Tony Blair’s New Climate Reset Report Promotes Delay, Not Action

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Last Updated on: 5th May 2025, 11:07 pm

The Tony Blair Institute recently released a controversial and rapidly amplified new report titled “The Climate Paradox,” seeking to redefine the global climate debate by advocating what it positions as a pragmatic, politically viable reset of climate action. At the heart of the report lies a provocative assertion: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.”

The report garnered significant attention across major UK and European media outlets, clearly indicating a carefully orchestrated and effective media strategy. Upon its release, the report received prominent coverage in leading publications such as the BBC, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Telegraph, and major European newspapers, many of which featured coordinated interviews, commentary pieces, and opinion columns from high-profile figures closely aligned with the Institute.

The synchronized nature and timing of these pieces, often accompanied by direct commentary from Tony Blair himself, suggested deliberate pre-briefings and strategic distribution to influential journalists. Such structured and widespread media engagement amplified the report’s impact and ensured it dominated climate policy discussions for several days across mainstream channels, clearly reflecting a sophisticated public relations effort aimed at shaping the policy narrative.

On its face, some might find the report refreshingly realistic, emphasizing practicality over idealism. Yet, digging deeper, this seemingly pragmatic framing reveals a troubling alignment with delaying narratives, as defined clearly by Lamb et al. in their influential 2020 analysis of climate delay discourses.

One of the most problematic underlying assumptions of the Blair report is the notion that personal sacrifice—such as reduced meat consumption, limited air travel, or constrained consumer lifestyles—is a necessary but politically untenable cornerstone of current climate policy. Indeed, the report repeatedly frames these personal sacrifices as ineffective and unpopular, suggesting they have alienated voters, particularly in developed countries.

This critique might appear compelling at first glance, yet it misses a crucial point: the “personal sacrifice” narrative was itself largely constructed by fossil-fuel giant BP in the early 2000s to divert responsibility for emissions from industry and governments to individual consumer behaviors. The Blair Institute’s report, by taking this framing at face value, inadvertently reinforces a deeply flawed narrative rather than challenging its origin or validity.

Moreover, the Blair Institute’s heavy emphasis on technology as the principal solution to climate action, while superficially aligned with a pragmatic approach, falls short of a genuinely evidence-based climate strategy. A core example is the report’s enthusiastic embrace of carbon capture and storage. CCS, historically presented as a silver-bullet solution to emissions from fossil fuels, has consistently failed to deliver on its promised scale, cost-effectiveness, and timeline. Despite decades of investment, CCS projects globally continue to falter due to prohibitively high costs, technological complexity, and fundamental energy inefficiencies inherent in capturing and storing carbon at scale. While theoretically attractive—capturing emissions before they enter the atmosphere—CCS has, in practice, proven itself a persistent distraction, draining precious resources away from proven solutions like solar, wind, battery storage, and electrification.

Like so many other parts of the report, this smells more of internalization of the fossil fuel industry’s core messaging than pragmatic and evidence-based choices. The Blair Institute report clearly falls into the common trap of assuming that CCS can replicate the impressive cost and scalability trajectories of solar, wind, and battery storage. While the report repeatedly suggests that CCS could follow a similar rapid learning curve, becoming both affordable and deployable at scale, this framing fundamentally misunderstands the technological and economic drivers behind renewable energy and battery success.

Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries have achieved dramatic cost reductions primarily due to modularity, manufacturing economies of scale, intense global competition, and cumulative incremental innovation. CCS, by contrast, remains inherently a bespoke, complex, and highly site-specific chemical and mechanical engineering solution tethered directly to fossil-fuel infrastructure. Decades of substantial public and private investment have failed to deliver comparable cost reductions or meaningful global deployment. Suggesting CCS can mirror renewables’ cost curves is dangerously optimistic and distracts from proven technologies that are available today.

CCS remains a fossil fuel industry shell game, mostly extracting geologically sequestered CO2 in one place and resequestering it in another for enhanced oil recovery, tax breaks, or both. That the Blair Institute is incapable of recognizing this reality indicates that they aren’t really paying attention.

The report also advocates strongly for both basic and advanced nuclear power, as well as fusion energy, portraying these technologies as essential components of the net-zero energy landscape. Yet, again, the reality of nuclear power paints a different picture. Traditional nuclear power plants continue to suffer from crippling economic disadvantages, characterized by staggering capital costs, significant project delays, and persistent operational issues. New nuclear projects routinely come online years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, as evidenced by projects in Finland, France, the United States, and the UK.

Even China can’t scale nuclear. The country, which eats billion-dollar megaprojects as snacks between real meals, only managed to reach its modest 2020 target in 2024, and will be far off its target of a meager 2% of grid capacity for 2025. As for its 2030 targets, suffice it to say that China is going to be even further off of those modest goals. Meanwhile, it hit its target of 50% of grid capacity from renewables six years early, in 2024, and will be hitting its 2035 goal of 50% of vehicle sales being EVs a decade early.

Advanced nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors (SMRs), remain not only commercially unproven but unlikely to ever be commercially viable, and their deployment timelines extend well beyond the immediate emissions-reduction window we face. Fusion, while scientifically interesting, remains firmly experimental, with viable commercial applications decades away at best. To present fusion as part of any near-term climate solution reflects an unrealistic optimism that diverges sharply from evidence-based planning.

