The latest report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, ‘The Climate Paradox: Why We Need To Reset Action on Climate Change’ has caused an almighty row within the Labour Party and amongst the UK’s climate commentariat and climate campaigners and activists. The Guardian newspaper has felt it necessary to editorialise about the Report, suggesting it should be “ignored” and that “a period of silence from Sir Tony on this subject would now be most welcome”. Sir Nicholas Stern describes the Report from his former political boss as “muddled and misleading”.
These reactions are unfortunate, since at the heart of ‘The Climate Paradox’ is a profound truth: the aspirational ambition for the carbon-constrained world enshrined in the Paris Agreement of 2015 is far, far short of being realised, its narrative framing no longer persuasive in a world that geopolitically is radically different from just 10 years ago.
Blair’s ‘The Climate Paradox’ is not a climate sceptical document; it is not even a Net-Zero sceptical document. And it is certainly unlikely to be adopted as a strategy document by Nigel Farage’s Reform party—would that it were, since it makes some very bold claims about the realities of climate change and the need to tackle them.
But what Tony Blair gets exactly right is to call out the false belief that climate change is a global collective action problem that can be solved through the multilateralism of the past 30 years. “Despite the past 15 years seeing an explosion in renewable energy”, says the Report, “production of fossil fuels, and demand for them, has risen, not fallen, and is set to rise further up to 2030.”
Twenty-eight years after the first tentative manifestation of this multilaterialist belief in the Kyoto Protocol, 16 years after the failed attempt to drive home this belief at COP15 in Copenhagen, and 10 years after the last-ditch attempt to rescue climate multilateralism at COP21 in Paris, ‘The Climate Paradox’ is correct to argue for a fundamental re-set about (i) how we think about the nature of the climate change problem; and (ii) the constellation of efforts that can be made to mitigate the most dangerous consequences of climate change.
I have written or spoken about my approach to these two questions in other settings: the implausibility of the 1.5°C target (‘Was the world’s most influential climate target doomed from the start?’), the dangers of Net Zero (‘Is the quest for net-zero a form of scientism?’), and why ‘Climate emergency politics is dangerous’.
I do not agree with everything in ‘The Climate Paradox’. I do not agree, for example, that climate change can ever be depoliticsed, nor should it; the questions, dilemmas and ethical choices involved are the very essence of a vibrant political culture. Nor do I agree with the Report’s call for further research into solar geoengineering technologies and the naïve belief that such technologies can ever be “governed wisely”.
David Astor was the editor of The Observer between 1948 and 1975 and established this newspaper’s credentials as offering a liberal and progressive voice in the world. During his editorship, Astor wrote a short, unpublished, ‘Memo on the Soul of a Paper’ describing the attitudes by which he worked and which were heavily shaped by the anti-fascist mood of the 1940s. These attitudes included “Not exaggerating your own case; discouraging herd thinking, particularly among those ‘on our side’; challenging taboos and legends, particularly those ‘our sort’ of reader usually accepts; daring to pursue an unpopular cause solitarily, deliberately cultivating doubt and scepticism, but not cynicism” (p.152 in Jeremy Lewis’ ‘David Astor’, Jonathan Cape, 2016).
I was reminded of Astor’s wise words when reading many of the knee-jerk dismissals over the past 48 hours of Blair’s challenge to Net -Zero orthodoxy. Rather than dismissing ‘The Climate Paradox’ Report out of hand—circling the wagons to defend the status quo—wiser politicians would do well to take time to read it carefully and to reflect on the implications of its bluntly stated home-truths.
Mike Hulme
© 1 May 2025
