Ignoring Reality: Tony Blair Institute’s Dangerous Climate Mirage – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 26th May 2025, 03:58 pm

Recently I published a scathing assessment of the recent Tony Blair Institute whitepaper which claimed net zero was dead and that only direct air capture and nuclear could save us. As a result, Laurent Segalen and Gerard Reid invited me to join them on Redefining Energy to tear into Blair, the Institute and the report. The lightly edited transcript is below the embedded podcast.

Gerard Reid [GR]: Today on Redefining Energy, we’re going to talk about the Tony Blair Institute’s recent report on climate which we warmly recommend people not to read.

Laurent Segalen [LS]: Joining us on the show is our partner in crime, the fearless and invincible Michael Barnard. The three of us put together the most downloaded episode of the past 12 months—our predictions episode, which was extremely popular. And, of course, the one on Bill Gates, where we weren’t exactly kind. Honestly, I wonder why we still bother with guests—we’re better off just babbling together.

So, without further ado: Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Barnard [MB]: Great to be here again.

LS: We’re talking about the Tony Blair Institute. But first, Gerard, let’s talk about Tony Blair himself—because for anyone under 40, or for our American listeners, he might be a forgotten name. Can you remind us of his career?

GR: Tony Blair was the Labour Prime Minister in the UK from 1997 to 2007. He was hugely popular throughout that period—until the Iraq War in 2003, which left a lasting stain on his reputation. Still, he was a cultural icon for the center-left and played a key role in shifting the Labour Party from the left toward the center. You could argue he was the most charismatic European leader of his era.

LS: Yeah, he was young. And if you look at that period, China was still an economic minor. The Russian oligarchs were busy fighting among themselves rather than threatening anyone else. The Gulf states were still being built. Oil prices were low. Europe was expanding, with 3% growth. It was the era of Cool Britannia—we had the Spice Girls. At my company, the biggest name was GE. The giants were IBM, AOL, Enron, Kodak, Nokia. It was a different era—a different epoch altogether.

GR: Yeah.

MB: And the United States hadn’t yet become a gerontocracy. Bill Clinton was the charismatic, young, energetic leader—Blair’s counterpart across the Atlantic—until he wasn’t.

LS: After his time as Prime Minister, Tony Blair became a Middle East envoy—whatever that entailed, likely involving frequent trips to the region—until 2015. He then founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Gerard, can you tell us what the Institute is today?

GR: That’s a good question, Laurent. Ultimately, they produce a lot of reports and do lobbying—that’s what they do. They have a huge budget, around $100 million. I suppose they model themselves on the Clinton Foundation in the U.S., and some people do listen to them.

LS: A lot of people listen to them. They have a staff of 800, which is significant. If you look at their website, they offer government advisory services—which is essentially lobbying for governments. They have no problem working with any type of regime. They’ve received a lot of money from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and major funders like the Larry Ellison Foundation and the Gates Foundation. It’s a very cozy Davos world.

GR: By the way, they do write quite a bit on energy. They don’t write particularly well on it, but they do write about it.

LS: They publish two or three policy reports each month on topics like health, economics, technology, governance, and climate change. Looking at the data, about one in four of their reports relates to energy. The reason we’re having this conversation today is because, last month, they released their now-infamous Climate Paradox report. It triggered a wave of reactions. First, glowing coverage from mainstream outlets like the FT and Bloomberg—“Oh my God, Tony Blair is so brilliant,” and so on. Then came a few critical responses, including one from Michael Liebreich on his Substack and another by Michael Barnard on CleanTechnica.

The author of the report is Lindy Fursman, head of energy policy at the Tony Blair Institute. She has a PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley and has worked across academia, government, and NGOs. I think she never worked in a company in her whole life, but I’m sure she’s very talented. Okay, let’s go back to the report. Gerard.

GR: Well, at the end of the day, it’s a report full of words. Why do I start there? Because nobody reads reports like that anymore. I think there were only two graphs in the whole thing. You have to do a word search just to understand it.

But let me take a step back. The first recommendation of the report is about accelerating the scaling of carbon capture technologies. Then it talks about harnessing the power of technology, including AI, investing in breakthrough and frontier energy solutions, and scaling nature-based solutions. The overall message is that we don’t yet have the technologies in place to solve the issue.

What annoys me about this is—and I’ll talk more about the technologies later—we actually do have the technologies. And by the way, these technologies are also low cost. So when I listened to this, read it, and saw some of the commentary in the newspapers, I thought, okay, this is a typical blocking strategy.

What we’re seeing right now is a fossil fuel industry heavily financing anti-renewable and anti-electrification messaging. And there’s a reason for that—because they have massive assets in play. If electrification and renewable adoption accelerate, it’s bad for their business.

That’s clearly reflected in the media. So when I saw this report, I thought, this is just propaganda.

But Michael, I don’t know—you wrote something on this. What was your initial reaction?

MB: Well, I’m going to lean into the primary energy fallacy. These people are in the same camp as Vaclav Smil—arguing that we can’t get there from here in less than a century, which simply isn’t true.

A quick primer on the primary energy fallacy: today, a large portion of the energy in our economies comes from fossil fuels. We burn them and only get 15 to 50% of the energy as useful output—the rest is wasted as heat. In an electrified economy, we waste much less. Wind turbines powering heat pumps actually give us excess energy by drawing it from the environment. With electrification, we’ll need about 40% less energy coming into the economy to deliver the same economic benefits, comfort, and convenience.

Anyone who’s driven an electric car knows this. They accelerate faster, they’re quiet, they don’t stink, they’re fully charged in the morning, and you can use an app to warm them up. That future involves far less waste than today’s system.

Smil missed that point. In his influential books—Bill Gates read all 37 of them, apparently—Smil didn’t account for the fallacy. It wasn’t until 2021 that he wrote a three-page monograph acknowledging the primary energy fallacy, and even then he didn’t revise his assumptions.

The Tony Blair Institute is making the same mistake. They claim energy use has always gone up during energy transitions, calling them “additions,” while ignoring that we no longer burn whale oil in lamps. The primary energy fallacy is the big one.

People have done substantial work on this. Mark Z. Jacobson explored it in the 2000s. Saul Griffiths worked on it under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy in the 2010s. I’ve done my own napkin math—it’s not complicated. And yet, apparently, both napkin math and decades of research are beyond the capacity of the Blair Institute. That’s my first observation.

GR: Laurent, what were your thoughts on it?

LS: Well, my thoughts were pretty simple. I did a word count: the term “DAC” or “direct air capture” appeared 11 times, CCS 9 times, “capture” 17 times, “nuclear” 8 times, “wind” 4 times, and “solar” 6 times. That gives you a sense of the emphasis.

The second thing that triggered this episode was the cover image—featuring the now-famous, or infamous, Climeworks direct air capture plant in Iceland. Just a week after the report was published, the poster child for direct air capture—which I’ve described as deception, amateurism, and a con—started releasing its actual capture numbers. And it’s an absolute joke.

Michael immediately wrote another op-ed on CleanTechnica in response. Michael, can you talk a bit about Climeworks, which Tony Blair seems to have adopted as his poster child?

MB: Let’s talk about the problem they’re trying to solve: removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. The analogy I use is a beach full of black sand—a million grains—and among them, just 430 grains of dark gray sand. Your job is to find and remove the dark gray ones, while someone else is simultaneously scattering more of them across the beach as you sift. It’s an entropic nightmare. A waste of time.

From a materiality perspective, you’d need to capture around 100 million tons of CO₂ per year just to make a dent in the 40 billion tons we emit annually. These are massive numbers.

Now, Climeworks—this was their second plant. Their first was Orca, which was supposed to capture 10,000 tons per year in theory [sic, actually 4,000] but hasn’t hit that number. Then came Mammoth, which made headlines when an investigative journalist found that although it was designed to capture 40,000 tons per year, it had managed only 105 tons in 2024.

They have all sorts of excuses for that.

But what really stood out is this: I went to their sustainability page looking for metrics. You’d expect them to clearly state how much CO₂ they’ve sequestered—after all, that’s their entire purpose. But they don’t say. They never provide a number on their website for how much CO₂ they’ve actually stored. That’s a remarkable omission for a company whose sole reason for existing is permanent sequestration.

It’s fascinating—and I’ve followed direct air capture for a long time. What was it you called it? Deceptions, amateurs, and cons.

LS: Yep.

MB: I looked at Carbon Engineering back in 2019, and I spoke with the founders of Global Thermostat—I think that was around 2010. I’ve talked to people all over this space, including David Keith, and I’ve never found anything in it that’s worth doing. None of these approaches scale to the level of materiality required. Climeworks is no different.
They’ve raised $800 million, have around 500 staff, and now they’re laying people off—because, unsurprisingly, thermodynamic and entropic realities are proving that this will never be dirt cheap. And it has to be dirt cheap to be relevant.

LS: Now, 105 tons—just to give our listeners some context—if you fly a Boeing from London to New York, that’s about 165 tons of CO₂. So Climeworks didn’t even compensate for one flight. And we’re talking about $800 million invested. Sure, lab research is fine, but this is serious money. And serious people have been backing it.

Let’s talk about who financed them. Their Series A in 2022, during the heydays, included Partners Group. People say, well, Climeworks is Swiss, so of course they brought in Swiss Re and Partners Group. The person who signed off—it’s public, it’s in the press release—was Alfred Gantner, vice CEO, and Esther Peiner, head of infrastructure. These are usually serious people. I know Esther—she does real investments. But what is she doing in Climeworks?

