Giving Tony Blair the hard stare: A Critical Response to The Tony Blair Institute

In The Climate Paradox, the Tony Blair Institute calls for a reset of global climate action - one grounded in realism, innovation, and disruption. The report diagnoses a set of real and urgent challenges: emissions are still rising, political consensus is fraying, and current net-zero strategies are struggling to deliver tangible results.

Its central claim is that technological innovation, especially in frontier domains like artificial intelligence, nuclear energy and carbon capture, should become the primary engine of climate progress.

The report has sparked a lot of debate over the past 72h in the UK. Tony Blair's foreword was quoted as "Net Zero Doomed to Fail" by many headlines, making the report climb at the top of the agenda for many news outlets.

Following the backlash, Tony Blair and several members of the UK government have declared mutual alignment - the report, according to them, is in fact aligned with the UK's Net Zero policy, and vice-versa, even though there might be disagreements on granular details.

To cut through the noise around this report, CAFA has analysed it to present you with a summary of its contents, implications, and alignment or lack thereof with net zero goals.

Report Summary

The Climate Paradox argues that current global climate strategies, especially those centered on domestic net-zero targets, regulatory mandates, and short-term political cycles, are failing to reduce global emissions.

Despite decades of policy action, emissions continue to rise, largely because:

• Emissions are rising in developing countries: major emitters like China and India are still expanding fossil fuel use despite deploying low carbon energy at a fast pace.

• Public support is eroding, especially in developed economies where climate policies are perceived to raise costs or threaten livelihoods.

• Current tools (carbon pricing, standards, public investment) have limited political and economic effectiveness and are not delivering results at the necessary scale or pace.

This creates what the report calls a “climate paradox”: strong consensus on the need for action, yet weak and fragmented outcomes. The report proposes a “reset” of climate strategy built around five core shifts:

• Reframe climate action around growth and innovation, not sacrifice or regulation - positioning climate as an economic opportunity.

• Prioritise investment in breakthrough technologies, particularly: Artificial Intelligence for system optimisation, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies such as Direct Air Capture, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Advanced clean energy systems like modular nuclear or potentially fusion.

• Use private capital and philanthropy as key financial drivers, especially in developing and scaling new technologies.

• Shift global investment focus toward rapidly developing countries (like China, India, and parts of Asia and Africa), where emissions growth is concentrated.

• Leverage voluntary carbon markets and climate finance mechanisms to channel capital toward low- and middle-income countries, while allowing emitters to contribute through offsets or investments.

In essence, the report argues that climate progress requires embracing disruption - not more of the same incremental policies, but bold bets on scalable innovation, backed by new coalitions of capital, philanthropy, and geopolitical engagement.

What the Report Gets Right

The Climate Paradox correctly identifies several fundamental tensions in today’s climate landscape. Among them:

• Emissions continue to rise, despite decades of climate diplomacy and growing clean energy investment.

• Global Cooperation is currently insufficient, with COPs having limited and mixed results.

• New and Emerging Technologies are essential, including smart energy systems, new building materials, carbon capture and storage (CCS), direct air capture (DAC) Nature-based Solutions can buy us time, such as regenerative agriculture and afforestation, despite the long-term risks that vegetation is subject to in a changing climate (wildfires, pests, etc).

• Public and private climate finance is deeply insufficient, particularly in the Global South. Political resistance in developed economies, particularly around cost-of-living, fairness, and economic anxiety, is undermining support for decarbonisation policies.

• The Global South's development should be supported financially and technologically by the Global North to ensure that emissions per capita don't rise to the levels of developed countries which are actively decreasing them.

• The Prisoners Dilemma - "The global reality is that no country can afford to pay the price of decarbonisation as well as the cost of climate disasters caused by others’ inaction." With that said, the global reality is also that global inaction will lead to higher climate costs - so we treat this statement as only partially accurate.

In summary, we need to be doing much, much more. These are not fringe observations. They align with mainstream assessments from the IPCC, IEA, IMF, the UNFCCC and others. And at a high level, many of the solutions proposed - investment in DAC and CCS, deployment of clean energy, smarter energy systems - are not inherently wrong, even reflecting existing consensus.

Where the Report Falls Short

However, the report appears to have many issues, but we chose to focus on the following.

The first one, related to a specific part of the diagnosis of the problem, is likely the one that sparked so much debate in the media over the past two days: its commentary on domestic decarbonisation efforts isn't clear - while domestic efforts are sometimes described as reaching diminishing returns and needing to be deprioritised, they are also treated as necessary.

