{"id":299843,"date":"2026-02-15T20:13:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T20:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/299843\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T20:13:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T20:13:20","slug":"tony-blairs-oil-lobbying-is-a-misleading-rehash-of-fossil-fuel-industry-spin-oil-and-gas-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/299843\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Blair\u2019s oil lobbying is a misleading rehash of fossil fuel industry spin | Oil and gas companies"},"content":{"rendered":"

A thinktank with close ties to Saudi Arabia<\/a> 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\u2019s latest report fails on almost every point.<\/p>\n

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) received money from the Saudi government<\/a>, has advised the United Arab Emirates<\/a> petrostate, and counts as a main donor Larry Ellison<\/a>, the founder of Oracle, friend of Trump and advocate of AI.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s target to largely decarbonise the electricity sector<\/a> by 2030, arguing that doing so is necessary to power AI datacentres.<\/p>\n

The report claims renewable energy is too expensive. Yet this overlooks the fact that it is significantly cheaper than building the gas-fired power stations that would be needed instead.<\/p>\n

New onshore wind has been agreed at a price of \u00a372\/MWh and new solar at \u00a365MWh \u2013 both less than half the \u00a3147\/MWh cost of building and operating new gas power stations. New offshore wind<\/a>, at \u00a391\/MWh, is about 40% cheaper than new gas.<\/p>\n

According to the analyst firm Aurora Energy<\/a> Research, offshore wind priced below \u00a394\/MWh lowers consumer bills. By contrast, nuclear power \u2013 on which the TBI is keen \u2013 is likely to cost more than \u00a3133\/MWh and would take many more years to build.<\/p>\n

The report also cavils at the cost of electricity grid upgrades needed to support renewable energy, without acknowledging that grid improvements will be required in any scenario. It also ignores the conclusion of the network system operators<\/a>, NESO, that a clean power system for the UK by 2030 is achievable \u201cwithout increasing costs to consumers\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"WhatWhat does net zero emissions actually mean? And is it different to the Paris agreement? \u2013 video<\/p>\n

Draining the last drops of oil and gas from the North Sea lies at the heart of the TBI advice, projecting a \u00a3165bn 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.<\/p>\n

Since 2020, the energy industry has made \u00a3125bn 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.<\/p>\n

Simon Francis, a coordinator at the End Fuel Poverty Coalition<\/a>, said: \u201cTo call for the windfall tax<\/a> to be scrapped, while energy giants post extraordinary profits and millions live in cold damp homes is staggering.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat tax exists because companies benefited from a crisis that devastated household finances. Removing the windfall tax would reward profiteering and shift the burden back on to households that are still paying the price of Britain\u2019s overreliance on gas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tony Blair (left) during a prime ministerial visit to the Buzzard oilfield in the North Sea, off the coast of Aberdeen, in March 2007. Photograph: Danny Lawson\/PA<\/p>\n

Numerous analyses have shown that further North Sea production would make little difference to the UK\u2019s energy security and would not reduce energy bills.<\/p>\n

Bob Ward, a policy director of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said: \u201cMore North Sea production would have no significant impact on the wholesale price of electricity and would not reduce prices for British households and businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gas is traded on international markets, which determine the price. Even if the North Sea were drilled to exhaustion, the UK is likely to be reliant on imports for at least two-thirds of its gas within five years, and potentially all of it by 2050.<\/p>\n

Mike Childs, the head of science at Friends of the Earth, said: \u201cIf we\u2019re to bring down bills for good and protect people from future gas price volatility, then we must accelerate the development of renewable energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report\u2019s claim that renewable energy will be costly \u2013 despite price falls of 50-90% in recent years \u2013 also overlooks the fact that wind energy cut wholesale prices of electricity by about a third<\/a> last year, with further reductions likely as new offshore windfarms come online.<\/p>\n

The TBI report calls for an expansion of oil and gas production in the North Sea. Photograph: Kendall\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Shaun Spiers, the executive director of the Green Alliance thinktank, said: \u201cWe don\u2019t need to rethink a clean power plan that\u2019s working \u2013 the UK generated record-breaking amounts of renewable energy last year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consumers have yet to feel the full benefit, largely because the structure of the UK\u2019s privatised energy market means electricity prices remain mostly dependent on the price of gas<\/a>. The TBI report, Spiers added, \u201cgives few suggestions for how to do this\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although TBI maintains that the UK\u2019s target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 should remain, it does not explain how slowing the rollout of renewables is compatible with that goal.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in the interim, undermining the purpose of the target.<\/p>\n

Climate activists in Edinburgh at a rally against the Rosebank oil and gas field in November 2024. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

According to Angharad Hopkinson, a political campaigner for Greenpeace UK: \u201cThe assertion that abandoning strategies to reduce emissions will somehow reduce emissions, and choosing more expensive energy will somehow reduce costs, is ludicrous.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A thinktank with close ties to Saudi Arabia and substantial funding from a Donald Trump ally needs to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-299843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}