Nigel Farage is hoping to enlist the climate science denier Donald Trump to help lead a global campaign to plant billions of trees to capture CO2.
The Brexit party leader, a friend of the US president, is due to make the announcement in Westminster on Friday as his party launches its version of an election manifesto.
Described as a “contract with the British people”, the party’s focus on the environment with the support of the US may be part of an attempt to broaden its appeal to voters beyond those looking to vote for a hard form of Brexit.
Speaking to the Guardian, Farage said the UK should become the face of a worldwide UN initiative.
“The UK should spearhead a global initiative at the United Nations to plant billions of trees around the world and I have every confidence Britain would get support from the American administration on this,” he said. “If it’s true that an area the size of Devon and Cornwall is removed from the Amazon every year, then we have a lot of work to do – and quickly.”
Farage is also pledging to ensure Britain recycles all of its own waste and to make it illegal for it to be exported overseas to be burned, buried or dumped at sea.
Trump pulled out of the Paris climate change agreement, aimed at keeping the planet’s temperature rise below two degrees this century. He said the agreement placed an unfair burden on the US to meet targets while big polluters in Asia were not signatories.
In 2018 he also caused controversy when he said he did not believe a finding in the US government’s fourth national climate assessment that the country’s economy would be hit by the climate crisis.
Tree-planting initiatives are said to be gaining ground among rightwing parties globally as a way of reclaiming the climate debate from the left. Farage, who recently secured a rare interview with the US president on his LBC radio show, is said to be keen to work with Trump on pushing environmental policies.
Farage’s Brexit party has had a difficult start to the campaign after its formal offer to the Tories of an electoral alliance was rebuffed by Boris Johnson.
After coming under pressure not to split the vote among those on the right and in favour of Brexit, Farage pulled out candidates in 317 Tory-won seats. He had hoped the government would give him a free shot at Labour-won seats in return, but this was also rejected by Johnson.
While it won the most seats in the European parliament elections, polls show support for the party has dropped to 3%.
Another tranche of its offer to voters is political reform through referendums. Farage is expected to say at the launch in Westminster that the party would introduce “citizens’ initiatives” to allow people to call referendums, subject to a 5 million threshold of registered voter signatures. There would also be time limitations on repetitive votes of at least 10 yrs.
Farage, who is not standing at the election, said: “We need wholesale change in Westminster and our plans will ensure that millions across this country feel like they can be heard in a politics that isn’t listening to them any more.”
