During the climate summits

In the sterile corridors of climate summits, numbers drift like ghostly apparitions. Worrying numbers. Disturbing numbers. 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C. 36.8 gigatonnes of CO₂ released annually. 4 million human deaths since 2000 – a significant underestimate. 1 million species at risk of extinction.

Tony Blair is busy

Tony Blair is a man in motion. From one luxury hotel suite to the next he races, discreetly meeting leaders and helping countries – advising his ‘partners’. Partners, not clients; clients make you sound like Hakluyt. He cultivates, he advises, he influences, he promotes. ‘His presence sent a ripple of excitement through an otherwise turgid summit’.

Different numbers float in the air. ‘Turnover increased to $145.3 million’. 40+ countries, 50+ partners, 900+ staff. $52 million from Oracle Larry Ellison The Larry Ellison Foundation. $125 million coming into the advisory division. Business is booming. Not quite Al-Yamamah, but the spirit is there.

but now he is worried.

About climate hysteria. ‘People know’, he writes, ‘that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality’; ‘over-emotionality’ (sic) and lack of reason. ‘Political leaders are decent people who want to do the right thing’, he insists – somewhat shrilly. ‘They would like to start taking some of the hysteria out of the climate debate but are reluctant to be the first to do so’. Poor things, we have to help them. They are, after all, ‘reasonable men’ – apologies, ‘sensible people’ who ‘need to speak up’. So, he does, ever the rational (=male) leader.

The Institute produced a report

His institute, ‘the Tony Blair Institute, trading as Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, is a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (registered company number: 10505963)’. The McKinsey for World Leaders; ‘Our offering is unique. No other organisation combines our mission to help political leaders deliver change for their people with our deep advisory experience and understanding of the role of technology in 21^st centurygovernance’. ‘The Group and Company is controlled by ACL Blair[1], being the only subscribing member of the company’.

The institute’s report is titled The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change.

concerned about populist backlash

It talks of an impasse, ‘the greatest loss of climate momentum in recent history’. Net zero policies are ‘unaffordable, ineffective, or politically toxic.’ Another culture war brews around them. ‘The current climate debate is broken.’ Public confidence is ‘waning’ and proposed green policies ‘have alienated many people’. ‘The debate needs to be taken out of the hands of the campaigners and put in the hands of the policymakers’.

No more hysteria and irrationality if the rational policymakers are involved, then. ACL’s foreword makes it clear. Taking the debate out of the hands of people and putting it into the hands of elite policymakers will absolutely show these populists, who shall remain nameless. It will shout, loud and clear, that this is not an ‘elite-driven agenda’. After all, these elites will listen on behalf of the politicians and states and billionaire donors, as opposed to those other elites, the environmental campaigners that listen on behalf of people and communities. That is how one restores public trust of people and communities in climate policy. That is how one avoids climate hysteria, hand in hand with Larry Ellison and Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.

and asking the world to cooperate and innovate.

Sounds confusing… Let me be clear, the report seems to say, it is absolutely right that climate policy is simplified; we should adopt a realist voice that is ‘pragmatic, solutions-driven, and outcome-oriented (sic)’. No more unrealistic demands, such as phasing out of fossil fuels, or reparations according to historical responsibility. We have, after all, established that such demands create hysteria.

Instead, we need simple solutions, such as negotiating multiple, additional plurilateral climate agreements across different regions, that will also somehow include binding commitments from China and India, that we will then proceed to layer onto the existing framework of international climate law. It sounds somewhat liketurning international environmental law into international investment law. While you are at it, add climate provisions to all the new trade agreements that are currently being negotiated in dire haste as the international trade system crumbles into regional fragments. You may not like it, but this is what peak international pragmatism looks like.

Beyond that, it is just technology and finance all the way down; carbon capture, AI-enhanced AI energy grids, clean nuclear and fusion energy, afforestation, carbon-sequestering crops, smart farms, flood defences, green cities, a veritable infinite regress of tech – climate adaptation financed by green bonds, climate-risk pricing and philanthropic giving. An infinite regress of pragmatic solutions by private capital, like Nikola trucks; perpetually five years away from being five years away from being ready. Welcome to the era of private climate governance.

The experts revolted

Wrong message at the wrong time. Muddled and misleading. Making UK’s climate leadership wobble, so that other countries will wobble in unison. Reassurances had to be made that ACL was ‘absolutely aligned’ with the Labour government. And we were reassured, because they used the word absolutely. That is always reassuring, an Ogilvy focus group has told me so.

and the intervention is easily dismissed.

Muddled, because the report is mostly an application of the faux-progressive abundance neoliberalism[2] to climate, driven by donor interests, poor AI prompting and the passionate belief that the Clinton/Blair years was the best time. There will be salvation once more, when deregulation lets private interests loose to deal with any problem.

