Blair Intervenes Ad Nauseum

His latest report claims to show how to make renewable energy work but the laws of physics still say no

A problem for a writer on the climate and energy agenda is that the Green Blob is, by its nature, extremely repetitive. The climate wars are, after all, wars of attrition – of governments starving their own populations into compliance. And their salvos are, accordingly the banal repetition of slogans, fibs and false utopian promises in the face of economic stagnation and deindustrialisation, rising prices and lower living standards. So what is there to say about the thing that gets repeated without simply repeating the points that were made last time? In this case, the repeater is Tony Blair, whose institute has produced yet another report – a sixth in little more than a year – which seemingly dismantles Ed Miliband’s agenda.

It is less than a month ago that Blair’s Institute for Global Change (IGC) published his previous intervention, which I covered here. The report, I argued, let slip Blair’s real agenda, including (among other things) using digital ID to manage the crises caused by green energy policy. The problem of climate change is just too convenient for Establishment figures to let go of it.

Accordingly, in the foreword to the sixth report, Blair states that “decarbonisation remains essential”, and that the report is “not an argument for weakening climate ambition”. So while it claims to be “an argument for embedding [decarbonisation/climate ambition] within a more effective strategy”, which purports to move “cost, capacity and security” from secondary to “central design principles”, it is an analysis born of a conflict that it cannot transcend. These are ideas that are fundamentally irreconcilable.

It is cakeism, in other words, plain and simple – Blair’s trick for magical reconciliation of contradictions. And that is an aversion to a proper examination of the history of the green agenda. And this is where I risk repetition. The green agenda, with its roots in the 1970s (though we can go back a lot further) always required degrowth, deindustrialisation and depopulation. Any analysis that claims otherwise, or that their can be ‘green growth’ and ‘green industry’ is superficial, and worse than being merely unproven, is contradicted by recent history. They are the claims, like the fable of the scorpion and the frog, of an organism in denial of its own DNA. “I won’t sting you,” says the scorpion pleading with the frog to carry him across the river, “because if I did, I would drown” – before stinging him anyway and dooming them both.