Not only that, the report attributes climate responsibility to developing economies - while it is true that these economies have rising emissions which are a concern over the next few years and decades, most developing countries currently are well under North America and even Europe when it comes to per capita emissions - and geopolitical tension arises from historical emissions for which the Global North has responsibility, meaning that the North needs to lead by example if it wants developing economies to follow in its footsteps.

Let's get this out of the way: domestic decarbonisation in developed countries is a valuable and necessary effort, that allows to cut a path forward for others to follow, especially considering that emissions per capita are often much higher in developed countries.

The second issue is a set of flaws, related to the "solutions" proposed throughout the report.

First of all, the report addresses the failure to phase out fossil fuels by stating that the world should double down on that failure due to lack of results.

Second of all, the report mentions solutions which are unsubstantiated by clear costs, emission cuts, benefits or timeframes for scaling, making any fair comparison with existing solutions virtually impossible - the potential benefits from the proposed solutions are unclear and vague, but presented overconfidently as silver bullets.

Last but not least, in some areas it repeats widely accepted claims (such as the need for more climate finance) but without identifying how its own approach materially differs from existing multilateral efforts or scientific pathways. Where the report departs from consensus - by, for example, suggesting that new technologies can scale without requiring the phase-out of fossil fuels - it fails to offer supporting evidence.

The report is problematic even from a political science standpoint, let alone climate science. It treats its contents as "pragmatic" and positions itself in stark contrast to "climate hysteria" and claims to be devoid of ideology - all while embodying textbook technosolutionism with little supporting evidence.

As a result, the report falls short in its proposed solutions. It is often directionally accurate, but insufficiently detailed, starting in the right place but then failing to advance.

Flaw #1 It Treats "Technology" As A Silver Bullet

At the heart of The Climate Paradox lies a familiar and seductive idea: that the climate crisis is, above all, a problem of insufficient technology. In this framing, the key to solving climate change is not deploying what we already have more effectively, but inventing and scaling the tools we do not yet possess.

Artificial intelligence, advanced carbon removal, modular nuclear reactors, even space-based solar - these are presented as the new frontier of climate action, positioned not as supplements but as potential game-changers.

We can group the technologies mentioned by the report in three buckets:

1. Scalable technologies: technologically feasible, cheap and/or subsidised, commercially available, such as solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, heat pumps, heat-reflective paint, insulation, blinds & shutters, biochar, nuclear fission reactors, etc.

2. Technologies which are not yet scalable but are supported by net zero policies and standards such as DAC, CCS, other technologies that have a significant role to play to reach net zero by 2050.

3. Technologies which are not yet scalable and aren't actively pursued by net zero policies such as nuclear fusion, or genetic engineering on vegetation.

The report accurately identifies that scalable technologies (1) aren't being scaled fast enough and that there is an underlying lack of funding and support, especially in the Global South. But instead of addressing how to accelerate such deployments, it shifts our attention to the two other buckets (2 and 3), calling for policymakers to gamble and heavily rely on new or emerging technologies rather than proven ones.

While our second bucket is already supported by net zero policies, they aren't projected to scale fast enough to go anywhere beyond tackling hard-to-abate emissions by 2050, let alone halve global emissions by 2030.

The technologies that can decarbonise most sectors already exist. Electrification of transport, renewable energy, heat pumps, energy efficiency retrofits, low-carbon construction materials, and industrial process upgrades are commercially available, increasingly cost-competitive, and technologically mature.

The barriers to deployment are primarily economic, institutional, financial, and political, not technical. The report sidesteps this reality by reframing climate failure as the result of insufficient innovation rather than insufficient policy delivery, fiscal commitment, or infrastructure coordination.

This is the essence of technosolutionism: the belief that complex social and political problems can be solved through technological innovation alone. The appeal is clear: it shifts responsibility away from governance, regulation, and collective action, and toward R&D, startups, and philanthropy.

But this shift comes at a cost. Technologies like AI and DAC may one day play a vital role in climate mitigation, but they currently face steep cost curves, low Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), and a lack of deployment infrastructure.

The report offers no model or timeline for how these tools will scale fast enough to bear the weight of 2030 or even 2040 climate targets. Nor does it explain how these innovations will overcome the very same political and economic barriers that have slowed the rollout of mature technologies.

More fundamentally, the report implies that new technologies will bypass the political and behavioral resistance that existing solutions encounter. But technologies do not operate in a vacuum. They require investment, regulation, public acceptance, and governance. AI cannot optimise a grid that doesn’t exist. Carbon capture cannot succeed without long-term storage infrastructure, permitting systems, and regulatory frameworks - all of which are lagging behind even in wealthy nations.

In this light, the promise of disruptive innovation becomes not pragmatic, but evasive. Rather than addressing the hard work of delivery - of accelerating deployment, fixing procurement, retraining labor, reforming permitting and finance - the report defers responsibility to a hypothetical future where “better tools” will somehow make all of this easier.

Flaw #2 What About Scalability?

One of the report’s most significant conceptual flaws is its disconnect between climate timelines and technological readiness. The world must cut emissions nearly in half by 2030 to stay within a 1.5°C pathway, and make substantial progress by the mid-2030s to limit warming below 2°C.

These are not speculative milestones - they are backed by physical science and well-established carbon budgets. And yet, the technologies most emphasised in The Climate Paradox - from advanced AI applications to direct air capture, fourth-generation nuclear reactors, and even space-based solar - are not only unscaled but in many cases still low on the Technology Readiness Level spectrum.

Their economic viability, supply chains, regulatory pathways, and deployment timelines are uncertain or undeveloped. In some cases, the fundamental physics or economics may not work out at scale at all.

This creates a dangerous temporal mismatch. The report critiques the failure of existing policies to deliver emission reductions - without acknowledging that most of the proposed replacements cannot deliver within the time window that matters most.

The report completely ignores the problem of delay, by placing disproportionate emphasis on long-term solutions while treating near-term interventions as politically exhausted or insufficiently innovative.

Think about it - a new technology needs R&D, funding programmes, testing, supply chain development, and substantial manufacturing capacity followed by economies of scale if the innovation doesn't fail to deliver commercial-quality results at the R&D stage, which is where nuclear fusion has been stuck at since the late 1950s. Each of these steps easily takes several years, if not decades.

Additionally, the premise of the report is that current policies are costly and slow to deliver. Are technologies that are more expensive, experimental or even entirely unavailable, really a solution to that problem?

Flaw #3 Philanthropy as a Solution to the Funding Gap?

The Climate Paradox's financial architecture could benefit from being fleshed out and substantiated with data or estimates. It can even be considered to be somewhat self-contradictory.

Having argued that climate strategies must be reframed around global cooperation, funding and cost structures, the report then proposes solutions which are more expensive than the ones they're supposed to replace and over which governments have little influence.

Additionally, it proposes a financing model that relies heavily on philanthropy, voluntary private investment, and cross-border carbon credit flows to fund the global transition.

There is no evidence that philanthropic capital can meet the scale of the global climate finance gap - let alone do so in a coordinated, equitable, or strategically guided way. Even the largest philanthropic initiatives in the space, such as the Bezos Earth Fund or Breakthrough Energy, are relatively small compared to the multi-trillion-dollar investment needs projected by the IEA, IMF, and IPCC.

And while some billionaires have shown interest in funding climate tech, most philanthropic capital is concentrated, opaque, and structurally unaccountable. It is also discretionary -subject to the shifting whims, interests, and branding goals of individual donors.

By centering voluntary flows - philanthropic and market-based - rather than coordinated public investment, the report avoids confronting the real fiscal decisions that climate action entails. It does not discuss subsidy reform (e.g., ending fossil fuel support), tax policy, debt reform, carbon tax and pricing, or multilateral finance institutions. In doing so, it offers a vision of climate finance that is technically narrow and politically evasive.

Flaw #4 Vague Planning and Strategic Evasiveness

For a report that demands a “reset” of global climate action, The Climate Paradox is remarkably short on the basic components of any credible strategy: timelines, targets, costs, institutional responsibilities, and measurable outcomes.

It critiques existing policies for underperforming, but provides no actionable framework to evaluate how its own proposals would do better. There are no projected emissions reductions from the proposed technologies. No cost comparisons to existing solutions. No deployment timelines, no prioritisation of sectors, and no estimates of global or regional investment needs.

The report offers ideas - many of which are valid as inputs to a broader discussion - but packages them as a coherent plan without the structure to justify that framing. This evasiveness extends to the report’s core vision. It is not clear whether the authors believe that emerging technologies should:

• Replace mature tools that are politically constrained,

• Supplement them in parallel,

• Or act as a long-term fallback if current efforts fail.

Each of these choices carries major implications for investment strategy, institutional focus, and policy design. But the report declines to make any of them. Instead, it adopts a tone of urgency while building a strategy premised on long-term speculation and short-term abstraction.