It is easy to mock, even, from a position of safety and privilege. ACL’s legacy has been ground so fine that it is nothing more than fine dust covering the luxury LV furnishings of the hotel suites he frequents. How about Atelier Biagetti’s Anemona Table (RRP£80,000.00) – an ‘intensely physical piece’ with ‘a sinuously undulating base covered with leather on the exterior and lacquer on the interior, supporting a heavyweight top made of clear glass’? An apt description. When the donor-wind blows, the institute-ship will change direction.

Yet there is disquiet

Escalating climate chaos; wildfires, flooding, acidification. Carbon is spreading, saturating. The climate regime appears to constrain extraction, but enables extractivism. Extraction is the activity of extracting resources, whereas extractivism is the political economy built on this activity. Extractivism is a relation, a way of relating to the world, to both nature and society. It is a relation that structures the unequal distribution of harms and benefits arising from extraction over place and time. Whether it is mining, drilling or farming, the harms have and continue to accrue locally at the site of extraction, and the benefits have and continue to accrue at a distance, and towards global capital. By this point, we have had centuries of this extractivist political economy spread to every corner of the Earth. Fossil fuels are embedded; everything we touch, and use is drenched in oil. It cannot be peeled away, scrubbed away, while also leaving the system intact. In short, extraction cannot be contained without containing extractivism. And containing extractivism means change; it means changing everything.

Hence, international environmental law fixates on extraction. Even then, the constraints it has placed, indeed do not work fast enough or well enough. Nor are these clear constraints. Fast enough for what? Well enough for whom? And constraints on what?

and law functions like horse blinkers.

On the (positivist) surface, the answers to such questions are straightforward. Climate is a common concern of humanity and thus requires multinational cooperation between states. This is recognised in the very first line of the preamble of the climate convention. We all are suffering because this multilateral effort is not pushing fast enough to achieve the overarching aim of maintaining the global temperature rise under 1.5^oC degrees, agreed after joint legal and scientific efforts to address the problem. And international environmental law places constraints on state conduct as any international law does, which are then interpreted and transformed into constraints on individual behaviour by the state parties to the convention. That’s good legal form.

Yet it also protects us from the disquiet of the climate regime. Horse blinkers are ‘ideal for reducing the field of vision and helping the horse to concentrate and limit the impact of distractions’. People know, after all, that ‘since horses can easily get distracted by the disturbing sounds around them, horse eye half cover blinder is used to keep the focus intact and helps reduce peripheral vision, keeping his focus glued to the track and the jockey’s commands.’

There is no ‘we’

Horse blinkers protect us from other questions that international environmental law does not like to entertain. What is the point of an appropriate temperature rise target and less carbon? What is the point of a clean atmosphere? What is the point of a clean environment? Is it an aesthetic outcome, a moral one, or a public health achievement? Will we be happier in a world where the temperature rise is kept at below 1.5°C? Is a global clean environment the same or to be achieved in the same way for everyone?

As Anna Grear detected, the climate crisis is a crisis of ‘global unevenness’ characterized by many (often hidden) ‘dynamics of privilege and oppression’. In short, it is crisis of unjust distribution. Even if international environmental law, through its climate regime, constrains certain products and practices of extraction, it enables extractivism by continuing to ignore distribution of harms and benefits and continuing to allow the generation of these products and practices. This is what Andre Gorz discovered in the relation between ecology and capitalism.

Moreover, these attempts to constrain also create benefits and harms that need to be distributed as well and on top. That is the nature of any law and policy. So both environmental degradation and environmental protection create different harms and benefits that require distribution. Both are ignored by international environmental law, and obscured by labels such as ‘just transition’.

Without distribution there are no politics, and without politics, there is no ‘we’. ‘We’ have not suffered equally from the rising global temperatures and global climate emergency, either historically or now; nor will ‘we’ benefit from a stable climate and a clean environment equally, either now or in the future. There is no such ‘universal’ subject or community. There is no humanity in international environmental law, or, in other words, and once more, ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’.

This is the disquiet of the climate regime. It will continue to work not well or fast enough. As long as there are only technical and scientific goals related to temperatures and parts per million, it will continue to work not well or fast enough.

And his solution will not work. It is not meant to work to address this disquiet. This will not ‘take out the hysteria from the climate debate’. In fact, it will increase it. Climate chaos is beneficial to capital, as long people and things remain to be extracted and sacrificed. Climate adaptation financed by private capital will create new scarcities, new products and new sacrifice zones. And climate law and policy will join along for the ride.

BIO: Dr. Andreas Kotsakis is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School.

[1] The company accounts available on Companies House use these full initials of Blair’s name. In the rest of the text he will thus be referred to as ACL, given the acronym also stands for the Anterior Cruciate Ligament, a structural element of the knee. Damage to this ligament leads to a debilitating injury; such an association feels appropriate.

[2] Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (Profile Books, 2025).