Greenism is the road to ruin – and revolt

Not for the first time, Tony Blair is making life difficult for his party by saying something vaguely commonsensical. Ahead of the General Election last year, Blair felt moved to announce that only men have penises, forcing Labour leader Keir Starmer to meekly agree. Now, ahead of the local elections tomorrow, Blair has – in effect – declared many of the Labour government’s climate-change policies to be ‘irrational’. That noise you hear in the distance is Ed Miliband smashing up his ukelele.

‘The current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality’, writes Blair, in a foreword to a new report by his Institute for Global [Regime] Change. He reels off a number of uncomfortable truths – or really, statements of the bleedin’ obvious. In the developed world, ‘voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal’. Meanwhile, those in the developing world ‘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’. With energy demand set to skyrocket as the Global South rises, ‘any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail’.

While he doesn’t call out the UK government directly, the piece certainly doesn’t jive with an administration hell-bent on banning oil and gas exploration and ‘decarbonising’ the electricity grid by sometime next Thursday. Hence, the bitchy briefings from within Labour this morning, suggesting Blair is in the pocket of Saudi Arabia. The paper calls for more carbon capture, more nuclear power, more adaptation to climate change, more reforestation and – of course – more AI (the technocrat’s answer to everything). This is by no means a disavowal of elite environmentalism and all its attendant delusions – Blair calls renewable energy ‘both necessary and cost effective’, even as it delivers sky-high prices and, quite plausibly, a historic blackout in Europe. Still, Blair has – if nothing else – sensed which way the wind is blowing, and it isn’t towards all those shiny new wind turbines.

After decades of deranged, impoverishing policies being quietly agreed to and implemented, in conference rooms far away from the demos, establishment greenism is now colliding with economic reality and ordinary people. These past few years of war, pestilence and inflation have only underscored what has been clear for some time: that environmentalism is a luxury the West can no longer afford and a fantasy the developing world can see right through. Cheap and reliable energy is the foundation of prosperity and so-called renewables are neither cheap nor reliable. Crackdowns on air travel and consumption look like the elites pulling the ladder up from under them, making a taste of the good life prohibitively expensive for the masses. Meanwhile, eco-friendly measures are devastating agriculture in various countries. No wonder a backlash against these policies is fuelling uprisings – some ballot-box, some literal – from America to the Netherlands to Sri Lanka.

Blair has clearly noticed all this, but he still doesn’t get it. His institute’s report insists that we ‘depoliticise the climate debate’, even though that is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place – with a disastrous ‘consensus’ hashed out among global leaders with more private jets than sense. Indeed, it is only because the ‘populists’ – who get a disparaging namecheck, natch – have tapped into public fury with eco-austerity that Blair and his wonks have been forced to reassess. His aim here seems to be to save elite environmentalism from its worst excesses, to focus on ‘what works’ rather than double down on failed strategies and bitter medicine, whereas what we really need is to junk it altogether.

Blair appears baffled that governments, NGOs and supranational institutions are clinging to policies that are politically and practically impossible. But the reason is obvious: a mix of ideology and self-interest. This has never been about finding smart, technical solutions to a real problem confronting humanity. This has been about a global elite that has come to see human beings as a blight and economic growth as grubby and soulless. Hence, the project of environmentalism has meant reorienting politics not around the needs and desires of human beings, but the supposed demands of ‘the planet’. Technocratic politicians, with no idea what they stand for and little connection to or care for ordinary people, can refashion themselves as warriors against the apocalypse. Supranational institutions, keen to accrue more power, are handed a justification for why politics must be done above the heads of nation states and their citizens. And an increasingly self-loathing capitalist class, incapable of justifying its own existence, is furnished with a moral cover story, not to mention some lucrative, subsidy-fuelled business opportunities.

It’s more than a little rich for Tony Blair to criticise a climate mania he was once so keen on stoking. His New Labour government institutionalised the British establishment’s green turn. In 2003, he made climate change the key focus of British energy policy. The dying days of his premiership produced the Climate Change Bill, which eventually became law in 2008 under Gordon Brown. Overseen by one Ed Miliband, it brought in the world’s first legally binding CO2-reduction target. It also birthed the Climate Change Committee, an unelected quango responsible for pushing many of the miserabilist policies Blair now decries. Eco-alarmist, heal thyself!

Still, his confused intervention suggests the cracks in the elite green ‘consensus’ are beginning to show. Climate hysteria is the road to ruin. The global working classes are rejecting the hairshirt being thrust upon them. And even the archest of arch technocrats is taking notice.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater