For all the noise that surrounds Tony Blair, his sharpest interventions tend to arrive on paper. In late April 2025, his institute published “The climate paradox: why we need to reset action on climate change”, a document whose foreword, signed by the former prime minister, dismissed the global drive to phase out fossil fuels as “doomed to fail”. The salient point, largely missed in the coverage: the paper was written by the Tony Blair Institute’s Lindy Fursman, and it never disputed that climate change demands urgent action.
What it attacked was method. Blair wrote: “Present policy solutions are inadequate and, worse, are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable,” adding: “Too often, political leaders fear saying what many know to be true: the current approach isn’t working.” The Guardian reported his view that people were “being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal”. The reset he wanted was technological: seven actions running from prioritising carbon capture and harnessing AI to investing in nuclear and redirecting global philanthropy toward breakthroughs.
Westminster’s reply was a study in discomfort. Environment secretary Steve Reed told Sky News the government was “moving away from sticking plaster solutions towards doing what’s right for the future of the economy, and for the future of households”, while conceding that “we’ll still be using fossil fuels… for some time to come”. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer insisted Blair was “absolutely aligned” with Labour policy, citing shared enthusiasm for carbon capture, AI and domestic targets. It would seem an odd word for a man whose paper the Times reported had one Labour source calling it “public tantrum” material that was “really unhelpful”, days before local elections.
The critique drew return fire from an authority of the field. Lord Stern, author of the 2006 climate review, branded the report “muddled and misleading”, noting “far more progress being made around the world to decarbonise the global economy than it suggests”, including China’s lead in renewables and electric vehicles. The Conservatives’ Victoria Atkins saw a simpler lesson: “If even Tony Blair doesn’t agree with the Labour government, then that is quite a clear message.” A government spokesperson offered the dry counter: “We will reach net-zero in a way that treads lightly on people’s lives, not by telling them how to live or behave.”
Notably, the politics cut both ways. YouGov polling at the time put 66% of UK voters worried about climate change, and the thinktank Persuasion UK warned Labour stood to lose more seats to the Greens than to Reform. Blair’s verdict, dated and argued, was that the climate fight would be won by engineers, not by asking voters to use less. The argument over that proposition, inside his own party most of all, has outlasted the news cycle that carried it.
Sources
- Environment secretary defends green policies – after Sir Tony Blair says net zero is 'doomed to fail' – Yahoo News UK
- Climate plan based on phasing out fossil fuels doomed to fail, says Tony Blair – Carbon Brief
