Essay by Eric Worrall
From green hero to zero. The Guardian even threw in a big oil smear against their former climate hero.
How ‘out of touch’ Tony Blair became a serious threat to climate action
Even before his call for a net zero ‘reset’, there had been criticism of ex-PM’s lucrative links with fossil fuel nations
Fiona Harvey Environment editor Mon 5 May 2025 21.17 AEST
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In late 2022, on the sidelines of the Cop27 UN climate conference, the former UK prime minister Tony Blair was holding high-level meetings with senior figures from politics and business. His role in the negotiations raised questions for some, who began to worry that, having been a respected elder statesman on the subject – one who as prime minister crafted the UK’s first real climate measures, and made it the priority for the UK presidency of the G8 group of countries in 2005 – he might now be becoming, in the words of one Whitehall insider, “a serious threat to sensible climate policy”.
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[Tony Blair] “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,” he wrote. “Political leaders by and large know that the debate has become irrational. But they’re terrified of saying so, for fear of being accused of being ‘climate deniers’.”
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Immediately after resigning as prime minister, Blair took up an international role as Middle East peace envoy, a position he would keep until 2015. He also moved quickly to forge lucrative partnerships for his thinktank and his former commercial consultancy, Tony Blair Associates, landing a multimillion-pound deal advising the Saudi Arabian government on modernising the country, even continuing after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He facilitated deals with the Chinese for PetroSaudi and TBI was paid millions for consultancy to the United Arab Emirates government in the mid-2010s.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/05/tony-blair-serious-threat-climate-policy-out-of-touch
Blair didn’t criticise Net Zero as a goal, what he said is the economic fallout from racing to Net Zero too quickly might turn people against climate action.
The playbook for the attack on Tony Blair appears to follow the usual unimaginative green innuendo of being paid off by big oil.
If a green starts from the assumption that radical green action is the only rational policy, then from that perspective anyone who criticises even the most ridiculous green ideas must either be ignorant and stupid, or they must be a selfish corrupt villain who is endangering our children’s future for short term greed. It’s not even worth considering ideas which challenge the green movement on the merits of the ideas, because by definition they cannot have any merits – because deep greens unshakeably believe that radical green action is the only rational policy.
Apparently talking with the enemy makes you an enemy. I guess they think armies should never surrender and arbitration and mediation are disgusting.
I think they have a Ten Commandments of sorts, one of them being “Thou shalt not stray from the Climate Orthodoxy in any way shape or form lest thou be excommunicated”.
Yep.
My main problem with the whole climate irrationality is that we are constantly pushed to accept their “whole package”.
That is, observations, studies and understanding of this planet’s (numerous) climate systems and behaviors can only be considered through the prism of the postulated effects of manmade CO2 emissions.
Which has demonstrably been proven to be abject nonsense.
Climate studies should continue apace, but modern human civilisations are unsustainable without access to abundant reliable energy sources. The more the better, as appropriate to the overall mix.
Abundant, reliable fossil fuels cannot be regarded as the “lepers” of these resources.
These two matters are not inextricably linked, and anti-energy activists should get their moronic noses out of energy supply policy everywhere.
climate emergency fundamentalists
It is part of a whole. My favorite quote is: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.”
The don’t complain to fix climate issues, they complain to bring down western economies so the collapse survivors will clamor for communist orthodoxy.
They would probably like to bring back bonfires, the rack and thumbscrews to bring back the deniers into the fold.
Please don’t give them ideas. Already some of these extremists have called for prosecutions of “Deniers”.
Blair is divisive beyond belief on so many levels. Marmite (Vegemite) personified.
But for once the tarnished one is bang on regarding the need for fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
Their idea of the future does not include such things, they fantasise a green, rewilded clean energy utopia. But then, would Trump do this to American workers?
Nigel Farage has accused Keir Starmer of signing a trade deal with India that News will make it 20% cheaper to employ Indian workers than British workers thanks to a major new tax concession. – GB News
Net zero National Insurance – much cheaper for employers…
You clearly underestimate Blair..
