Tony Blair is a climate lobbyist for Big Tech and Big Polluters

How the media got the story completely wrong.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change published a report this week that was splashed across the front pages of many of the UK’s newspapers. The headlines accuse Blair of writing that net zero is doomed. In fact, Blair didn’t write anything about net zero.

The Tony Blair Institute report is titled, “The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change”.

Tony Blair wrote a five-page foreword to the report, in which he makes the following statements:

• Despite an “explosion” in renewable energy and electric vehicles, production and burning of fossil fuels is increasing.

• Air travel is predicted to double in 20 years.

• By 2050, demand for steel will increase 40% and cement 50%.

• The population of Africa will double in 30 years.

• By 2030, almost two-thirds of global emissions will come from China, India, and Southeast Asia.

“These are the inconvenient facts,” Blair writes, “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.”

“Wildly inaccurate” headlines

Simon Evans, deputy editor and journalist at Carbon Brief, points out that newspaper headlines about Blair’s comments were “wildly inaccurate”:¹

PHOTO Credit: Simon Evans.

Blair did not write that “net zero policies are doomed to fail”. He said that any strategy based on phasing out fossil fuels in the short term, or addressing over-consumption, is “doomed to fail”.

And, as Evans writes, “no government in the world has a current net-zero policy to ‘phase out fossil fuels in the short term or limit consumption’”.

Of course there’s plenty to be said about what’s wrong with net zero — it is not ambitious enough and it allows carbon offsets and other false solutions when real solutions require leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

But the Tony Blair Institute report mentions “net zero” only three times. The first is to argue that AI “must turbocharge our path to net zero”. The second is a quotation from the IPCC that states that carbon dioxide removals are “essential” to reach net zero. And the third is in a footnote referring to a 2024 YouGov survey that found that public support for net zero “remains high in the UK and EU”.

George Monbiot, journalist with The Guardian, appeared on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 yesterday. Vine appears to have read the headlines, but not the report. He introduces the topic by saying that Tony Blair “has called for a major rethink of net zero policies”.

Monbiot points out that support for net zero is high. “People are rightly extremely concerned about climate breakdown,” he says. “They want to see action.”

Blair recommends investing in carbon capture and storage, which is precisely what the Labour government is already doing. To the tune of £21.7 billion. “It’s a total white elephant,” Monbiot says.

In September 2024, climate scientists wrote to the Labour government urging them to pause its carbon capture plans. They argue that the process relies on unproven technology and would result in large greenhouse gas emissions.

The Good Law Project is taking legal action against the government’s subsidies to this risky and unproven technology.

Blair’s clients

Since Blair resigned as British prime minister in 2007, he has amassed a small fortune by acting as an adviser to polluting corporations and petrostates including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the United Arab Emirates.

In November 2010, as Monbiot points out on the Jeremy Vine show, Tony Blair Associates signed a contract with PetroSaudi, a Saudi Arabian oil company. Blair was paid £41,000 a month, and received a 2% commission on any deals he helped to broker.

Between September 2010 and February 2011, PetroSaudi paid US$382,000 to Tony Blair Associates.

A PetroSaudi source told The Times that the deal with Blair, “was a confidential engagement to help us develop business in China”.

Incidentally, between 2009 and 2011, PetroSaudi’s chief executive, Tarek Obaid, and another executive, Patrick Mahony, helped steal more than US$1.8 billion from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB. In August 2024, Obaid was sentenced in a Swiss court to seven years in prison, and Mahoney to six years.

The Tony Blair Institute has also received donations from Saudi Arabia’s Media Investment Limited, a subsidiary of Saudi Research and Marketing Group, which is registered in the tax haven of Guernsey. Media Investment Limited gave £9 million to the Tony Blair Institute.

AI

In addition to carbon capture and storage, the Tony Blair Institute report recommends harnessing the power of technology, including AI. Blair writes that,

AI, applied to energy efficiency and the better use of the energy grid, is itself potentially revolutionary in reducing energy use. Yet there is little time devoted at climate conferences to it.

But Blair makes no mention of the enormous amounts of energy required for the AI’s data centres in his foreword.

Lindy Fursman, the report’s author, mentions in passing that AI is “creating additional pressure on energy resources”.

The Tony Blair Institute’s is partly funded by Big Tech, including Amazon Web Services, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Larry Ellison Foundation, and Microsoft.

In promoting AI, the Tony Blair Institute is just echoing the tech fantasies of its financial backers.

Carbon capture and storage

Blair writes that,

We should put carbon capture — directly removing carbon as well as capturing it at source — at the centre of the battle. At present, carbon capture is not commercially viable despite being technologically feasible – but policy, finance and innovation would change this. The disdain for this technology in favour of the purist solution of stopping fossil-fuel production is totally misguided.

The Tony Blair Institute’s report explains that because of population growth and “new technologies such as AI” we will see “rising demands for fossil fuels”. Therefore, according to the report, “solutions must include the rapid scaling of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies that capture emissions at source”.

The report argues that governments should agree “collectively” to move towards a “goal of capturing and permanently storing every tonne of CO₂ generated by the coal, oil and gas industries — or removing an equivalent amount via other methods — making this part of these industries’ licenses to operate”.

It took more than 30 years for fossil fuels to even get a mention in the outcome of the UN climate meetings. And at COP28, governments only agreed to “contribute” to “transitioning away from fossil fuels”.

