Does Tony Blair have a point about net zero?

Tony Blair’s intervention on Britain’s net zero ambitions this week has unsurprisingly caused consternation. His statement that net zero is “doomed to fail” aligns with the stance of Reform and the Conservatives and is surprising coming from the former leader of a political party that made decarbonising Britain’s electricity by grid 2030 a key policy commitment.

Putting aside the timing of this statement, just before yesterday’s local elections, it is worth examining why Blair said what he did. His central tenet is that countries such as China, India and potentially much of Africa, are growing at such a rate that carbon emissions are going up rather than down despite attempts to mitigate them.

Tackling this will need joined up, strategic global intervention and the embracing and developing of technologies including carbon capture and storage, and artificial intelligence. While people acknowledge the reality of climate change, they are becoming alienated by bad policy solutions and being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes to their lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal.

Ed Miliband’s decision to stop issuing new oil and gas licences in the North Sea because he wants to largely decarbonise the grid by 2030 looks like a triumph of hope over experience

The consensus behind net zero does seem to have fragmented, not just because Reform and the Tories have stepped away from Britain’s 2050 target. Culture wars have erupted around the introduction of heat pumps and there has been criticism of the government mandate that electric vehicles should make up 28% of a manufacturer’s sales in 2025, with penalties of £15,000 per vehicle for failing to meet this target.

The government’s refusal to budge on this mandate despite manufacturers threatening to close UK plants looked like precisely the sort of thing that Blair was warning against. It took Donald Trump’s threatened 25% tariffs on UK car imports for the government to make the policy more flexible.

And energy secretary Ed Miliband’s decision to stop issuing new oil and gas licences in the North Sea because he wants to largely decarbonise the grid by 2030 looks like a triumph of hope over experience. Decarbonising the grid is absolutely the right thing to do, but constraints on component supply and skills availability to do the work – plus the time it takes to get consents for new infrastructure – make this look unlikely despite the planning and infrastructure bill helping with the latter.

Future generations won’t thank Miliband if we end up making up the shortfall by importing liquified natural gas, a product with a carbon footprint greater than coal, because we fail to meet the target.

What are the implications of Blair’s interventions for the industry? It is unlikely to make much difference to the commercial market because the net zero agenda is being driven by the investment community rather than the government. Business takes a much longer-term view than the latter as it is not subject to election cycles and rightly sees climate change as a risk, so is putting its money into low carbon investments such as net zero office buildings.

Climate change risk is not going away regardless of what Blair, or anyone else for that matter, says. And government departments and local authorities, which have committed to net zero targets, are unlikely to rip these up despite some operating on unrealistic timescales. As long-term occupiers of the buildings they commission, net zero makes financial sense.

When it comes to individuals, Blair’s comment on the negative impact of net zero policies on individuals is essentially articulating the shift in public attitudes. Some media outlets, notably the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, are running concerted campaigns warning against the evils of heat pumps, and even the BBC has stopped the presenter Evan Davis from hosting a podcast on heat pumps because it is “treading on areas of public controversy”.

There are some committed individuals prepared to pay more to make a difference for low carbon interventions but, unfortunately, they are in a minority

It is true that a majority – 61% – support net zero targets, according to a recent YouGov poll, but people also say they are happy to pay more tax until they enter the polling station, when not many vote for a party that says it will put up one of the big three taxes. This is why the government is in such a financial bind and, as a parallel, Reform and the Tories have changed their stance on net zero.

There are some committed individuals prepared to pay more to make a difference for low carbon interventions but, unfortunately, they are in a minority. The retrofit agenda has never gained much traction with homeowners because of the upfront costs of major retrofit work coupled with a lack of incentives and concerns about cowboy builders and the disruption.

Heat pump grants have helped to increase uptake, but the reality remains that these are still more expensive to install than gas boilers and do not improve a home’s EPC rating. And heat pumps may produce three units of heat for every unit of electricity but this does not mean much when electricity costs four times as much per unit compared with gas.

Which is an opportunity to turn Blair’s observation that net zero entails financial sacrifices on its head. The UK is the fourth most expensive country in Europe for domestic electricity, and the most expensive in the world for industrial electricity thanks to the way our prices are based on the cost of gas regardless of the contribution of renewables. Prices also include network and policy costs including environmental levies.

Rebalancing the market for electricity generation away from one based on the gas price and shifting the other costs onto general taxation would reduce prices and could make heat pumps cheaper to run than gas boilers – and also help to stimulate demand for electric vehicles. Cheaper industrial electricity would mean talk of investment in electric arc furnaces at the Scunthorpe steelworks made more sense. And the government’s growth zone strategy for AI-enabled data centres would have much more chance of attracting investment away from countries with low electricity prices for facilities where location is not critical. This would also mean more work for the industry.

And, while policy shifts like this might not make much difference to net zero attitudes, making low carbon technologies cost effective would certainly drive change, help the UK to meet its targets and make an admittedly small, but worthwhile, difference to the planet.

Thomas Lane is technical editor of Building