Energy specialists say abandoning net zero and increasing oil and gas drilling would cause more instability for Britons
Abandoning net zero and drilling for more oil and gas in the North Sea would be a massive setback for the UK and would not help the economy, leading experts have said in response to claims by the former prime minister Tony Blair.
“This is a bizarre intervention to make during the worst May heatwave on record and when the Iran crisis is providing yet more evidence of the enormous costs of oil and gas,” said Ed Matthew, the UK programme director at the E3G thinktank. “Clean energy is cheaper energy – it protects our bills from prices skyrocketing, its running costs are virtually zero, and it doesn’t cause climate change which threatens economic collapse … The government should ignore Blair’s ideological nonsense and focus on what works.”
In an essay published on Wednesday, Blair argued that the UK should exploit its remaining oil and gas reserves and abandon its long-set target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Blair, who has links to petrostates and whose institute takes money from technology companies that want a large build-out of AI data centres, has made these arguments for fossil fuels and against net zero many times in the past two years.
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Calls to maximise production from the UK’s rapidly dwindling North Sea reserves have also been made by the Conservative and Reform parties.
The head of the International Energy Agency, and one of the world’s most respected energy economists, Fatih Birol, said last month that opening new fields would have little impact, and more drilling by the UK would not bring down the price of oil and gas for British consumers.
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Last week, the UK’s Climate Change Committee warned that the impacts of global heating of 2C by 2050 were likely to wipe billions from the UK’s economy, in the form of damage from heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms, but that acting to reach net zero would bring economic benefits.
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See the original Guardian article at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/28/tony-blair-fossil-fuel-advice-bizarre-energy-climate-crises-experts-say
dizzy: Blair should not be regarded seriously
