New research reveals a massive swing back to climate-hostility in right-wing newspaper editorials

Over the course of 2025, a record-breaking number of mainstream newspaper editorials spoke out to oppose climate action. The total, nearing 100 articles, demonstrates the complicity of the right-wing press in the destruction of our planet.

That’s according to new analysis from climate-focused independent news site Carbon Brief. The researchers analysed editorials – articles setting out the newspaper’s ‘official’ stance on an issue — stretching back as far as 2011.

Last year, 2025, was the only period in which opposition to climate action actually outweighed support. In fact, the opposition outnumbered the support by more than two to one.

Climate hostility driven by the right

Unsurprisingly, every one of the 98 editorials opposing climate action came from right-wing papers. These included the Times, Daily Express, Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Telegraph. 

Meanwhile, lower-circulation left-or-center outlets like the Guardian and Financial Times penned all 46 editorials supporting climate action.

In total, 81% of the climate-focused editorials in right-wing papers voiced their opposition to action. This in itself is a contrast to just a few years ago, when even the right-wing rags saw a swell in support for climate action.

Notably, the 2025 editorials didn’t position themselves as skeptical of the existence of climate change itself. Rather, they took a ‘response-sceptic’ approach, criticising the policies and efforts to stop about climate change.

Economic arguments

Often, this took the form of attacking ‘net-zero’ as a nebulous scapegoat for any climate policy they disliked. Meanwhile, these critical editorials rarely presented any alternative plans or proposals. As Carbon Brief explained:

Most editorials that rejected climate action did not even mention the word “climate”, often using “net-zero” instead.

This supports recent analysis by Dr James Painter, a research associate at the University of Oxford, which concluded that UK newspaper coverage has been “decoupling net-zero from climate change”.

This is significant, given strong and broad UK public support for many of the individual climate policies that underpin net-zero. Notably, there is also majority support for the “net-zero by 2050” target itself.

Often, the editors levelled arguments against net-zero as being too costly for the UK to implement. In fact, economic factors were the most commonly cited reason for opposition to net-zero policies, appearing in 87% of the hostile articles.

Likewise, Carbon Brief also analysed the papers’ attitudes to renewable energy sources. Following the general timbre of climate-hostility, 2025 was the first year since 2014 when opposition to renewables outweighed support among the editorials.

Over 2025, 42 editorials criticised renewable energy sources and their use in the UK. And, as ever, right-wing papers featured the whole lot — with 86% of the articles again citing the costs of renewable power as the main reason for their rejection.

Shift in the right

Carbon Brief argued that the shift in the editorials’ stance on climate action mirrored a shift in right-wing politics more broadly:

Taken together, the newspaper editorials mirror a significant shift on the UK political right in 2025, as the opposition Conservative party mimicked the hard-right populist Reform UK party by definitively rejecting the net-zero target that it had legislated for and the policies that it had previously championed.

The earlier trend of right-wing outlets embracing climate action mirrored Tory policies under May and Johnson, who first introduced the net-zero target in the UK. However, we’re now seeing a sharp turn away from those ‘green right’ policies under Badenoch and Farage:

Over the past year, the Conservative party has rejected both the “net-zero by 2050” target that it legislated for in 2019 and the underpinning Climate Change Act that it had a major role in creating. Meanwhile, the Reform UK party has been rising in the polls, while pledging to “ditch net-zero”

Right-wing newspapers and politicians both influence and are influenced by one another. Both are now working to shift public opinion towards a denial that climate action can be cost-effective and have an impact on climate change – all of which works towards the agenda of their climate-wrecking donors. 

The harsh truth is that there is no economic cost of climate action that would outweigh the massive cost of inaction. The oil-hungry right of both the media and politics desperately want a public that believes electric cars and wind farms are too expensive to be worthwhile.

Meanwhile, the inaction they favour will, inevitably, cost no less than the earth itself.

Featured image via CarbonBrief