Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier

By Jo Nova

What a bomb to drop in the last days before the Australian election

The aggressive climate action of the Australian Labor Party is suddenly wildly far out on a branch.

There are council elections in the UK, and Nigel Farage’s party is “expected to make large gains”. So as Ed Cummings in The Telegraph describes it, Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, “chose this moment to lob a large grenade”.

Blair is possibly the first person within the Blob to say what skeptics have been saying for years, as if he thought of it all by himself. He’s pulling the pin on the idea that “Net Zero” is sensible, possible, and essential, but this is no mea culpa — more like an escape plan. The populist parties are rising across Europe, grids are falling, and the failures of the Left are becoming too obvious.

Watch the pea — on the one hand, it’s good that an influential figure on the Left is saying that Net Zero is “riven with irrationality” and “unworkable” and “doomed to fail” but he’s tacitly pretending the left have figured this out by themselves and are victims of the namecalling they started. The namecalling that has been their greatest weapon, and his remarks have made it to the Sydney Morning Herald today:

A political tide is turning across Europe, and at its centre is a hard truth

— by Rob Harris, The Sydney Morning Herald

In Britain, Sir Tony Blair’s sharp critique of the government’s net zero strategy this week marks a watershed moment for green policy debate. The former Labour prime minister, who has been quietly advising Downing Street, accused politicians of pushing unrealistic and politically unsustainable climate agendas.

“People are being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal,” Blair said in a foreword to a new report from his think tank released on Tuesday.

This is a remarkable admission. The Blob have ostracized and ruthlessly punished anyone who stepped outside the line. It’s been their substitute for rational argument for thirty years:

According to Blair, the political elite is paralysed by a climate discourse he described as “riven with irrationality”. He argued that many leaders know the current approach is unworkable but are “terrified” of voicing that view for fear of being labelled climate change deniers. “The movement now needs a public mandate, attainable only through a shift from protest to pragmatic policy,” he said.

This big shift has been forced upon them by Donald Trump, by Nigel Farage, and belatedly the UK Conservative party. Above all, it’s been forced upon them by reality. The shocking price rises, the blackouts, the crippling loss of industrial power — and now finally, the rise of powerful political opposition in the UK. But this is not a reconciliation with reality, there is no acknowledgement the Left got anything wrong, or the “deniers” were right all along. There are no lessons being learned here. It is their escape hatch.

In The Foreward, he says people are turning away from politics (meaning Labour politics).

People know that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality. As a result, though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy.

So, 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.

It’s about The Backlash

The Paris agreement failed because of Covid and the War in Ukraine, you know:

Therefore, there has been a period where climate-change action and global agreements, notably the Paris Agreement in 2015, seemed to herald a new era; but that momentum has been followed – exacerbated by external shocks like Covid and the Ukraine war – by a backlash against such action, which threatens to derail the whole agenda.

However, because of the levels of growth and development, present policy solutions are inadequate and, worse, are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable. 

And though action by the developed world is still vital, by 2030 almost two-thirds of global emissions will come from China, India and South-East Asia. Yet the global financial flows for renewable energy in the developing world have fallen and not risen in the past few years.

It’s not the end of coal and oil:

These are the inconvenient facts, which mean that any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.

But this is not good news for Wind and Solar power. They may have just been thrown under the bus.

This is a Big Blob document

But make no mistake, in the conclusions he’s still calling for the ultimate Blob wet dream — he wants weather control with geoengineering and that will need global governance:

Actions to address the climate-change challenge must include:

1. 1. 1. 1. Accelerating and scaling technologies that capture carbon, together with significant investment and acceleration of engineered permanent carbon-dioxide-removal technologies, including direct air capture (DAC) solutions.

         2. Harnessing the power of technologies, including AI, to streamline and speed up both climate mitigation and adaptation.

         3. Investing in breakthrough and frontier energy solutions to ensure future generation can be clean.

         4. Scaling nature-based solutions in order to buy time for more systemic solutions.

In the most extreme case, in which we fail to make significant progress on decarbonisation, the world may need to seriously consider solar radiation management (SRM), a technology generally considered a last resort for addressing global warming. One of the most radical and controversial forms of disruption, SRM involves the direct manipulation of the Earth’s climate system to counteract global warming through techniques aiming to reflect sunlight away or limit the radiation that reaches the Earth. While highly controversial, such technologies may become necessary if mitigation efforts fail to prevent catastrophic climate shifts. …

Because the impacts of SRM are likely to be global and unequally felt, the world needs a robust governance framework to ensure its equitable and ethical use. This framework could mirror past efforts at limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

There is currently significant risk that a single country could move ahead unilaterally with this technology at scale, resulting in extreme weather effects that transcend national borders. As such, political leaders globally should progress with urgency a governance framework. The potential for unintended consequences such as regional climate disruptions or unforeseen ecological impacts, including risks from sudden temperature rise on the ceasing of SRM activities, underscores the importance of international cooperation and oversight, and makes this intervention the most disruptive of technological options.

Finally — In Part 7. “Rethinking the Role of Finance, Including Philanthropy”,  free men and women of the world will want to know Tony Blair wants to harness the power of philanthropic funding, and one of the successes he mentions is this:

One good example of the power of philanthropic investment is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investment in mRNA vaccine technology – years before the Covid-19 pandemic.

That’s just in case you were wondering if Tony Blair was still an active part of the Global Blob — The Billionaires, the United Nations Bureaucrats, the Davos Ski Club, and the largest corporate leaders in the world. He is.

The Labour Party are facing a fire. Think of Blair’s work as “backburning”.

He can burn off Net Zero Targets, wind and solar, and Ed Milliband, but he still gets the UN global Power Structure, and he might dig the Labour party out of a big hole (while digging a different hole).

h/t TdeF and OldOzzie, GWPF