UK’s Starmer Defends Net Zero After Blair Says Plans Not Working

Tony Blair, executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Photographer: Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg Photo by Christopher Goodney /Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended the UK government’s plans to phase down greenhouse gas emissions after former Labour premier Tony Blair said the international approach to tackling global warming isn’t working.

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The climate debate is “riven with irrationality” and “present policy solutions are inadequate,” Blair said on Tuesday in the foreword to a report issued by the institute that bears his name. That’s leading to a strategy that is “unrealistic and therefore unworkable,” he said.

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The timing of Blair’s remarks just ahead of a round of local elections in the UK on Thursday is potentially damaging to the party he once led, as they draw attention to policies pursued by Starmer’s current Labour administration that opposition parties say are raising costs for British households. The nine-month-old government is pushing for a massive expansion in renewable energy, a phaseout of petrol cars and the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps in order to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050. 

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While Blair didn’t specifically single out the UK in his preamble, opposition parties seized on it to attack Starmer’s administration. Andrew Bowie, the main opposition Conservative Party’s energy spokesman, issued a statement that “it seems even Tony Blair has come to the realization that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party’s mad dash to net zero by 2050 is simply not feasible, or sustainable.”

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In the House of Commons on Wednesday, Democratic Unionist Party politician Sammy Wilson called net zero “bad” and “mad,” while referencing Blair’s report.

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“If you look at the detail of what Tony Blair was saying, it’s absolutely in line with what we’re doing,” Starmer told the Commons in response, pointing to recommendations by the former Labour premier to invest in carbon capture and artificial intelligence, and his view that domestic targets are needed to give certainty to business.

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Attacks also came from the left side of the political spectrum. Green Party Co-Leader Carla Denyer suggested in a post on X that Blair is a “political dinosaur,” and that the current government “isn’t doing what it needs to do to protect us” from climate change, a reference to a separate report Wednesday from Britain’s advisory Climate Change Committee, which expressed concern about potential cuts in the government’s forthcoming spending review to flood defenses.