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The admission comes after the business secretary met with a controversial group of US think tanks. Rishi Sunak with Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt, Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch and other members of his cabinet UK government ministers meet with climate deniers "all the time", a government spokesman said.
The admission comes after it emerged that Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch had dined with lobbyists from a controversial US think tank.
Ms. Badenoch met with representatives of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in November, according to a survey on the OpenDemocracy website.
The IEA has repeatedly been accused of "distorting" climate science and recently called a landmark 2021 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "alarmist" and "deeply dubious."
A lobbying group report claimed it would be "beyond irresponsible" for governments to try to tackle climate change on the basis of evidence.
The dinner with Ms Badenoch took place during an official visit to the United States in November, where the minister also met with another American think tank, the Cato Institute.
This organization is partly "focused on challenging the science behind global warming and questioning the justification for the action," according to US Greenpeace activists.
Greenpeace says it describes the IEA as a "climate denial front group" and says it tries to "downplay the environmental and economic risks of climate change, overstate the costs of solving the problem and question the value of policy setting." .
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When Ms Badenoch ran to become leader of the Conservative Party, she said she would abandon the government's plan to reach net zero, calling it "unilateral economic disarmament".
In response to the story, a spokesperson for the Department for Business and Commerce told openDemocracy that the Business Secretary is "all sorts of stakeholders who have different views" and that "it's no different than it is in the UK."
The spokesman added: 'There are various think tanks in Westminster who have skeptical views on climate change and ministers meet these people all the time.
"In climate research, as in any other policy issue, our academics do not conduct contract research and have full academic freedom to follow their own research to its conclusions, even if they disagree with management or among themselves." they said.
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