Last November, an invitation-only gathering of politicians, journalists and policy figures assembled at Westminster Central Hall to hear what was billed as an authoritative, expert-led “National Emergency Briefing” on the UK’s climate and energy crisis. The final speaker, awarded the “energy transition” slot, was Tessa Khan – lawyer, campaigner and founder of an NGO called Uplift. Her message was crisp: fossil fuels are the root cause of the UK’s energy price shocks; roughly half of all British recessions since 1970 have been caused by fossil fuel price volatility; and a fully renewable, electrified energy system will deliver lower bills, energy security and a just transition for workers and households alike. The audience, carefully curated, received this vision with the reverence one might accord a scientific briefing. No awkward questions followed about system costs, grid reliability, or the fate of the 100,000-odd workers in the North Sea supply chain. The “emergency” format, it seems, does not lend itself to inconvenient complications.
There is a peculiar growth industry that has flourished in the green movement: the professional climate litigator. Funded by an interlocking web of American and European philanthropic foundations, staffed by lawyers with no grounding in economics, energy engineering, or the lived realities of working people dependent on affordable power, this industry pursues a singular goal – to achieve through the courts what democratic electorates have repeatedly declined to endorse via the ballot box. Nowhere is this enterprise more vividly embodied than in the career of Tessa Khan.
Khan is the founder and Executive Director of Uplift, a UK-based NGO whose stated mission is to support “a rapid and just transition away from oil and gas production in the UK”. She is also, by her own account, an “international climate change and human rights lawyer, campaigner and strategist”. Before setting up Uplift, she was co-founder and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, a project of the Urgenda Foundation – a Dutch NGO that first pioneered the strategy of suing national governments to force them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by court order. In 2019, Time magazine named her one of 15 women “leading the fight against climate change”. She is, by the standards of the green movement, a star.
What are her qualifications? Khan holds a Bachelor of Laws (with Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Australia, and a Master of Laws (with Distinction) from Oxford. She has spent time working in Thailand on women’s rights advocacy, in Egypt, India, the Netherlands and Australia. She’s an expert adviser to UN human rights bodies and has served on the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. What she has never done – at any point in this impressive-sounding bio – is work in the energy sector, study economics, or demonstrate any understanding of what it means to depend on affordable, reliable energy for heat, transport, or employment. Her background is that of an activist, not a dispassionate analyst of complex (or, for that matter, simple) energy and economic trade-offs.
The lawfare strategy
The climate litigation movement is, at its heart, a strategy for circumventing democracy. As the New Atlantis has observed, activists “disillusioned by politics, and especially by democracy” have decided that courts “offer the best hope for achieving what they call ‘climate justice’”. Ordinary voters have consistently proved reluctant to accept the enormous costs that Net Zero imposes – on their heating bills, their petrol prices, their industrial competitiveness, their jobs. The solution, in the minds of the activist-litigators, is to remove the question from the democratic arena altogether and hand it to judges and well-funded NGO lawyers.
Khan has been open about this strategy. Inspired by the 2015 Urgenda ruling – in which a Dutch court ordered the Dutch government to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by a prescribed amount, a decision upheld by the Dutch Supreme Court in 2019 – she co-founded the Climate Litigation Network to replicate this approach across jurisdictions, from Canada to New Zealand and from Ireland to South Korea. The method is nearly always the same: find a sympathetic plaintiff, frame climate change as a human rights violation, and persuade a court to order an elected government to do what it has declined, or been too slow, to do on its own.
The philosophical absurdity here should be self-evident. In a constitutional democracy, judges are not elected. They have no mandate from the public to set energy policy, determine acceptable levels of carbon emissions, or weigh the costs of decarbonisation against the benefits of affordable energy for poor households. As Cambridge legal scholars have noted, there exists a profound tension between this brand of climate litigation and democratic legitimacy – the problem of judicial overreach. When the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled in April 2024 that Switzerland had violated the human rights of elderly women by failing to reduce its CO2 sufficiently, and when a Scottish court can declare the UK’s largest undeveloped oilfield “unlawful” – not because of any flaw in the licensing process, but because regulators failed to calculate the emissions that might theoretically result from burning the oil once extracted – we have entered a world in which unelected lawyers and judges are making trillion-dollar decisions over the heads of electorates.
The CO2 Coalition has noted this phenomenon: activists “know they are losing the public debate” and have therefore “turned to ‘lawfare’” – suing oil companies, car manufacturers and utilities, “hoping to bypass the legislative process and impose ‘green’ policies through judicial fiat”.
Rosebank and the war on North Sea energy
Khan’s most prominent recent achievement has been her role in the legal campaign against the Rosebank oilfield – described as the UK’s largest undeveloped oil field, lying off Shetland and operated by Equinor and Ithaca Energy. Together with Greenpeace, Uplift brought judicial review proceedings challenging the government’s approval of Rosebank and the Jackdaw gas field. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Finch case – which established that planning authorities must consider the so-called “scope 3” emissions, i.e., the emissions produced when fossil fuels are eventually burned by consumers, not merely those generated during extraction – the previous Labour Government declined to defend the approvals. In January 2025, the Scottish Court of Session duly ruled both projects unlawful.
Khan was, predictably, triumphant. Rosebank, she declared, “cannot go ahead without accounting for its enormous climate harm”. The burning of oil and gas is, in her telling, why “we are seeing more extreme weather like Storm Eowyn” and flooding that has “claimed lives and caused hundreds of millions of pounds in damage”. The causal chain from a North Sea oilfield to an Irish storm was, needless to say, left entirely unsubstantiated.