Then you clearly did not understand.
Deleted
They will need the workers from India to balance out the “immigrants” from Islamist countries.
What could possibly go wrong !
“I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly”
from a children’s book.
My take on Climastrology is that any
politician who accepts any of their premises is suspect. Either of a pandering to the True Believers or actually being one themselves.
Or getting the 10% for the Big Buy.
Although the Clinton White House was for reductions in CO2 emissions, Slick Willy has had very little to say in recent years about Net Zero despite being very vocal on many leftish issues.
I suspect he’s very much a pragmatist pretty well aligned with Tony Blair.
We can only hope that more leaders feel sufficiently “safe” to join the club.
Yep Clinton is slick.
I thought at one time of having cigars made.
Call them Slick Willies
Motto
Smoke em or Poke em your choice.
The only time leaders feel “sufficiently safe” is when they are. free of the party chains and obligations By which time they have usually fouled themselves so thoroughly nobody wants to know them.
Slick is also in rapid cognitive decline and Hillary won’t blow him under the desk.
Those on board w the Green Deal w connections to Big oil thought that they would have a seat at the table when the rules for the new Carbon Credit system were set up. Better that than be subjected to those rules. But the system did not fly off the track so now they are all pulling back. It wasnt ideological to begin with.
Blair is a master manipulator and he clearly sees the negatives in a given idea and is ready to jump ship or lay the ship at anchor when the wind blows against it.
Never underestimate him..the Dark Lord. He is urging Starmer but Starmer is too stupid and wedded to Nut Zero. We will see if he shifts and pushes Miliband to the side. Watch this space…
“Climate action” what a dangerous sounding term!
All we are saying,
Is give Blair a chance!
Blair is in the pay of the highest bidder.
Always has been*.
Don’t know why you guys don’t love him more here.
[*Possible exception being the Northern Ireland Peace Process, which was before he sold his soul to the corporations.]
We don’t give a hootenanny what his motives are. He gets a gold star for criticizing Nut Zero, and another for getting himself cast out of the Church of Climate. He is now on the path to becoming a Climate Realist. That makes him a hero in our book.
Shallow..
A hero? I think that’s going a bit far. A better way of putting it, I’d suggest, is that even complete jerks can sometimes exhibit a bit of sense.
His sense is that he can read the writing on the wall and that the Carbon Credit idea is dead in the water
Possible exception being the Northern Ireland Peace Process, which was before he sold his soul to the corporations.
Most of NI was done under Major, and Blair caused a lot of problems trying to rush the final deal over the line to claim his personal glory.
“in the pay of the highest bidder.”
You mean like every solar and wind apostle in the world ? !
The left has always had very flexible standards. They view right and wrong purely on the grounds of whether they benefit.
A politician is beholden to the easy money from the climate capers?
Who knew. What a revelation!
Well oil beef hooked!
Blair has enough money and is now persona non grata, as such as all who have strayed such as Musk are forced from the tribe.
A new tribe will take the strays and as we know with Blair from the past he will take up the challenge.
He moves in high circles. You know, where the msm isnt even considered except as a propaganda tool. He doesnt care what the Guardian thinks. Only certain politicians and civil servants care what the Guardian thinks, nobody else does. So, highlighting an article there doesnt mean jack shite..
Oh, btw, in regards to Musk. After DOGE ‘saving’ all that money it is now transfered to…the Pentagon. More war..everybody loses.
As every good socialist knows, peace means the absence of opposition to global communism.
The left is so vicious towards those who drift from the party line.
TFN is the perfect example towards Eric’s point. The left believe that everyone who disagrees with them is evil.
The Vicar of Bray comes to mind.
Yes, I know Bray is in England and Blair is a Scot, but if the cap fits ….. .
Net Zero is not ‘climate action’, it’s economic self-harm on an unprecedented scale.
