Climate misinformation and press regulation

How IPSO is failing to rein in the populist newspapers

I’ve found a new use for AI. It can list all the inaccuracies in Daily Mail (a right-wing populist UK newspaper) articles quickly and comprehensively. To test it out, I gave Claude a copy of an Andrew Neil article on onshore wind from late August last year. This journalist’s purpose was to use some of the temporary problems of the global wind developer Ørsted to rubbish the UK government’s plans for the energy transition. Claude came back to me within a couple of seconds, listing the many errors in Mr Neil’s work. These ranged from a dissection of his comments on the development of Hornsea 4, a large proposed wind farm in the North Sea, to a short statement on how he misunderstood the way offshore projects are financially supported.

I have to admit that AI confirmed that one figure in the article was correct: the global wind developer Orsted does indeed operate 12 wind farms in UK waters. It questioned almost everything else.

This was a significant relief to me. I’d complained to the Daily Mail immediately after the article was published, pointing out fifteen inaccuracies that ranged from a correction of Andrew Neil’s comments on Orsted’s plans to a somewhat incoherent attempt to explain his dire misstatements on the way UK supports renewable electricity. The paper didn’t respond to my email.

A few days later, I submitted a complaint to the press regulator IPSO, listing each error in turn. After an interminable delay of almost twelve months, with frequent flows of five page emails back and forth, IPSO will publish its final decision in the next few days. The newspaper had received several extensions to the deadlines imposed by IPSO, dragging out the case to well beyond the typical six months it typically takes to complete its work.

The IPSO decision is a clear victory for the Daily Mail. I lost comprehensively. Of the fifteen factual errors I had identified - twelve of which were also found by AI - its adjudication is that only one needs to be corrected. About a year after the article was published, the paper will be asked amend a single sentence in the article sitting on its website, now probably unread by anybody but enthusiastic opponents of renewable energy. That’s it; one of the most egregious and error-strewn commentaries on UK energy policy will rest otherwise unchanged.

What can I learn from the process of taking a complaint to IPSO? First of all, don’t get dragged into detail. The regulator doesn’t have specialists who might understand how Contracts for Difference (CfD), the current support scheme for renewables. The lengthy interchanges mediated by IPSO between the Daily Mail and me probably didn’t really clarify just how wrong Mr Neil was on the operation of CfDs. This was partly my fault and AI put it much better than me by simply saying ‘The subsidy-stacking maths doesn’t reflect how UK offshore wind is actually paid’. I should have stuck to a single sentence. Instead IPSO criticised me for focusing on ‘semantics’ in my complicated analysis. (But wasn’t the whole of my complaint about ‘semantics’ or the words used in the article?)

Second, the successful complainant shouldn’t equivocate over his or her corrections. The Neil article wrongly said that wind turbines were increasingly imported from China. In the multiple interchanges after the complaint was lodged I mentioned that Octopus Energy had talked of buying Chinese turbines at some point in the future. This was seized upon by IPSO to confirm the accuracy of the Daily Mail’s piece even though not a single large turbine has ever been imported into the UK from China and may not be for many years to come.

Third, just focus on a few factual issues. Don’t try to question personal opinions in an article, however outlandish or damaging these may be. Mr Neil’s article said that Ørsted, the biggest offshore wind developer, was on the point of financial failure. This was a company then valued at around £12bn (and now about twice this level) and with positive cash flows. IPSO allowed Andrew Neil to say that this leader of the world’s attempts to decarbonise was ‘in the knacker’s yard’ and ‘a financial basket case’, because these comments were ‘subjective characterisations’ which are always allowable even if absurdly wrong.

More worryingly for the standards of journalism, I was struck by how the IPSO judgment sought – and usually found – any possible reason to excuse the journalist’s more contentious statements. One example was that Mr Neil stated that Ørsted had ‘no plans’ to develop any further UK wind farms after temporary retreat from the Hornsea 4 project in spring 2025. In my complaint, I pointed to a statement from the company that stressed it remained wholly committed to helping the UK reach its ambitious targets for offshore wind and would ‘seek to develop the project later’. In IPSO’s view, these statements were not specific enough to represent ‘plans’ but rather were statements of intent. So Mr Neil’s assertion was correct, at least in the regulator’s judgment.

Another example was the journalist’s assertion that Ørsted was engaged in ‘American withdrawal’. I took this to mean that he was saying that the company was ceasing operations in the US, a totally untrue statement. The company operates 15 wind farms in the country. However, IPSO thought differently, saying US ‘withdrawal’ could mean a partial retrenchment. As in several of my individual points, the regulator excused the author, even though the typical reader would have interpreted a sentence to mean something very different to the view of IPSO. To most people ‘withdrawal’ means leaving.

In 2025, IPSO received just over 6,500 complaints. In the year to July 2026, it only addressed about 220 of these submissions, or less than 4%. The rest were immediately dismissed without any form of adjudication. Of that 220, about 120 were resolved with a correction imposed by the regulator or agreed after negotiations with the newspaper. Mostly this outcome meant a small change to the text in the paper’s archive as with my complaint.

Only in 4 cases (less than 0.1% of the complaints) was the paper required to make a public statement of its errors or bad practices in the preparation of an article. I was surprised to see that even in these very serious cases the newspaper was only obliged to carry a copy of the adjudication on its website for 24 hours. IPSO is not an effective restraint on the activities of the British press and misinformation about the climate crisis fills the newspapers.

Finally, let me stress that I completely agree that there’s good reason to question many aspects of UK government policy on energy. Please will Mr Neil continue to write on this topic. Domestic electricity bills do remain higher than almost anywhere else in Europe, partly because of the UK’s continuing use of expensive gas in power stations and partly because of the long-delayed cost of bringing the electricity grid into the 21^st century. The energy transition is indeed proving more costly than expected in many different ways. But that’s not a good excuse for publishing vituperative and misleading commentary.