Tony Blair and climate change – a long sordid history

Former Prime Minister Tony “I actually belong at The Hague” Blair has offered us all some more of his ineffable and ineluctable pearls of wisdom. This time, on climate change.  Apparently phasing out fossil fuels is doomed to fail and impractical (we will come back to this).

Labour politicians, most who did not serve under him, are predictably irritated, though Keir Starmer, in a surprise move, says that black is white, ignorance is strength etc and that Blair is aligned with Labour policy (on carbon capture).

Liberals will talk patronisingly and cod-Freudianly about “Relevance Deprivation Syndrome” – of Blair as an antinomian ha-been who once bestrode the world stage like a Poundstore colossus, chumming it up with George and Silvio and is now reduced to palling around with petrostate assholes instead (because, you know, George and Silvio were so much, well ‘classier’.)

Radicals will say “why does the media give this has-been oxygen? Are they just trolling us? Blair is a GODDAM WAR CRIMINAL.”

Reform bosses will say “more of this please, especially ahead of the local elections and that by-election.”

Everyone in between will just sigh, roll their eyes and doomscroll right on past to other less outraging sources of outrage.

I’m writing this simply because I spent a little time this morning working on the indexing (currently slipshod af) of my All Our Yesterdays site, and since Blair popped up a bit, I thought I’d write something brief about Blair, climate and carbon capture and storage and close out with my usual quote about “practicality.”

Blair and hot air

First of several fun facts – Tony Blair was born on May 6 1953, which was the day that newspapers around the world (US, Australia etc) carried news of a warning by Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass that the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, would mean a rise in global temperatures, melting ice-caps and all the rest of it.  For the next thirty five years, scientists would beaver away. Ultimately, Plass was right….

Tony Blair was a new keen MP when the climate issue “broke through” in 1988.  These were the days of Neil Kinnock as Labour leader. Already it was obvious that Blair – by all accounts not exactly the sharpest tool in the box – was doing what all his fellow politicians were doing – seeing the climate issue (existential, super-wicked) as another opportunity for political games.

The Thatcher government, thanks to her speech in September 1988 to the Royal Society, was having to grapple with what to do about the “greenhouse effect.”  There were some within the civil service and government saying “well, you know, we tax things we think are bad, to discourage them… soooo….” This was not a popular view within government, and either to kill it or boost it, somebody leaked it to the media.  It was covered on the front page of the Independent on June 1 1989.  And, well

In the aftermath of John Smith’s sudden death, Blair became Labour leader thanks to The Infamous Dinner. Climate change was really not an “issue” for the electorate in 1995-1997 (though of course it could and should have been, but this is the world we live in. 

Blair’s deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, was at the Kyoto COP in December 1997 and much was made of the UK promise to go “beyond” Kyoto in terms of carbon emissions cuts. The simple reality was that these were, to paraphrase Dire Straits, “Reductions for Nothing” – they were an artefact of a) the “dash for gas” (i.e. the partial phasing out coal-burning for electricity generation – though that phase out is clear in retrospect – until early 2010s the plan was for coal to stick around and b) deindustrialisation – factories getting exported to India, China etc.

Blair managed not to hold businesses feet to the fire on a climate levy, and generally continued with lipservice and all the rest of it. Sometimes uttered some Fine Words like these at the Sustainable Development summit in September 2002

Mr President and colleagues. We know the problems. A child in Africa dies every three seconds from famine, disease or conflict. We know that if climate change is not stopped, all parts of the world will suffer. Some will even be destroyed, and we know the solution – sustainable development. So the issue for this summit is the political will.

But it wasn’t until 2004 that Blair really started leaning into the pieties.  What happened? Well, there was the small matter of the attack on Iraq that wasn’t going so well, and the impending G8 summit, the one the UK was hosting.  Rather like Richard Nixon going “green” in 1969 to try to change the topic from Vietnam All The Time, Blair wanted to have a different mood music for his various crusades.

In September 2004 he gave a speech – you can read it here if you want to weep. 

What is now plain is that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialisation and strong economic growth from a world population that has increased sixfold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long-term. And by long-term I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by unsustainable, I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.

As best I can tell,it’s the first time carbon capture and storage got a run from him.

“And carbon sequestration: literally capturing carbon and storing it in the ground, also has real potential. BP are already involved in an Algerian project which aims to store 17 million tonnes of CO2.”

[Fun fact – BP had to end the Algerian jaunt because the carbon didn’t stay stored]

In January of the same year Blair’s chief scientific advisor, David King had already argued that climate change was a much bigger threat than terrorism.  And we had in April the launch of the (defunct? defunct-adjacent?) Climate Group. 2004 was a big year for bollocks.

So Blair got his wish – the 2005 G8 Gleneagles was about “Make Poverty History” and some long-forgotten promises on climate – and the launch of all the tosh about carbon capture and storage.

Blair by then was on borrowed time, and his pivot towards nuclear, cloaked as climate concern, came as no surprise.

Praktisch

Blair is one of those “politics is the art of the possible” kinda guys. Always happy to remind you that some things are impossible and unrealistic- feeding people, decent housing, preparing for climate change while others – starting wars, ignoring climate change – are the normal behaviour of ‘responsible’ people.

‘Responsible’ people like him.  They have known about climate change for four decades. We are living in the world they are responsible for.  They are going to be – inevitably now I think – quite literally the death of us all.

And so I will close out with a quote, one I use often, but probably not often enough, from a wonderful memoir about World War 2. The author, an American doctor serving in Europe in late 1944, encounters a young German, called Manfred.  Manfred had offered his services to the Allies, who put him in a German army uniform, parachuted him behind the German lines. His job was to gather as much useful military intelligence as he could, get captured by the advancing American troops and then spill everything he knew.  Given that the Gestapo and Abwehr etc knew about this, and were on the look out for the Manfreds, this was, ah, mildly brave.

Manfred hears some of the American troops talking about “being practical” and starts muttering to himself. The author of the book, asks-

“… the word praktisch had been a two-syllable club he’d been beaten with by fellow students and teachers and businessmen and clergy all through the nightmare years. “Stop being such a god-damned idealist! Be practical!” “Practical means I know right from wrong but I’m too fucking scared to do what’s right so I commit crimes or permit crimes and I say I’m only being practical. Practical means coward. Practical frequently means stupid. Someone is too goddamn dumb to realize the consequences of what he’s doing and he hides under practical. It also means corrupt: I know what I ought to do but I’m being paid to do something different so I call it practical. Practical is an umbrella for everything lousy people do.”

[see also “constructive”]

Final fun facts

There is a thing called the Keeling Curve (see my tattoo of it here).  

It measures the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

When Blair was born, 6 May 1953 the C02 level was about 310ppm (we didn’t have the Keeling Curve then – it starts in 1958.  We have ice cores, though…)

When Blair took office in 1997 the C02 level was 363ppm

When Blair left office in 2007 the C02 level was 384ppm

Today it is 430ish, and climbing fast.  It could have been different. If Blair had had courage, or principles – which he would only have had if forced to by unflinching social movements capable of pushing back against State and Corporate power – then it might have been different

Things I will read someday, if only to understand Blair more

Leo Abse- “Blair the man behind the smile”

There’s also these – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/may/05/biography.politicalbooks