At the same time, the report’s call for a “pragmatic” and “non-political” approach turns out to be rhetorical rather than structural. It argues for depoliticising climate action while relying on voluntary capital flows, elite philanthropy, and disruptive technology - all of which are deeply embedded in political and ideological assumptions. These mechanisms are not neutral. They reflect a particular worldview: one in which the state is reactive, public finance is constrained, and social buy-in is secondary to elite-driven innovation.

A reset, to be meaningful, must be specific enough to evaluate, bold enough to challenge incumbency, and grounded enough to be implementable. The Climate Paradox is bold, but unspecific.

Flaw #5 Geopolitical and Regional Blind Spots

Despite its ambition to reshape global climate strategy, The Climate Paradox treats the international dimension of climate politics with a striking lack of specificity. It names China and India as major contributors to rising emissions but offers little insight into their motivations, constraints, or incentives.

It makes passing reference to Africa’s vulnerability and Europe’s early leadership, but fails to account for regional differences in institutional capacity, economic structure, and energy dependencies. 

Most notably, it barely mentions the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter and arguably its most powerful actor in climate finance, trade, and innovation, especially at a time when the country is doing a complete 180° turn on climate policy after years of significant progress, in our most critical decade. It points to developing economies' rising emissions but doesn't address the unfortunately famous "Drill, Baby, Drill" strategy deployed this year by the Trump administration for the next 4 years, maybe 8 if the U.S.'s checks and balances fail to maintain rule of law.

The report’s silence on China’s internal incentives is also a missed opportunity. It points to China’s continued coal buildout as a failure of global governance, but offers no analysis of China’s energy security priorities, economic planning system, or industrial strategy. Nor does it propose any realistic mechanism - economic, diplomatic, or financial - through which China (or the United States) might be persuaded to change course.

This abstraction is compounded by the report’s failure to be transparent about its own institutional context. Funded in part by U.S. and Gulf State interests, the Tony Blair Institute occupies a particular geopolitical vantage point - one that likely informs its emphasis on market-based finance, voluntary capital flows, and a limited role for the state. While this does not invalidate its contributions, it does mean that its ideological and geopolitical positioning should be made explicit, particularly when the report frames itself as “pragmatic” and non-political.

A climate strategy that claims to be global must engage seriously with regional realities, power asymmetries, and strategic interests. The Climate Paradox names many of the right actors - but rarely locates them inside the political, economic, or institutional systems that determine what they can and cannot do, should or shouldn't do.

Conclusion

The Climate Paradox identifies a genuine problem: global emissions are rising, political support for climate action is wavering, and the current mix of policies is not delivering the transformation required. In diagnosing the sense of drift and frustration that pervades climate politics, the report is directionally correct.

But in prescribing a path forward, it stumbles. Rather than proposing a grounded strategy for course correction, the report offers a speculative narrative wrapped in the language of pragmatism. It calls for economic renewal while proposing capital outflows through philanthropy and carbon markets.

It champions disruptive technology without addressing readiness, cost, or deployment barriers. It invokes growth but supplies no credible industrial strategy. It claims to reset the climate debate but avoids the core questions of governance, equity, and political delivery.

What’s needed is not another rhetorical pivot, but a return to fundamentals. Climate strategy must align with:

• The timescale of the crisis (action in this decade, not the next);

• The tools that are already viable (and the institutions needed to scale them);

• The regions and actors that matter most (from the U.S. and China to emerging economies and supply chain leaders);

• And the fiscal and political realities that shape what can be funded, built, and supported by the public.

This doesn’t mean ignoring innovation.

New technologies will play a critical role, especially in hard-to-abate sectors and long-term stabilisation.

But innovations are slow to scale and they are expensive, and there is a difference between relying on some of them for hard-to-abate emissions (around 10% of global emissions by 2050) versus using them as a core net zero lever able to compensate for the failure to phase out fossil fuels in the short-term.

A real reset should be specific about trade-offs, transparent about assumptions, and honest about uncertainty, and should treat climate change as what it is: a measurable crisis, driven by identifiable causes, demanding quantifiable solutions.

The foundational science and data for planning has been made available already, by many organisations including the IPCC. The world hasn't delivered the necessary results, that's correct. But it is it because the technology isn't right? Or is it because we haven't done enough of what works?

In any case, the report does get two things right: we're currently extremely late on delivering results, and climate change needs more funding to be mitigated - and we can treat the report as a call-to-action which is much needed right now.

New and more expensive technologies probably aren't the right way to solve a funding and political issue, but credit where credit is due: it is in fact becoming increasingly evident that the climate problem is an economic problem.