Tony Blair's Thinktank (Funded By UAE, Saudis And Larry Ellison) Faceplants With Its "Analysis" Of Climate And Energy
Shocked, shocked!
A thinktank with close ties to Saudi Arabia and substantial funding from a Donald Trump ally needs to present a particularly robust analysis to earn the right to be listened to on the climate crisis. On that measure, Tony Blair’s latest report fails on almost every point. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) received money from the Saudi government, has advised the United Arab Emirates petrostate, and counts as a main donor Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, friend of Trump and advocate of AI. The latest TBI report calls for an expansion of oil and gas production in the North Sea, despite the additional greenhouse gas emissions this would generate, and abandoning the UK government’s target to largely decarbonise the electricity sector by 2030, arguing that doing so is necessary to power AI datacentres.
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Draining the last drops of oil and gas from the North Sea lies at the heart of the TBI advice, projecting a £165bn industry as a result. Yet the North Sea is a rapidly declining basin where the remaining reserves are increasingly expensive to extract. Accordingly, says the TBI, oil and gas companies should receive substantial tax cuts. Since 2020, the energy industry has made £125bn in profits in the UK, with oil and gas companies enjoying windfalls while vulnerable people struggled to heat their homes. Shell made $40bn in 2022 alone, BP $30bn the same year. Although profits have come down from their peaks, persistently high gas prices are keeping fossil fuel companies buoyant.
EDIT
Draining the last drops of oil and gas from the North Sea lies at the heart of the TBI advice, projecting a £165bn industry as a result. Yet the North Sea is a rapidly declining basin where the remaining reserves are increasingly expensive to extract. Accordingly, says the TBI, oil and gas companies should receive substantial tax cuts. Since 2020, the energy industry has made £125bn in profits in the UK, with oil and gas companies enjoying windfalls while vulnerable people struggled to heat their homes. Shell made $40bn in 2022 alone, BP $30bn the same year. Although profits have come down from their peaks, persistently high gas prices are keeping fossil fuel companies buoyant.
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What matters to the climate is not emissions in 2050 but the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Maintaining fossil fuel production, as TBI advocates, might still allow net zero to be reached by mid-century, but would result in higher emissions in the interim, undermining the purpose of the target. According to Angharad Hopkinson, a political campaigner for Greenpeace UK: “The assertion that abandoning strategies to reduce emissions will somehow reduce emissions, and choosing more expensive energy will somehow reduce costs, is ludicrous.” Elsewhere in the report, the TBI rehashes the argument that the UK is responsible for just 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, implying that the actions of larger emitters such as China will make more of an impact. While technically accurate, this fails to acknowledge that roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that each account for about 1% of emissions. If all of them abandoned net zero efforts, global temperatures would rise far beyond the 1.5C limit of safe heating.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/13/tony-blair-oil-lobbying-fossil-fuel-industry-renewables-energy-bills