The economic ignorance on display here deserves attention. The North Sea energy sector supports tens of thousands of jobs in Scotland and northern England – over 90,000 in Scotland alone, concentrated in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Shetland. It generates billions in tax revenue. It contributes to the UK’s energy security at a time when dependence on imported liquefied natural gas and pipeline gas has demonstrated, with the Ukrainian crisis, precisely how dangerous such dependence can be. Khan’s response to concerns about jobs is characteristic in its breezy dismissal: the number of jobs supported by the oil and gas industry has “more than halved over the past decade” – as if the correct response to an industry already under a tax onslaught is to accelerate its destruction, and as if the workers concerned will find the same pay and conditions in the wind-turbine supply chains that Khan and Ed Miliband promise are just around the corner. They will not. The true costs of the renewable energy transition – once system costs, intermittency, grid balancing, backup capacity and the enormous capital expenditures required are properly accounted for – are vastly higher than the headline figures peddled by clean-energy advocates.
Who pays for Uplift?
Every time a well-funded NGO campaigns against affordable energy, one should ask: who is paying for this? The climate litigation and campaigning industry does not operate on voluntary financial contributions from the grassroots as fiction would have it. It is financed by a network of American and European philanthropic foundations – the European Climate Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and a constellation of smaller intermediaries – that collectively channel hundreds of millions of dollars annually into green advocacy organisations worldwide.
Uplift itself is hosted by the Social Change Nest CIC, a “community interest company” that serves as a fiscal sponsor for numerous left-wing campaigns. Khan was the recipient of a Climate Breakthrough Award – a grant programme that provides selected activists with several hundred thousand dollars to pursue their campaigns. This is a pattern across the entire climate NGO ecosystem: as has been documented in detail, the European Climate Foundation alone dominates the climate debate by funding environmental NGOs, using them as an “influence flotilla” to advance specific policy positions – all while maintaining the fiction that these organisations are independent voices of civil society.
Environmental NGOs frequently act as predatory special interests rather than saviours – imposing the preferences of wealthy Western donors on populations who simply want reliable electricity and economic development. The same logic applies in the UK context. Khan and her funders are, at their core, privileged members of the global professional class who will suffer no personal consequences from energy price rises, industrial job losses, or reduced economic growth. The workers of Aberdeen, Shetland and the Scottish manufacturing belt will.
The bogus science of attribution
Undergirding the entire climate litigation enterprise is a set of contested scientific claims that its practitioners treat as settled fact. Foremost among these is the claim that specific weather events – storms, floods, heatwaves – can be attributed with sufficient precision to the greenhouse gas emissions of specific governments or corporations so as to ground legal liability. This is scientifically and legally fraudulent. A Nature paper purporting to pin liability on fossil fuel companies illustrates how activism dressed in scientific language is being deployed to provide the litigation industry with the veneer of empirical legitimacy.
Climate models – on which all such attribution claims ultimately depend – have consistently run hotter than observed temperatures, overpredicting warming by a substantial margin. As the CO2 Coalition has noted in submissions to US federal courts, these predictions have regularly failed the test of real-world observation. Paul Homewood, who has spent years meticulously auditing the claims of the climate establishment, has repeatedly documented how temperature records are adjusted, extreme weather events are misattributed and projections are presented as certainties. The science is not “crystal clear”, as Khan insists. It is deeply contested among credentialled scientists. Yet the litigation industry requires the pretence of certainty, because uncertainty would make the legal claims collapse.
There is also the question, highly relevant to the Rosebank litigation, of whether the ‘scope 3’ emissions doctrine makes any coherent sense. The logic demands that regulators count not only the emissions from oil extraction, but the emissions that will result when the oil is burned – potentially anywhere in the world, by consumers with no connection to the UK licensing decision. If Rosebank does not produce its oil, does anyone seriously contend that global oil consumption will fall by an equivalent amount? The oil will simply be produced somewhere else – Norway (adjacent to the UK’s own oil and gas fields), Saudi Arabia, or the United States – with no net reduction in global emissions. As even legal commentators have noted, the Finch ruling does not actually bar future approvals; it merely requires that scope 3 emissions be assessed – yet the climate litigation class has weaponised it as a de facto prohibition. Khan, of course, does not engage with such distinctions. Her world is one of legal briefs and activist networks, not energy balances and supply and demand elasticities.
A closing thought on democratic accountability
Tessa Khan might genuinely believe in what she is doing, but that is precisely what makes her dangerous. The climate litigation industry that she has helped to build is not a legitimate exercise in holding governments to account – it is a systematic attempt to remove control over energy and climate policy from democratic deliberation and hand it to courts, NGOs and the foundations that fund them.
When Khan declares that “the climate science is crystal clear that we can’t create new oil and gas fields if we’re going to stay within safe climate thresholds” – as she told the BBC in the aftermath of the Rosebank ruling – she’s not reporting a scientific consensus. She is repeating an activist catechism. The question of whether the UK should develop its North Sea resources, and on what timeline involves enormously complex trade-offs between energy security, employment, fiscal revenues, industrial competitiveness and, yes, environmental objectives. It is precisely the kind of question that elected governments and parliaments exist to resolve, subject to democratic accountability.
Instead, we have a situation in which a lawyer funded by European and American philanthropist-activists, with no background in economics or engineering, and operating through an NGO hosted by a “community interest company”, has succeeded in shutting down what would have been one of the most significant energy projects in British history – not by winning a democratic argument, but by winning a legal one. This is not democracy. It is its negation.
The UK’s energy policy is too important – and the costs of getting it wrong too severe for ordinary working people – to be delegated to the climate litigation class. It is past time for Parliament to reclaim it.
A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/15/meet-tessa-khan-the-climate-activist-litigator-waging-war-on-the-north-sea/)
