From Watts Up With That?

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.

…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.

Former British PM Tony Blair Slams Net Zero as “Irrational”

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.