Sir Tony Blair has attacked Sir Keir Starmer’s net zero plans and called for a radical reset of the Government’s green agenda.

The former prime minister said it was wrong that people were “being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal”.

In a significant intervention, he said politicians must face the “inconvenient facts” which show that any strategy based on phasing out fossil fuels was “doomed to fail”.

Sir Tony has been advising the Prime Minister in an informal capacity since he won the election last year.

It comes as Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, faces mounting questions about his green strategy a day after Spain and Portugal were plunged into a nationwide power cut blamed by experts on a reliance on renewable energy.

Last week Sir Keir told a conference in London that tackling the climate crisis and bolstering energy security were “in the DNA of my government” and that “we won’t wait – we will accelerate”.

However, the Prime Minister has been quietly rowing back on elements of the Government’s green agenda in recent months.

The Government announced it was in favour of a third runway at Heathrow, and has delayed plans to ban new hybrid cars in 2030.

Sir Tony made his comments in the foreword to a new report from his think tank, the Tony Blair Institute.

Debate ‘riven with irrationality’

The Labour grandee appeared to accuse Sir Keir of being “terrified” to admit his current climate policies are not working.

He wrote that the climate debate was “riven with irrationality” and suggested net zero was losing public support.

He also urged politicians to face the “inconvenient facts” that undermined green policies – a reference to Al Gore’s writing about “an inconvenient truth”.

The former prime minister said politicians needed to face the fact that the current approach “isn’t working”.

“Present policy solutions are inadequate and, worse, are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable,” he said.

“So, the movement now needs a public mandate, attainable only through a shift from protest to pragmatic policy.

“Too often, political leaders fear saying what many know to be true: the current approach isn’t working.

“But they mustn’t be silent – there’s a new coalition to build; one that unites disillusioned activists with technologists and policymakers ready to act.”

Sir Tony accused political leaders of being scared to wade into the net zero debate, saying: “Political leaders by and large know that the debate has become irrational.

“But they’re terrified of saying so, for fear of being accused of being ‘climate deniers’.

“As ever, when sensible people don’t speak up about the way a campaign is being conducted, the campaign stays in the hands of those who end up alienating the very opinion on which consent for action depends.”

He said that the annual Cop climate summits were not the right platform to make progress in tackling global warming.

Critics claimed that last year’s Cop29 summit had lost its importance as leaders including Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Joe Biden, the US president at the time, shunned the talks.

Sir Tony said: “Political leaders argue for days in public about wording like ‘ending’, ‘phasing out’, ‘reducing’ fossil fuels, proclaiming that we can still meet the 1.5 degrees target on limiting global warming, about who bears ‘responsibility’ for climate change, and ‘loss and damage’ compensation, in a forum that frankly doesn’t have the heft to drive action and impact.

“Because – agree with it or not – most political leaders are decent people who do want to do the right thing, in recent times the COPs have become uncomfortable for many leaders. They would like to start taking some of the hysteria out of the climate debate but are reluctant to be the first to do so.”

Sir Tony said politicians needed to acknowledge there was rising demand for production of fossil fuels, especially in China and India.

He said that airline travel was on course to double over the next 20 years, and there would be increased demand for steel and cement as a result of increased urbanisation in developing nations.

“These are 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,” he said.

Sir Tony said he still believed climate was “one of the fundamental challenges of our time” and that renewable energy was necessary but that the government needs “to alter where we put our focus”.

He said there should be more focus on carbon capture, where carbon dioxide from power stations and factories is captured and buried underground.

Mr Miliband has put carbon capture at the heart of his net zero plans, but faced criticism over spending £22 billion on what critics have claimed is “unproven” technology.

Disdain for technology ‘misguided’

Sir Tony rejected this criticism, saying: “The disdain for this technology in favour of the purist solution of stopping fossil-fuel production is totally misguided.”

He also called for a major new international embrace of nuclear power and to intensify work on new small modular reactors.

“We need to recognise that without turning some of the emerging technologies into financially viable options, the world will choose the cheapest option,” he said.

“This applies to everything from nuclear fusion to sustainable aviation fuel, to green steel and low-emissions cement.

“Nuclear power is going to be an essential part of the answer.

“The confusion of this with nuclear weapons and consequently the irrational fear of it, intensified by hyperbolic campaigning, has led the world to an egregious policy error with many countries turning their back on it from the 1980s onwards, when embracing it would have significantly changed the trajectory of global emissions.

“The new generation of small modular reactors offers hope for the renaissance of nuclear power, but it needs integrating into nations’ energy policy.”

The paper itself, written by the TBI’s Lindy Fursman, said that net zero policies were now being seen as “increasingly viewed as unaffordable, ineffective, or politically toxic”.

Andrew Bowie, the acting shadow energy secretary, said: “It seems even Tony Blair has come to the realisation that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party’s mad dash to net zero by 2050 is simply not feasible, or sustainable.

“As Ed Miliband’s net zero zealotry pushes this country’s energy security even further into the arms of China, and their slave labour supply chains, and risks driving up energy bills further and further, only Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives are telling the truth about energy policy in this country.

“Under new leadership, we have been clear that the cost of net zero by 2050 to families will be far too high, and we must urgently change course. Will Labour now finally be prepared to do the same, and put the national interest above their own ideological dogma?”