Perhaps even more problematic is the report’s assertion regarding fossil fuel phase-out strategies, dismissing outright the feasibility of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels or limiting global energy demand. The claim that such strategies are inherently doomed overlooks significant empirical successes. Numerous jurisdictions worldwide have demonstrably reduced fossil fuel consumption, expanded electrification, and accelerated renewable energy deployment at scale. In one place, the report extols the necessity of quickly eliminating coal, and in another it says we can’t quickly eliminate fossil fuels. It’s a report written by someone who has the attention span of a gnat, or perhaps a committee that included a bunch of fossil fuel advocates.

China’s rapid deployment of wind, solar, and electric vehicles provides a compelling counterpoint. Indeed, China is positioned to decarbonize significantly faster than most Western nations precisely because it has embraced and scaled available technologies rather than relying primarily on theoretical future solutions. The slide above is my projection of China’s energy demand with the country’s extraordinary degree and rate of electrification, electrification powered by wind, solar, and water. They are on track to decarbonize much more rapidly than the west, with its tepid growth of electrification and renewables.

The Blair Institute also falls prey to the primary energy fallacy. By emphasizing the inevitability of rising global energy demand and arguing explicitly against any strategy that involves limiting consumption, the report implicitly relies on outdated assumptions tied to primary energy growth. It largely overlooks the profound efficiency gains achievable through widespread electrification, which inherently reduces total primary energy needs due to the vastly superior efficiency of electric systems over combustion-based technologies. As Mark Z. Jacobson, Saul Griffiths, and I—with napkin math compared to their much more sophisticated work—have shown, we can deliver the same energy services today with 40% to 45% of total input energy in an electrified economy, eliminating only the negative externalities of fossil fuels.

This failure is significant because it perpetuates a narrative that continued high levels of fossil fuel consumption or complex interventions like CCS are necessary to meet increasing global energy demand. A robust, evidence-based climate strategy would instead emphasize that electrification of transport, heating, and industry dramatically cuts primary energy demand even as end-use energy services continue to grow. By failing to explicitly recognize or correct for the primary energy fallacy—mistaking the need for energy services as a direct need for equivalent primary energy—the Blair report unintentionally strengthens delaying discourses that argue for continued reliance on fossil fuels or unproven technological fixes.

The Blair report’s continued narrative that China and other developing nations will dominate global emissions for decades—and thus must lead global action before the West can meaningfully decarbonize—is both outdated and misleading. By emphasizing that future emissions will predominantly originate in Asia, the report subtly redirects responsibility and justification for Western inertia, echoing what Lamb et al. categorize explicitly as “redirecting responsibility”—a central discourse of climate delay.

The Blair report also repeatedly stresses the downsides of ambitious climate action, portraying existing net-zero policies as unaffordable, politically toxic, and ineffective in securing public support. This framing exemplifies another delaying discourse highlighted by Lamb: emphasizing downsides and costs while minimizing the multiple co-benefits of rapid climate action.

Extensive evidence shows that transitioning to renewable energy not only reduces emissions but also dramatically improves air quality, public health, energy security, and economic resilience. By choosing instead to foreground narratives of public backlash and economic hardship—citing examples like France’s “gilets jaunes” protests—the report inadvertently amplifies perceptions of climate action as politically dangerous and economically harmful, rather than beneficial. Ironically, in arguing against alarmist activism, the Blair Institute itself adopts an alarmist stance about the political and economic feasibility of proven decarbonization strategies.

Equally contradictory within the report is its stance on activism. Initially acknowledging that activism has been crucial to driving progress on climate awareness and renewable energy adoption, the report quickly pivots to labeling activist-driven approaches as unhelpfully ideological and politically divisive. This internal contradiction is part of the incoherence of its overall message. Effective activism historically has broadened political acceptance of strong climate policy, rather than limiting it. By framing activism as simultaneously valuable yet problematic, the report muddles its own narrative and potentially alienates key stakeholders necessary for broad coalitions and rapid policy implementation.

Finally, the Blair Institute advocates for “depoliticizing” climate action, removing what it perceives as ideological hysteria from the discussion. Yet, its own framing choices—such as labeling opposition to nuclear as irrational and dismissing renewable-only pathways as unrealistic—are themselves politically charged positions. This paradox of depoliticization reveals yet another internal contradiction. The report seeks a new politics while simultaneously denouncing the political engagement of those pushing for urgent, science-based climate policies.

To be clear, the Blair Institute correctly identifies critical barriers: polarization, inadequate political will, insufficient global coordination, and the real-world inertia of existing fossil infrastructure. It rightly highlights the importance of delivering tangible economic and societal benefits to secure broad public buy-in. And it clearly states the need to address climate change. Yet, by framing the challenge through delaying narratives—especially reliance on future breakthroughs in unproven technologies like fusion, CCS, and advanced nuclear—the report effectively advocates for prolonging the problems rather than accelerating action.

Pragmatism in climate strategy is not about waiting for speculative innovations to save us decades from now. It is about swiftly scaling solutions available today—renewables, electrification, energy storage, grid enhancements, and efficiency—that we know can rapidly reduce emissions at a global scale.

Ultimately, climate pragmatism must be grounded in reality and solid frameworks—my frameworks are published here—rather than optimism alone. By overstating the potential of speculative technologies and reinforcing outdated personal-sacrifice frames invented by fossil-fuel interests, the Blair report misses the critical opportunity to clearly support immediate, feasible, and proven actions that deliver measurable emissions cuts and widespread public benefits today. If the goal truly is pragmatic action and tangible results, policymakers must acknowledge that robust, scalable solutions already exist and commit unequivocally to their immediate global deployment.