Blair’s unhelpful intervention on net zero

One phenomenon that leaders in office find most unhelpful is when one of their predecessors makes a big statement on a controversial issue that questions the government position. It is a safe bet for creating a distraction that generates all the wrong headlines, and it is exponentially more damaging when the predecessor comes from the party of government.

Hence, when the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change last month published a report — with a foreword by the former British prime minister himself — that suggested that the “debate over climate change is riven with irrationality,” the UK government’s PR machine swiftly went into damage limitation mode. Blair is a seasoned politician and he must have known that his foreword would make more headlines than the entire report and, more alarmingly, would feed the climate change skeptics, especially those in the media who are hostile to a Labour government.

Back in 2019, under the stewardship of Theresa May, the UK became the first major economy in the world to pass laws to end its contribution to global warming, requiring all greenhouse gas emissions to be brought to net zero by 2050. This was no mean feat. The aim was for the country that kick-started the Industrial Revolution to be one of the leading forces of the green revolution.

When Blair questions public support for the sacrifices required to achieve this, he is suggesting that leaders in the UK and across the world abandon what should probably be the world’s top priority: that of saving the planet from climate cataclysm. By doing so, he disappointingly also suggests leadership by focus groups, a contentious style that very much characterized the later years of his premiership. True leaders should combine the delivery of tough news to their people while also presenting a realistic horizon of hope, which in this case should be the promotion of a global collective effort to contain global warming and its devastating consequences.

Blair is a seasoned politician and he must have known that his foreword would feed the climate change skeptics

Yossi Mekelberg

The timing of the report’s release was unfortunately more damaging than Blair probably intended, especially in the UK, as it came just ahead of local elections in which the climate-skeptic Reform UK party was expected to do well. And do well it certainly did, even beyond its wildest expectations, while Blair’s intervention gave it an unnecessary tailwind.

Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, the leader of Reform is still questioning whether global warming is the result of human actions, while others in his party see the effort to adhere to the Paris Agreement as “ideological lunacy.” There is no wisdom in giving them a helping hand based on some dubious information.

This issue goes way beyond British politics and the first step must be to adhere to the facts. Like all scientific research, that on climate change is evolving as it deals with an event on a global scale that is constantly changing. Nevertheless, there is unanimity, which the Blair report does not dispute, that climate change does exist and is already manifesting itself in floods, droughts and wildfires, while threatening more than 2 million species with extinction and bringing unpredictable weather conditions including extreme heat waves and storms. All of which bring grave health risks, poverty and displacement.

So, to argue as Blair does, that “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,” could be easily interpreted as giving up on future generations because saving planet Earth has become an inconvenience for the current generation, especially of high-income countries. If this is the case, he cannot think very highly of either this generation of leaders or generally the rest of us for that matter.

Moreover, this claim is not anchored in data. A public opinion poll that was published in the UK by YouGov found that 67 percent of the public accepts that the climate is changing due to human activity, while only 17 percent reject the correlation between the two. In a similar ratio, Britons believe that climate change has not been exaggerated.

But these are the very same people — and not only in the UK — that also deal daily with the decline in public services, a national health system that is on life support and an education system starved of resources, while increasing numbers of people genuinely feel the pinch with the rise in the cost of living. The more there are daily struggles to make ends meet, the less capacity there is to think about longer-term threats, a situation made worse by the decline of trust in elected politicians and governments across the board. Fighting climate change pays the price for that.

In the face of existential danger, to accept defeat before all routes to success are explored is the main threat

Yossi Mekelberg

Still, the answer is not to abandon the goal of reaching net-zero emissions, nor to play into the hands of the climate change skeptics. Instead, it should be to truly lead from the front on the issue with conviction, like that has been shown, for instance, in supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, not only because it is morally right but because it is in our national interest.

Public support for the use of renewable energies such as wind, solar and biomass to provide electricity, fuel and heat is overwhelming, but it must be translated into transforming the world’s economies — first and foremost, those of the main polluting countries — into green economies. This also holds for developing countries because, although their contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is lower, it is expected to increase as their populations grow at a faster rate.

In Bangladesh, for instance, its chief adviser to the government and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammed Yunus is engaged in talks with development and renewable energy experts to decarbonize the country and import hydroelectricity from neighboring Nepal and Bhutan, despite limited resources. Blair’s pessimism ignores the fact that this part of the world is not only resourceful but is also willing to engage in sustainable development and climate change discourse and not be sidelined.

In the face of existential danger, to accept defeat before all routes to success are explored is the main threat. Investment in renewable energy is immense and awareness, at least in some parts of the world, of how individual and collective behavior affects our environment is growing all the time and must be harnessed to this cause. Shouting from the sidelines that, by this, we are chasing ghosts, is not only unhelpful but irresponsible.

• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg