Yet Another Climate Activist Masquerading as an Economist

The National Emergency Briefing's Angela Francis is an activist with gaping lacunae in her economics CV

Last week, I wrote about I wrote about Tessa Khan, funded by European and American philanthropists, who uses the courts to impose Net Zero policies voters have rejected at the ballot box. She spoke at an invitation-only gathering of politicians, journalists and policy figures assembled at Westminster Central Hall last November.

This week, I turn my attention to one of her colleagues who spoke to the same invitation-only gathering of over 1,200 politicians and business leaders for the so-called National Emergency Briefing (NEB) — supposedly an “expert-led” briefing to address the UK’s “climate and energy crisis”.

The “briefing” event was supported by an array of organisations ranging from the National Trust and WWF to the National Education Union and the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Of the 10 featured speakers, each introduced as a leading expert in their field, the slot for “economics” was given to Angela Francis, a self-styled “low carbon economist” and Director of Policy Solutions at WWF-UK. The audience, carefully selected, received her message with the reverence one might accord a scientific briefing.

This is a pattern that should by now be familiar to anyone who follows the climate-industrial complex in the United Kingdom. A convener with activist credentials assembles a sympathetic audience, presents a line-up of credentialled speakers and proceeds to make policy advocacy sound like dispassionate expert testimony. The format — emergency briefing, Westminster — is chosen for its associations with urgency and authority. What it actually delivers is something rather different: a well-rehearsed set of green talking points dressed in the language of economics, presented to people who will not ask inconvenient questions because they have not been invited to do so.