A parliamentary committee will this week provide further proof that political debate in the UK about climate change is becoming as depressingly unscientific and polarised as it is in the United States.





Among them will be Professor Richard Lindzen, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who spends much of his time complaining about the politicisation of science while speaking at events such as rallies for ‘Repeal the Climate Change Act’.

Also due to appear is Donna Laframboise, a Canadian who is probably the world’s leading producer of conspiracy theories about the IPCC.

The bias towards representatives from the extreme fringe of the climate change debate is a victory for climate sceptic MPs on the committee, Peter Lilley and Graham Stringer, who were apparently unperturbed by the lack of British contrarians on whom they could call.

But this balance between expertise and extreme ideology which the committee’s selection seeks to achieve is eerily reminiscent of the ridiculous Congressional hearings where Democrats usually invite mainstream scientists, while Republicans elevate lobbyists and campaigners to the status of ‘expert witnesses’.

It is also the latest sign that the politics of climate change looks increasingly the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

Take David Silvester, the UK Independence Party councillor who suggested in a letter to the ‘Henley Standard’ earlier this month that the recent bout of severe flooding should be attributed to David Cameron’s decision to legalise gay marriage instead of global warming. He would not have seemed out of place speaking on behalf of the Tea Party.

For instance, David Barton, who Tea Party activists are trying to persuade to run for a seat in the Senate, claimed in an interview last year that climate change was God’s “judgement” for abortion.

Indeed, Ukip’s current energy policy statement reads like a Tea Party manifesto, declaring that building more coal-fired power stations will “green the planet” because the higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions will be good for plants.

But these are not the only common shortcomings of the political debate in the UK and US.

Both suffer from the malign influence of vested financial interests of the fossil fuel industry. In the US, the most vocal political sceptic is Jim Inhofe, who represents Oklahoma in the Senate and regularly declares global warming to be “a hoax”. The Washington Post has reported that Senator Inhofe has received more than $1m in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry during his political career.

Similarly, Lilley, who is the loudest voice of climate change denial in the UK parliament, is paid as vice-chair of Tethys Petroleum while sitting as the Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden and a member of the select committee. And these politicians in the UK and the US are also aided by lobby groups that are funded by secret donors.

Inhofe regularly fronts events to promote climate change denial that are organised by the free market fundamentalists at the Heartland Foundation. Documents published in 2012 showed that the Foundation had received millions of dollars from a single unnamed source for its work on global warming.

Meanwhile, Lilley writes occasional pamphlets for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up by Lord Lawson to campaign against government climate policies. Its sources of funding are shrouded in secrecy, although Lord Lawson has boasted that it is primarily financed by his rich friends, and billionaire Conservative donor Michael Hintze has been exposed as one of its supporters.

Fortunately, despite these shared defects, there are still some important differences between the UK and United States when it comes to political debate about climate change. The Conservative party still officially accepts the scientific evidence, whereas the Republican party rejects it, and UK parliamentarians have already passed model national legislation in the form of the Climate Change Act, while Congress remains a significant barrier to the introduction of effective federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the rise in Ukip’s popularity, the growth of denial among Conservative backbenchers, and the disreputable campaigns of misinformation by lobby groups and their cheerleaders in the media, may yet drag the UK further down to plumb the depths currently frequented by politicians in the United States.