The bottom line landed on April 29, 2025: Tony Blair, writing the foreword to a report from his own institute, declared that climate strategy built on phasing out fossil fuels in the short term was “doomed to fail”. The backlash inside Labour was immediate, and by the next afternoon the fight had reached Prime Minister’s Questions.
By the numbers, the report’s case leaned on demand. Rising fossil fuel production, above all in China and India, a doubling of airline travel and growing appetite for steel and cement made current policy look, in Blair’s eyes, inadequate to the moment. He was 71, still a totem in his party, and he argued people were “being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal”. The paper itself, by the Tony Blair Institute’s Lindy Fursman, said net zero policies were “increasingly viewed as unaffordable, ineffective or politically toxic” and Blair called the wider debate “riven with irrationality”.
The Prescription and the Pushback
The report did not call for scrapping targets. It said existing carbon goals should stay, to give business certainty, while the route to them needed an urgent rethink toward carbon capture and storage, nuclear fusion, new small modular reactors, and international pressure on the biggest emitters. Fossil fuels still drive more than 75% of the world’s greenhouse gas output; renewables, Blair allowed, remain necessary, though he wanted the emphasis shifted.
Investors will note the counter-case came fast. At PMQs on April 30, Sir Keir Starmer batted the intervention away: “If you look at the detail of what Tony Blair said he’s absolutely aligned with what we’re doing here.” The TBI issued a statement the same day backing the government’s 2050 net zero target, and the prime minister’s spokesman insisted Energy Secretary Ed Miliband was doing a great job while conceding Starmer did not share Blair’s complaint of hysteria. A week earlier Starmer had promised to go all-out for a low-carbon future, calling the mission part of his government’s DNA.
The economics profession piled on. Lord Nicholas Stern, whose 2006 review Blair himself commissioned, called the report “muddled and misleading”, saying “If the UK wobbles on its route to net zero, other countries may become less committed. The UK matters,” Adam Berman of Energy UK answered the substance directly: “Net zero is the economic opportunity of the 21st century.” UK emissions, he noted, have halved since 1990 on the uptake of wind and solar. Green Alliance accused Blair of defeatism, an anonymous Labour MP called the timing unhelpful, and one government source pointedly noted the institute’s past funding from Saudi Arabia, which the TBI, calling itself editorially independent, did not answer directly.
The backdrop is a party already at war with itself over pace. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch had just dropped her party’s support for the 2050 target; the previous government and Labour had both pledged clean electricity, an end to petrol and diesel car sales by 2030 and 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028. The figure that matters stayed fixed through the noise: 66% of UK voters told YouGov they were worried about climate change. The target held. The argument over the road there had only begun.
Sources
- Climate plan based on phasing out fossil fuels doomed to fail, says Tony Blair | Environment policy | The Guardian
- Labour defends net-zero policies after Blair criticism
Sources
- Climate plan based on phasing out fossil fuels doomed to fail, says …
- Labour defends net-zero policies after Blair criticism – BBC
