Former British PM Tony Blair Slams Net Zero as “Irrational” – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t strativarius – Hangon, didn’t Blair help make Net Zero happen?

No 10 defends net-zero policies after Tony Blair brands them ‘irrational’

The Labour former prime minister suggested voters being asked to ‘make financial sacrifices’ are turning away from climate policies.

No 10 has defended the Government’s net-zero policies after Sir Tony Blair attacked any strategy that limits fossil fuels in the short term as “doomed to fail”.

The Labour former prime minister argued that the current climate approach “isn’t working”, with the debate having “become irrational” and people “turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy”.

“In developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal,” Sir Tony wrote in the foreword for a report from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI).

But Downing Street insisted that Sir Keir Starmer’s Government’s approach has a minimal impact on people’s lives.

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Read more: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair-government-ed-miliband-dna-downing-street-b1225009.html

Other mainstream media outlets take an even harder line on Blair’s Net Zero criticism;

Tony Blair has exposed an inconvenient truth about net zero

Most politicians will not dare say that the net zero emperor is naked – so the former prime minister is brave to admit there is a ‘credibility gap’ at the heart of it, says John Rentoul

Tuesday 29 April 2025 12:31 BST

never thought of Tony Blair as playing the part of the young boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes – but that is the role he has adopted in the debate about climate change.

He has cut through the assumptions that have built up over the decades – assumptions that everyone knew were not quite right, but which it had become dangerous to question.

“Political leaders by and large know that the debate has become irrational,” Blair writes, but are “terrified of saying so, for fear of being accused of being ‘climate deniers’.”

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Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/tony-blair-climate-change-net-zero-b2741287.html

The original piece by Tony Blair;

The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change

PAPER 29TH APRIL 2025
LINDY FURSMAN

Foreword [By Tony Blair]

People know that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality. As a result, though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy.

So, in developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal. Whatever the historical responsibility of the developed world for climate change, those with even a cursory knowledge of the facts understand that in the future the major sources of pollution will come principally from the developing world.

But for that developing world, there is an equal resentment when they’re told the investment is not available for the energy necessary for their development because it is not “green”. They believe, correctly, that they have a right to develop and that those who have already developed using fossil fuels do not have the right to inhibit them from whatever is the most effective way of developing.

Therefore, there has been a period where climate-change action and global agreements, notably the Paris Agreement in 2015, seemed to herald a new era; but that momentum has been followed – exacerbated by external shocks like Covid and the Ukraine war – by a backlash against such action, which threatens to derail the whole agenda.

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Tony Blair

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Read more: https://institute.global/insights/climate-and-energy/the-climate-paradox-why-we-need-to-reset-action-on-climate-change

What can I say? I guess Britain’s economic problems aren’t Trump’s fault after all.