Zeus: The climate passion of Tony Blair

Former UK Prime Minister steps into controversy with a misguided argument for fossil fuel technologies.

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On Sunday, Arnold Schwarzenegger posted to X this photo of him with Tony Blair and Danny DeVito, ahead of the Schwarzenegger Climate Initiative Austrian World Summit set for June.

(David Callaway is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is the former president of the World Editors Forum, Editor-in-Chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc. His climate columns have appeared in USA Today, The Independent, and New Thinking magazine).

SAN FRANCISCO (Callaway Climate Insights) — I was only three months into my foreign posting for Bloomberg in London back in 1994 when former Labour Party leader John Smith suddenly died of a heart attack on a train, and a 40-year-old underdog named Tony Blair took over the party.

I reported on his ascendancy and the transformation of the Labour Party and worked all night during Britain’s General Election three years later as “New Labour” swept into power for the first time in 18 years. I remember seeing Labour activists celebrating in the pubs at Smithfield Market at 6 a.m. the next day and how Time Magazine later dubbed the UK “Cool Brittania” as Blair charmed the world.

That’s why it was so distressing to see Blair, now an elder statesman and controversial subject in Britain, wade into the climate change debate with a shocking foreword to a new paper last week that argued the argument had become “irrational” and that policies to phase out fossil fuels were “doomed to fail.”

Shocking, because he was right. But for all the wrong reasons.