But the Tony Blair Institute is optimistic that governments can quickly reach an agreement to capture and permanently store every single tonne of CO₂ emitted from burning fossil fuels over the entire planet.

The report does not say how this might happen.

In addition to CCS, the report argues for carbon dioxide removal technologies to be accelerated. The report acknowledges that,

Critics of CDR and CCS technologies point to their high costs, significant energy requirements, and the risk that carbon capture might be used to justify even greater fossil-fuel consumption. These critiques have merit.

The Tony Blair Institute is using exactly this argument to justify continued use of fossil fuels.

Nature-based contradictions

The report acknowledges the problems with nature-based solutions:

[N]ot only are there constraints on the land and water needed to deliver these at scale, but nature-based solutions that accumulate carbon, such as forestry, are not permanent and do not sequester carbon indefinitely. For example, trees only absorb carbon as they grow, but once they reach maturity, their carbon uptake slows. In mature forests, the rate of new growth eventually becomes similar to the rate of decomposition, reaching a carbon-neutral state. If these forests are disturbed, through pest outbreaks, fires, floods, or landslides, they can release stored CO₂ suddenly back into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate warming.

The report also states that forests are used to “offset” emissions from burning fossil fuels — “emissions that remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years”. As the climate crisis intensifies, increased temperatures, droughts, pests, and wildfires mean that forests are flipping from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

Nevertheless, the report argues in favour of scaling nature-based solutions. “These are especially important to ‘buy time’ for both decarbonisation and for engineered CDR technologies to be scaled and deployed,” the report states.

Carbon markets

Not surprisingly, given that Tony Blair was always a neoliberal, the report is in favour of carbon markets.

“Optimising international carbon markets represents another promising avenue for redirecting financial flows towards climate priorities,” the report states and then lists some of the problems with carbon markets. Fragmented standards, concerns about additionally, lack of transparency have “undermined buyer confidence”.

The report lists high transaction costs, complex verification processes, and limited capacity as some of the problems faced by carbon project developers in the Global South.

The report could have added the problems with the massive oversupply of pollution allowances under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.

Or the fact that a 2016 report for the European Commission found that 85% of Clean Development Mechanism projects “have a low likelihood that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated”.

Or the massive levels of fraud within the EU ETS estimated to have cost European tax payer as much as €15 billion.

Or the conflicts of interest that riddle carbon markets and that make attempts to regulate carbon markets an exercise in corruption.

Instead the Tony Blair Institute tells us that,

Recent initiatives to develop global implementation frameworks through Article 6, the Paris Agreement article that sets out carbon-market trading, demonstrate growing momentum to overcome these barriers and establish robust international carbon-market mechanisms that could mobilise billions in investment for developing countries while bringing down the costs of emissions reductions globally.

The report makes no mention of the fact that the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism has a governance structure that is almost identical to that of the Clean Development Mechanism and is almost certain to run into exactly the same problems as the CDM.

Indeed, the first Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism project to be approved is a CDM cookstoves project in Myanmar. The project’s baseline is dodgy and the credits are junk.

The UK Labour government loves carbon trading. In September 2024, Keir Starmer appointed Rachel Kyte, a leading carbon market proponent, as climate envoy. Of course it’s just a coincidence that Quadrature Capital gave Kier Starmer’s Labour Party a £4 million donation and that Kyte is on the board of the Quadrature Climate Foundation.

Nuclear power

The Tony Blair Institute promotes nuclear power. Blair writes that “Nuclear power is going to be an essential part of the answer.”

Once again the energy demands of AI are raised in passing, not as a problem, but as a justification for nuclear power.

The report states that,

Large-scale AI companies are pouring vast sums of money into these next generation energy solutions as they look to power the data centres of the future.

The Tony Blair Institute’s biggest donor is the Larry Ellison Foundation. In January 2024, The Sunday Times reported that Ellison had pledged to donate US$375 million to the Tony Blair Institute.

Ellison is one of the world’s richest people and has a huge carbon footprint.

In September 2024, on a call with investors, Ellison talked about Oracle’s plans to expand the size and number of the company’s data centres. This includes a new data centre than will require more than a gigawatt of electricity. It will be powered by small modular nuclear reactors.

“The location and the power place we’ve located, they’ve already got building permits for three nuclear reactors. These are the small modular nuclear reactors to power the data center. This is how crazy it’s getting. This is what’s going on.”

“The sad truth,” writes Joe Romm at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, “is that small reactors make even less sense than big ones.” In March 2025, the Financial Times described small modular reactors as the “most expensive energy source”.

The first small modular reactor in the US was cancelled in 2023. The cost would have been more than US$20 million per megawatt. In 2024, Bill Gates told CBS that the cost of his 375 MW sodium cooled reactor would be US$10 billion. That’s nearly US$30 million per megawatt.

“The new generation of small modular reactors,” Blair writes, “offers hope for the renaissance of nuclear power.” It appears that Blair is perfectly happy to act as a lobbyist for Big Tech.

And to deflect attention away from the urgent need to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

All of which is perfectly in line with the Labour government’s climate policies.

1. After the damage was done, the Tony Blair Institute released a statement that said:

The report is clear that we support the government’s net zero targets, to give certainty to the investors and innovators who can develop these new solutions and make them deployable. People support climate action, and it is vital that we keep the public’s support for how we do it.