Every Government policy must be based on benefits vs costs. Net Zero trebles energy prices to achieve almost nothing in terms of ‘temperature reduction’. It seeks to change the entire dietary habits of a nation, to wipe out vast swathes of the farming industry. It involves insane energy policies, none of which stand up to rigorous critical evaluation.
And I absolutely bet you that Ed Miliband, Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan et al will not set an example by giving up their cars, stopping all air travel, becoming vegans, forgoing gas/electricity when the inevitable power cuts occur (it is all the Net Zero zealots who must be the first to lose access to power, be those that give up foreign travel, give up car ownership and absolutely none of them can ever eat meat again).
How hard is it to understand that wind energy is intermittent? It’s basic. As soon as a stable high pressure sits over the UK, all wind energy production drops off a cliff.
How hard is it to understand that the west of the country from Liverpool up to Cape Wrath is totally unsuited to solar power generation as it is cool, it rains a lot and cloud cover is far more common than full days of beating sunshine? We are not Saudi Arabia, Southern Spain or anywhere else with a Mediterranean climate, are we?
Scotland is best suited to wind and hydro, where renewables are concerned. Wales probably pretty similar, with hydro being a smaller percentage of the mix.
The problem with solar in the UK is that it is mostly generated in the summer, when energy usage is at its lowest.
What’s so nutty about Net Zero is that anaerobic digestion, which has been proven to provide reliable energy, year round, to small rural communities, is not going to have its ‘raw materials’ if cows are deemed the biggest pest on earth. All that shit that cows produce, along with the straw, goes into the digesters and produces heat and methane.It’s how you can enable rural communities to be energy secure without having to build costly pylons etc to source energy from far away. Wonderfully ‘green’ energy to anyone but raving nutcases…..
Very nice Eric. We need to embrace those who will stand with us even if they still haven’t completely come to our way of thinking. Our job is to put an end to the idea that wind and solar can replace fossil fuel, hydro and nuclear. We need to end net zero and I welcome even those who haven’t completely come in from the dark.
Would anyone expect anything else from The Guardian? Like numerous other climate alarmism sources, it realizes its hysterics are far more likely to be a source of mirth than credibility, so it’s been pulling out all the stops in trying to discredit its critics regardless of whether its arguments are being consistently debunked.
I’m actually very glad the Guardian has gone all in on Climate nonsense. The rag has a perfect record of backing losers.
The Left always ends up eating its own.
Teflon Tony, the ultra opportunist is always late to the party. Maragaret Thatcher adopted the CO2 scam way before the Teflon Don did that.
Margaret Thatcher also saw the lunacy of “climate action” way before Tony the Untouchable did.
From https://saltbushclub.com/2019/05/25/margaret-thatcher-on-climate-change/
Few people realize that Margaret Thatcher helped to promote the anthropogenic global warming scare and fewer still realize that she later made a complete U-turn once she came to appreciate that she was witnessing what is arguably the biggest fraud in the history of science.
On a lighter note, consider another piece of fake news about Margaret Thatcher and climate change.
Thatcher was trying to convince a number of journalists that the whole fabric of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming was a piece of UN nonsense, completely lacking any empirical evidence.
She took the journalists to lunch and attempted to show them why climate alarmism was without any scientific foundation and what the UN/IPCC goals really were.
The journalists simply wouldn’t listen to facts or reason so Thatcher gave up and decided they would just eat lunch. She beckoned the waiter who came over to their table and asked:
“Would you like the fish or the steak Madam?”
Margaret Thatcher replied:
“I’ll have the fish thank you.”
The waiter responded:
“And what about the vegetables?’
Thatcher replied:
“They’ll have the fish too.”
Blair has obviously seen what the end result of net zero will be and is now worming his way out of the historical position so he will look good in 5 years’ time. And long live his consultancy. Cynical I know, but I applaud his becoming rational as he understands more of the big picture as the next election cycle is not his top priority.
Funny how these alleged connections to big oil, weren’t a problem, so long as Blair supported the narrative.
Kind of like how oligarchs are only a threat to democracy when they support Republicans.