Tony Blair's climate pragmatism is a welcome intervention

London, 28 July - Net Zero Watch has welcomed Tony Blair's hard-headed intervention in the climate policy debate.

With mounting public concern and political divisions about the rising cost of the Net Zero agenda, the former prime minister has warned that it was not worth imposing even higher costs on consumers.

Sir Tony Blair warned against asking the public to do a “huge amount” to tackle climate change, saying Britain’s unilateral policies have no real impact in light of China’s rising CO2 emissions.

In a recent interview he said:

Don’t ask us to do a huge amount when frankly whatever we do in Britain is not really going to impact climate change."

Tony Blair also acknowledged what Net Zero Watch has been arguing for years: Britain’s unilateral decarbonisation targets make no sense in the absence of the world’s major economies adopting equally binding caps.

While he insisted that climate change was “the single biggest global challenge” and that “Britain should play its part”, he cautioned: “One year’s rise in China’s emissions would outscore the whole of Britain’s emissions for a year.”

The former prime minister rightly argues that the UK is now a minor greenhouse gas emitter which has no significant impact on global emissions because the world's major emitters have no intention of adopting binding caps.

Sir Tony's warning is a timely reminder that Britain's Net Zero plans are dangerously expensive and will result in painful reductions in living standards for all but the richest. They now threaten Britain with economic decline, societal instability and the eventual failure of the decarbonisation effort.  

Instead of extremely costly policies that are both unaffordable and unattractive to the poorer countries, Tony Blair advocates that Britain should focus on helping the developing world shift to alternative energy technologies.

Net Zero Watch welcomes Blair's intervention and hopes his pragmatic approach will open the door for a fresh debate that, for too long, has been seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist and depressingly intolerant.