I was Finance Director of the Labour Party when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, it was a more optimistic time. There were notable problems of course; but at the least the mood music was positive. The Labour Party was proudly European, it wasn’t trying to pose as immigrant-bashers, and the country was determined to help the world get out of poverty. Plus, Tony Blair had an ability to communicate and strategize that apparently is too much to hope for in a left-of-center leader nowadays. As such, I am naturally more supportive of Tony Blair’s interventions than most. In his most recent contribution, Tony Blair’s institute seeks to address the big question of what to do about climate? Today’s post will focus on the approaches identified. Next week I will discuss the report itself. For those who can’t wait I’ll summarize my thoughts. The approaches that the report identifies are sensible, the report that provides the bread that sandwiches around the approaches is embarrassingly bad.
What To Do About Climate?
The Institute report provides seven approaches — i.e., what to do about Climate.
- Accelerating and scaling technologies that capture carbon
- Harnessing the power of technologies, including AI
- Investing in breakthrough and frontier energy solutions
- Scaling nature-based solutions
- Adapt to what is coming
- Simplify global efforts to deliver collective action
- Rethink the role of finance, including philanthropy
A lot of this is sensible stuff. Clearly the Blair people knew that some of this would be controversial, but their approaches are all worth thinking about.
What Is Controversial And What Isn’t?
Sadly, what isn’t controversial is their chart use to illustrate continued reliance on coal (see below). Starting an axis at 7.0 billion tons gives a misleading view of the IEA projections. You should start charts at 0 (barring a strong contrary reason) and here starting at 7.0 billion is visually misleading. Coal use projections haven’t increased as much as this visual implies. (Plus, the data could be confusing given the increases kick in after 2020, when the Chinese economy, the biggest coal user, was ‘closed for Covid’). Still, the general point isn’t wrong. The world has a challenge with continued use of fossil fuels, especially coal, and current plans aren’t working well enough.
Adaptation And Mitigation
Given valid points about challenges that haven’t been met, and don’t seem likely to be met soon, the report writers have accepted that we need to embrace adaptation. (Mitigation is stopping emissions, adaptation is working to cope with the problems that those emissions which do happen will bring). The authors are implicitly saying that we can’t stop all the problems that are coming. This can strike some as giving up on mitigation. I don’t think that is fair. We can all wish it wasn’t true, but does anyone believe we will get a perfect grip on emissions in the near future? It seems hard to argue that we’ll have everything sorted in the next few years, so logically we’ll have to invest in adaptation.
Investing In Technology
In the report, technology is seen as vital to progress.
Investment and innovation in permanent engineered CDR [carbon-dioxide-removal] technologies, including DAC [direct air capture], is thus urgently needed, particularly as global efforts to reduce emissions stagnate and fossil-fuel demand continues to rise.
Fursman, 2025, page 31
Direct air capture is removing carbon dioxide from the air around us. Carbon is harder to take from the air, than to stop it going up initially. As such, it is much more efficient to not emit in the first place, or capture emissions at their source. Sadly, this isn’t always happening, so we need a backup plan. I completely agree, while it would be great if we didn’t need things like DAC we really do and will continue to do so for a while.
Why Is Technology Controversial?
Controversies arise because some worry that technologies like DAC are 1) not going to work, or 2) a moral hazard.
I don’t see the “not working” as a major criticism. The upside of such technologies is massive, and the risk of carbon-dioxide removal low. What is more, the tech does currently seem to work (although not yet at a significant scale or cheaply enough). Let’s try to fund plausible approaches like DAC. Some approaches likely won’t work, and certainly some firms doing them will fail, but some will succeed. You only need a small proportion to succeed to make the bet worthwhile.
The moral hazard argument is that people will continue to emit happily knowing that there is DAC available to save the day. Honestly, I think there are a bunch of people planning to emit who haven’t heard of DAC. I don’t think climate policy in the US is driven by people who know there are major problems but think DAC will save us. They are planning to do what they are planning to do, and so the rest of us had better find a solution. I don’t think DAC can be a moral hazard if people aren’t influenced by the potential moral hazard because they don’t care about the problem.
Overall, the approaches outlined in the Tony Blair Insitute reports seem a pretty sensible group to think about.
For more see Are Only Stupid People Positive?, Denial, Doom, Or Informed Optimism, Are We Making Any Progress On Sustainability?, Limits And Self-Limits, An Ineffective Defense Of Degrowth, and Messaging About Sustainability.
Read: Lindy Fursman, Tony Blair Insitute for Global Change, (2025) The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change
