Green Britain: Nigel Farage on a mission to save the planet and plant three trillion trees

The outspoken critic of “climate alarmism” has now joined a firm that wants to double the world’s forest cover in just nine years. Mr Farage, who stepped down as the leader of the Reform party last month, said: “This is non-political. We can all get involved and make the world a better place.”

The Dutch Green Business Group aims to plant three trillion trees globally by 2030. This would absorb 1.5 times the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, it says.

The firm will then sell “carbon credits” to firms and individuals so they can offset their carbon emissions.

Mr Farage, 56, denied that he has become a late convert to the environment. He said: “I am a country boy at heart. I have been a conservationist since the late 1970s.

“I was supporting green ideas before the Green Party was born.

“I even voted Green in the 1989 European elections before the party got hijacked by the extreme Left.”

Asked if he had somehow gone woke, he said: “I am not woke – that is not going to happen in a month of Sundays.”

In his first interview since joining the DGBG, Mr Farage told the Daily Express – which is running a Green Britain Needs You campaign – “I want to put out a big message to the public.

“We have just been through possibly the most divisive five to 10 years in the western world’s political history, in Britain and America, with massive arguments about Brexit and President Trump.

“Can we not unify around the issue of global deforestation, which is happening in a very dramatic way in the Far East and South America?

“Every year our forests are degraded and that is bad for nature, biodiversity and, for governments with targets to reduce carbon output, it is a disaster.

“I want this project to be a unifying theme that will manage the preservation of the rainforest through tree planting.”

Mr Farage said there are plenty of carbon offset schemes but not all are regulated.

“The key point about the Dutch Green Business Group is that it is a publicly listed, traded and regulated company on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange,” he said.

“If it puts money into planting trees, those trees have to be planted.”

He said investors could range from individuals wanting to offset their travel, with a return flight to New York needing 50 to 60 trees, right up to multinational corporations.

Mr Farage has been appointed to DGBG’s advisory board, despite a track record of climate scepticism including accusing eco-activist Greta Thunberg and Prince Charles of “alarmism”.

He once slammed wind energy as “the biggest collective economic insanity I’ve seen in my entire life”. Mr Farage insists that he has been a conservationist since he was a teenager but he still has some lingering doubts about climate change.

“What I have always said, ever since Tony Blair, is that to say the science is settled is impossible.

“Science is never settled. But the consensus says we have a problem with CO2 emissions. That is binding Government policy and we have to do something about it.”

But he slammed the “hypocrisy” of many of the actions to tackle climate change, such as the closure of the Redcar steel works on Teesside in 2015.

He said: “If we think of saving the planet then closing the Redcar steel works and sending the work to India did not reduce emissions globally.

“It just reduced UK emissions. There’s been too much negativity and too much hypocrisy.”

He added: “How does alarmism help? It is irresponsible.

“I sat opposite Prince Charles 15 years ago in the European parliament when he said the North Pole would disappear in 15 years. It’s still there, as far as I know.

“This ‘we are all going to die’ narrative is negative – and we are doing something positive.”

He added: “I have been extremely critical of much of what Government has done in the name of combating climate change, in particular taxes that have transferred wealth from the poor to the rich.

“The best example is tariffs on our electricity bills that add on about 20 percent. That’s all very well and good for people with money, but what about everybody else?”