Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has written an essay on what’s wrong with the UK, one of the headlines of which has been reported as ‘ditch Net Zero targets’.  So I had a closer look.

The actual text is slightly more nuanced than the headlines (colour me shocked):

“remove those parts of the net-zero agenda which prioritise clean energy over cheaper energy”

and

“We must prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources”

However, both of these are straw men arguments: the presumption that cheap energy is at odds with renewables and that electrification isn’t a huge part of Net Zero.

On the first, the Tony Blair Institute put out a suggestion last year that we should stick with fossil fuels and use carbon capture and storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC) to tackle climate change. Well if you want an expensive way to tackle climate change, that’s the best way to whack up the bills. Renewables and battery storage are currently storming the world because they are so affordable. Maybe, just maybe, the ‘parts of the net-zero agenda’ he is referring to is ‘hydrogen’ in which case I would actually agree.

On the second, Blair acknowledges that there isn’t much fuel left in the North Sea to use – so why would you bet the future of the country on a dwindling resource? And the suggestion that electrification isn’t part of net zero is ridiculous – electric vehicles and heat pumps in particular are core to the transformation – and much of the ‘cost’ of Net Zero is upgrading the grid to allow the expansion of electrification. This is a common rhetorical trick – defining net zero as the stuff you don’t like, but excluding the stuff you do approve of eg you often hear “we should ditch net zero and go nuclear instead” as if nuclear isn’t (an expensive) part of net zero.

Thirdly, I searched the essay for any mention of ‘climate’ or ‘warming’. Zilch. This is another devious but common debating trick – ignore the biggest threat facing humanity and frame the choice between fossil fuels and renewables as purely ideological. It’s not that Blair doesn’t know about climate change – after leaving no 10 in 2008, he accepted a well-paid post advising Zurich Insurance on climate change, since when the evidence for change has only got stronger. Which takes us on to…

My last point: what’s in it for Tony? Here’s Wikipedia on who funds the Tony Blair Institute:

The Tony Blair Institute confirmed that it had received donations from the United States Department of State and Saudi Arabia. In 2024 the institute provided paid work for the authoritarian regime in Azerbaijan when Azerbaijan hosted the COP29 conference. The Guardian reported in April 2025 that one of the institute’s largest donors is the charitable foundation of Larry Ellison, the founder of the computer technology company Oracle, which gave over £52 million in 2023 and has promised another £163 million.

If you didn’t know, Ellison is also a close confident of President Trump, and if Blair’s essay sometimes sounded like a Trump social media rant rewritten by an Oxford-educated lawyer, then maybe that’s not co-incidental. He who pays the piper picks the tune.