather than replace them. The campaign included ads saying BP was reducing the climate impact of oil by running wells on electricity in Texas’ Permian Basin.

In a Shell YouTube ad run in October, a drone inspector identified as Tori describes how she is “helping provide American energy security” by carrying out safety checks on a drilling platform.

“We heard that a lot internally, that we were influencing them in the right direction,” said a former employee who worked on projects for BP at WPP branding agency Landor. “In reality, whatever BP decides to do, we would just deliver it.”

WPP and the other ad agencies mentioned did not respond to requests for comment.

Shell declined to comment. BP, ExxonMobil and Chevron did not respond to a request for comment.

Piece of the Pie

Advertising companies do not publish details about how much their clients spend on ad space, and increasingly avoid publicising their fossil fuel contracts.

To generate its estimates, DeSmog mapped the dozens of ad agencies that have worked for the four oil companies, using public sources such as staff social media profiles and industry award listings, confidential information shared by employees, and previous research by DeSmog and Clean Creatives. These contracts were then cross-referenced with ad spend estimates obtained from market research platform MediaRadar by the University of Oxford’s Climate Litigation Lab.

Most of the oil majors’ U.S. ad spend was channelled via subsidiaries of the handful of advertising holding companies that dominate the industry globally. After WPP, Omnicom and IPG, Tokyo-based holding company Dentsu ranked fourth in terms of its exposure to this ad spend ($255 million) and Paris-based rival Havas ranked fifth ($230 million).

The analysis did not seek to capture the millions of dollars the fossil fuel industry spends every year advertising in countries outside the U.S., as well as on lobbying, branding, public relations, and other marketing activities.

Advertising industry insiders say momentum around climate initiatives has slowed over the past few years as competition from big technology companies and artificial intelligence (AI) has squeezed margins.

New WPP CEO Cindy Rose is due to present her strategy to reverse declining profits at the company’s annual general meeting on May 8. A preview in February did not mention sustainability.

Under previous CEO Mark Read, WPP committed to reduce carbon emissions and prevent greenwashing, including via the policy adopted in 2022 “not to take on any client work…designed to frustrate the objectives of the Paris Agreement.”

But employees claim these moves have changed little. 

There are concerns that WPP’s ongoing work with Shell, BP, and Chevron may breach the policy because many of these clients’ ads have distracted from or justified fossil fuel expansion, according to six current and former employees, who spoke to DeSmog anonymously for fear of professional repercussions.

New fossil fuel projects planned by the companies are incompatible with the Paris goal to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees and prevent catastrophic climate change, scientific assessments have found.

“I don’t think there’s anything that WPP could possibly be saying for BP or Shell that would adhere to the policy,” said a former director at two WPP agencies in New York.

In total, WPP has held at least 82 contracts with the fossil fuel industry around the world since the start of 2025, according to industry campaign group Clean Creatives. More than a quarter of those contracts relate to work wholly or partially targeted at U.S. audiences.

Experts say that the impact of WPP’s moves to lower carbon emissions by reducing employee travel and powering buildings with green energy is outweighed by its work for polluters.

“By shaping public narratives, increasing consumption, and normalising fossil fuel use, agencies like WPP can significantly influence emissions far beyond their operational footprint,” said Alexis McGivern, a researcher on corporate climate policy at Oxford Net Zero, a research group at the University of Oxford.

WPP ad agencies Ogilvy and VML have led BP and Shell’s respective advertising strategies since at least 2000, DeSmog found.

Ogilvy devised BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” campaign in 2000. It also popularised the concept of the “carbon footprint” through a series of BP ads in 2004 which sought to emphasise individual responsibility for reducing emissions. 

Today, WPP agencies such as Ogilvy are still “deeply embedded” in BP’s advertising process and have some staff dedicated solely to working on BP projects, according to the former Landor employee.

In 2020, BP briefed seven WPP agencies — including Ogilvy, Landor, and VML — to create a new brand strategy to tackle the company’s image as “the bad guys,” according to a WPP document obtained by investigative outlet Drilled.

Subsequent U.S. ad campaigns launched by BP repeatedly promoted the company’s “#netzero” goals and said it supported regulation to limit methane emissions, despite BP having successfully lobbied the U.S. government to roll back such rules, an investigation by Unearthed found.

“WPP has had oil clients for decades, whether they were promising to go green or not,” said one former partner at a WPP agency, who has worked on Shell campaigns. “That tells you everything you need to know about whether we are actually trying to change things.”

Risks Rising for Protecting Polluters

Pressure is building on advertising companies to acknowledge their role in delaying climate action by protecting the reputations of polluters.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has urged ad agencies to drop fossil fuel clients, calling ad executives “Mad Men fuelling the madness.”

The OECD, an intergovernmental economic organisation, is considering a complaint against WPP filed by climate and human rights campaigners in February last year. At the time, a WPP spokesperson said, “Contrary to the claims being made, we adhere to the highest regulatory standards in our work for clients.” Protesters have since targeted WPP’s Thames-front offices in London with banners reading “climate criminals”.

The “increased reputational risk associated with working on client briefs perceived to be environmentally detrimental” could affect revenue, WPP said in its 2025 sustainability report.

Legal risks are rising, too.

In a first-of-its-kind ruling in October, a Paris court found French oil giant TotalEnergies misled consumers by saying it had put “climate at the heart of its strategy” during a 2021 rebrand, despite continuing to heavily invest in new oil and gas projects.

WPP agency Wavemaker advised TotalEnergies on where to buy ad space for the rebrand campaign but was not named in the case.

In January, Michigan state filed the latest of dozens of U.S. lawsuits being brought by local and federal governments against ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other oil companies accusing the companies of climate deception and disinformation.

So far, a U.S. court is yet to find against an oil company in such a case. The companies deny any wrongdoing, arguing that the courts are the wrong venue to determine climate policy.

“In the context of increasing litigation to recover substantial damages for the escalating costs of climate change on the basis of oil majors’ deceptive activities, doing large amounts of the same companies’ advertising work does not seem legally advisable,” said Johnny White, a lawyer at environmental law firm Client Earth, which advised on the TotalEnergies case.

Additional reporting by Kathryn Clare and Ellen Ormesher

The post Revealed: British Ad Giant’s Billion-Dollar Greenwash of U.S. Oil Industry appeared first on DeSmog.