Climate change strategies based on phasing out fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption are doomed to fail, because demand and production continues to grow, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned - saying instead more effort needs to be put into technologies such as carbon capture to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Blair said the current state of debate over climate change is “riven with irrationality” with many people turning away because they believe the strategies are not based on good policy.
In developed countries, he said, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle even when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal, and because in future the major sources of pollution will come from the developing world. But in the developing world, there is “an equal resentment” when they’re told the investment is not available for the energy necessary for their development because it is not “green”, Blair said in the forward to a new report The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change.
“They believe, correctly, that they have a right to develop and that those who have already developed using fossil fuels do not have the right to inhibit them from whatever is the most effective way of developing,” he wrote in the report published by his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
As a result, current policies are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform “that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable,” he said.
The report noted that despite the rapid rise in renewable energy and despite electric vehicles becoming the fastest-growing sector of the vehicle market, production of fossil fuels and demand for them has risen, not fallen, and is set to rise further up to 2030. It pointed out that in 2024 China initiated construction on 95 gigawatts of new coal-fired energy - almost as much as the total current energy output from coal of all of Europe put together. Meanwhile, India recently produced one billion tonnes of coal production in a single year and by 2050, urbanisation is expected to drive a 40 per cent increase in demand for steel and a 50 per cent increase in demand for cement – both which have significant emissions footprint.
By 2030 almost two-thirds of global emissions will come from China, India and South-East Asia, the report said, but the global financial flows for renewable energy in the developing world have fallen and not risen in the past few years. Blair described these as the “inconvenient facts” 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.
For all of this Blair said that climate change remains one of the fundamental challenges of our time, but that there was a need to alter where we put our focus and resources. Carbon capture - directly removing carbon as well as capturing it at source – at the centre of the battle, he said. “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,” he said.
Nuclear power is going to be an essential part of the answer, he said noting that the new generation of small modular reactors offers hope for the renaissance of nuclear power. He said there was also need for a greater emphasis on how we finance climate-change action, and also said adaptation to climate change must also move up the agenda because the impacts that are already locked in cannot all be mitigated in time available.
SCI’s CEO Sharon Todd said: “Tony Blair is right when he says the drive for net zero is becoming ‘irrational’.
Todd added: “A coherent net zero plan is urgently needed as part of a comprehensive national industrial strategy. We must make the transition to net zero, but we cannot build new, green technologies without maintaining a strong manufacturing base. Without a rigorous plan, we will be committing an act of economic vandalism.”
More on climate change and carbon capture
- Carbon capture: $100 million competition reveals winning projects
- Engineering biology: Five ways it could change the future
- Advances in carbon capture and utilisation: A new SCI virtual collection
- Carbon capture: Major bio-CCS project gets the go ahead
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