Then they brought in others who, frankly, probably didn’t have time to dig deeply into it. GIC, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, also came in. So did Swiss Re—Christian Mumenthaler was CEO at the time, though he’s since left. The guy who led the investment, Mischa Repmann, is still there. And of course, the placement was done by J.P. Morgan. It’s all in the public record. People like Brian DiMarino and Heather Zichal were involved—they’re global heads of sustainability and so on.

Many of these people are still around. The big question now is: are they going to be asked to pony up for the next round? Because, to me, this smells like tuna bones. And people in finance know exactly what I mean.

GR: Guys, it’s easy to criticize—and we’re right to do so—but I want to talk about the reality of what’s happening in electrification.

Take solar, for example. Last year, 600 gigawatts were installed. In terms of power produced, that’s equivalent to Japan’s annual electricity demand. That’s the scale we’re talking about—this technology is arriving at massive speed.

Now look at lithium-ion batteries. In 2020, global production was 200 gigawatt-hours per year. We’re now over 1,100. A fourfold increase. That’s a clear sign of technological innovation and acceleration to market.

As for what you said about Vaclav Smil—he doesn’t grasp the scale or pace of technological change happening right now.

One thing I did appreciate in the report was the mention of AI. It’s critical, because AI helps manage this growing complexity in a far more efficient—and lower-cost—way than before.

That’s the reality we’re in. These technologies are here, and they’re coming faster than most people think.

MB: I want to lean into that point, because one of the key takeaways for me—beyond their misunderstanding of the technology shift and the primary energy fallacy—is that they clearly haven’t been paying attention to what China has been doing over the past few years. If they’re claiming nuclear is the answer, while ignoring wind, solar, batteries, and storage, they’re missing the bigger picture.

Let’s look at some numbers. Just last week, an analyst who focuses entirely on this space reported that China’s CO₂ emissions declined by 1% from March last year to March this year, even as their economy grew significantly.

GR: Wow. I didn’t see that. Wow. That’s big news. That’s brilliant.

MB: This isn’t decoupling—it’s a decline. Not a slowdown in growth, but an actual year-over-year drop in emissions. And it’s the first time that’s happened without a forced external event like COVID. Emissions fell in 2020 and again in 2022, but those were due to global slowdowns. This time, we’re talking about a growing, vibrant economy—regardless of the headlines. The Economist has spent 25 years predicting China’s collapse, and they’ve been wrong every time.

Now consider this: coal generation dropped by 4.7% from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, even with GDP growing over 5% and total electricity demand rising. Grid demand did drop slightly, but that’s not a sign of declining electrification. Quite the opposite. China has added so much behind-the-meter solar that lower grid demand reflects the success of programs like their “10,000 Villages Bloom” initiative, where EPC contractors are tasked with installing rooftop solar across entire counties.

China is also buying more electric cars than any country except Norway. Last year, half of all grid batteries installed globally were in China. They’re building 365 gigawatts—about 12 to 14 terawatt-hours—of pumped hydro. That includes systems already operating, under construction, or starting by 2030. They hit their 2030 renewables targets last year. They’re hitting their 2035 EV sales targets this year.

Meanwhile, nuclear—one of the pillars of decarbonization according to Tony Blair’s institute—hasn’t even reached its 2020 targets. They might finally get there this year. Their 2025 target is just 2% of generation capacity, and they’re not on track for that either. By contrast, renewables now account for 50% of China’s electricity generation capacity, and coal is in decline.

This is a clear proof point for the future. And yet, the Tony Blair Institute—and the person responsible for its energy and decarbonization analysis—seems to be missing it. Why?

GR: Well, they are a lobbying organization, so that tells you something, right? So follow the money.

LS: When you Google the phrase “What does TBI stand for?” the top answer is “traumatic brain injury.” That says it all.

MB: On that note, Paul Martin—a friend of the show—has a meme that says, “Stop paying attention to old guys.” I look at the news about Joe Biden, and how his handlers were trying to hide the extent of his decline. And now Tony Blair, who’s in a similar demographic. Clinton has mostly faded into a quiet post–#MeToo space, probably for the best.

I just hope that when I reach that stage, someone pulls me aside and says, “Mike, it’s time to hang up your keyboard.”

GR: We’ll definitely say that to you, Mike. Don’t worry.

LS: Okay, guys, my final words are: carbon capture is state capture. It’s that simple. And you’re absolutely right—these people are either old and out of touch, or they’re hired guns. At best, it’s misguided; at worst, it’s nefarious. That’s my conclusion on the Tony Blair report—especially when it comes to technologies like DAC, which have no future.

GR: Well said. Well said.

MB: My last words are: ignore Tony Blair. Look at the real story—China’s emissions are in decline.

LS: Gentlemen, thank you very much. I hope we weren’t too hard on certain people—but that’s how we do it here. We’re the mavericks.

GR: Exactly.

LS: Cheers.

GR: Thank you very much.

MB: Thank you. Always a pleasure.