Sunderland AFC, Solar Panels and Reform UK
Sunderland AFC’s plan to install solar panels at their training ground should have been a routine attempt to cut emissions and lower energy costs. Instead, it’s sparked fierce objections.
Locals are rightly fearful of the club’s plans to steal the power from their Sun God. If their petition fails and the planning application goes ahead they are considering building a giant wicker man to burn local planning officers.
Strip away the humour and what’s left is political. Many of the objections aren’t about planning regulations at all — they come from people who deny that climate change is real. And almost without exception, they’re Reform UK supporters. The party has made climate denial one of its core messages, casting itself as the main political opposition to Britain’s net zero commitments.
The Global Consensus vs. Reform UK’s Climate Denial
The global consensus is unambiguous: climate change is real, man-made, and economically catastrophic if ignored. Governments across the world, from the US to China, accept the need for action — even if they differ on how fast to move.
Reform UK climate change denial, however, mirrors a wider trend on the authoritarian right. Instead of engaging with solutions, denial and obstruction become political weapons. Not because the science is in doubt, but because the transition to renewable energy threatens entrenched power and wealth.
Oil, Gas and the Authoritarian Temptation
I’ve always believed that an economy’s mode of production shapes its politics. Oil and gas economies have one defining feature: concentrated wealth and power. And concentrated wealth nearly always breeds authoritarianism.
- Russia: an authoritarian regime with a billionaire elite propped up by fossil fuels.
- The Gulf States: dynasties built on oil wealth.
- Iran: an Islamist theocracy bankrolled by petroleum.
Find me a modern liberal democracy built on oil and gas extraction. I’ll wait.
The Radical Promise of Renewable Energy
That’s why the transition to green energy is so threatening to elites. Wind and solar can be generated and owned locally. Communities can produce their own power, free from oligarchs and petro-states.
The real radical promise of renewable energy isn’t just environmental. It’s political. It offers the chance to live outside rigid hierarchies, to create new forms of social and economic organisation.
This isn’t just a left-wing dream. On US right-wing forums, you’ll find climate sceptics boasting about going “off-grid” with solar panels. Reform UK climate change denial may be loud, but plenty of its fellow-travellers are quietly investing in the very technology they mock.
Why the Oligarchs Fear Net Zero
For Russia, the Gulf, and the fossil fuel barons who bankroll Trump, Farage and Reform, the green transition is an existential threat. If fossil fuels lose their dominance, so does their wealth and political control.
- GB News loses nearly £1m a week, bankrolled by a Dubai fund linked to Russian oligarchs.
- Reform UK’s vice-chairman commutes from Dubai while railing against “global elites.”
- Brexit was shaped by Russian influence.
- Trump’s campaign was lavishly funded by oil barons.
These same elites pour money into disinformation campaigns, spreading climate denial to slow down renewables and keep us filling their pockets every time we boil a kettle.
Authoritarianism, Denial and Control
Every week I run into Reform UK supporters online. They parrot the same line: they want to “protect children.” Yet their climate policies amount to wrecking their children’s future.
They don’t want to protect kids — they want to control them, and us. That’s why authoritarian movements are so vulnerable to manipulative online propaganda. Once you’ve swallowed one daft idea, why not swallow them all?
Breaking Free From Fossil Fuel Authoritarianism
Reform UK climate change denial is more than a fringe position — it’s part of a global strategy by oligarchs, petro-states, and authoritarian movements to keep their grip on power.
But the green transition offers a way out. If we can free ourselves from oil and gas, we can free ourselves from their control. And maybe, just maybe, when Sunderland puts up solar panels, we’ll ask if the Sun God can help find a new attacking midfielder.
It staggers me so many think climate change is fake, despite the evidence. John Cook, an Australian researcher analysed 12,000 papers on climate science and found 97% of these papers agree that climate change is man made.
Exxon scientists carried out work in the 70’s and 80’s on the effects of fossil fuel, of course they were kept hidden. When the documents were exposed they had proven to be shockingly accurate. Its like how tobacco companies knew smoking caused cancer but kept it hidden. People know smoking causes cancer, but that never used to be the case – why do people still think global warming is a hoax?
If people won’t believe the evidence of scientists then perhaps there is evidence elsewhere that isn’t spoken about? Like how militaries including the UK are preparing for climate change, or how insurance is becoming unobtainable in certain parts, or how big investors like Blackrock are demanding climate risk disclosures, maybe French wine makers buying land in the south of England to protect their future.
But if you really want to go for a Reformers jugular on climate change, remind them that, if it is real, it will cause 100’s of millions of people to become displaced and will make the current EU/UK immigration numbers look like just the tip of the iceberg. If theres once thing they like less than climate change its immigrants, especially immigrants that will be completing not for jobs, but for food and water.
I expect that climate change denial among ordinary people (as opposed to the paid propagandists themselves) is basically 100% motivated reasoning: they deny climate change because they’re clinging to their fossil-fuelled lifestyles (and see them as worth more than any number of Global South lives, to answer your final point about climate refugees).
In 2005 James Howard Kunstler (one of the more honest degrowth advocates) said that “Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar”, and I suspect it isn’t just Americans that feel that way, but a large number of residents of any Western country who live in car-dependent areas (rural areas, small towns or low-density suburbs).
In the present day however the advance of renewable energy (which the climate change deniers may just not have fully grasped yet) suggests that CO2 emissions from electricity generation may now be a solved problem: wouldn’t affordable electric cars (thus dealing with the current biggest source of man-made CO2 emissions) be perhaps the greatest way to undermine climate change denial?
It is the contagion of bad ideas. Once you believe one daft idea you find your community on-line, and to fit in you start and adopt loads of other daft ideas. After a while you no longer care what is true or false, real or fantasy. All that matters is identity and getting one over on the other side
The green energy transition is fundamentally about abandoning combustion as our main source of energy in favour of power sources that mostly generate electricity directly without recourse to heat engines (water turbines, wind turbines and solar photovoltaic cells).
Do you ever think that just as most Western countries have a major problem with obesity because we are evolved to crave calories, so we also have a problem with combating climate change because many men in particular have an emotional attachment to combustion (perhaps going back to our caveman days) that causes them to see non-combustion power sources as somehow inferior?
I honestly had never thought of that. I think there is a lot of male nostalgia for a world where a woman’s place was in the kitchen and a man’s place was tinkering under the bonnet of a Vauxhall viva or a ford corsair before a trip to the pub or the match with the lads. An all male, all white safe space.
Do you think the decline in male interest in tinkering with cars is another symptom of rising anti-intellectualism, or do you think that it was the inevitable consequence of cars themselves becoming more complex (for example in having computer-assisted functionality) and perhaps even designed not to be maintainable by unofficial means for rent-seeking reasons?
As for gender role nostalgia, while I certainly wouldn’t agree with the statement that “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” I do have a guilty nostalgia for shows set pre-1970 when skirts and dresses were the rule for women rather than the exception that they are today.