GB News drapes itself in the Union Jack and takes its money from Dubai. The channel is co-owned by Legatum, a Dubai-based investment firm, and by Sir Paul Marshall, a British billionaire who runs one of the biggest hedge funds on earth. That fund holds $2.8 billion in oil and gas. This year alone it nearly tripled the bet, pouring hundreds of millions into Chevron and Shell while cutting what it holds in renewables by a third. The Guardian called it cashing in on climate chaos. Sit with that. The people paying for the channel that tells you the planet is fine are the same people who get richer the more it burns.
Then listen to what they broadcast. One in three GB News presenters have pushed climate denial on air. More than half have attacked every effort to stop it. They sit in a London studio telling you to drill for more oil while moorland burns the length of the country and Arthur’s Seat goes up in smoke a few hundred metres from Parliament. Marshall also bankrolls UnHerd, which has published pieces telling you climate change is no catastrophe. The chairman he installed at GB News helped build a think tank funded by the Koch oil dynasty in America. None of this is hidden. It is filed with regulators. It is in the newspapers. You are just not supposed to join the dots.
So when a man on that channel stares down the camera and tells you the fires are just summer, that the heat is nothing new, that net zero is a con dreamed up to fleece you, look at who is signing his cheque. Billions riding on fossil fuels. A fortune that grows every time another field is drilled and another forest turns to ash. They are not confused about the science. They understand it perfectly. They are counting on you not to. They think the British public are too stupid to notice they are being played, and every day you swallow it, they are proven right.
This is the con. Not the climate crisis, which you can see and smell and feel. The con is the smooth voice on the television, paid for by oil money, telling you to trust him over your own eyes.