BLUNDERING Sir Tony Blair sparked anger among climate activists and Labour MPs today following a public call to ditch net-zero policies.

The former premier’s Tony Blair Institute (TBI) think tank was forced to clarify that it backed the government after issuing a report earlier this week calling for abandoning radical action to deal with the climate crisis.

It said: “The report is clear that we support the government’s 2050 net-zero targets, to give certainty to the investors and innovators who can develop these new solutions and make them deployable. 

“People support climate action, and it is vital that we keep the public’s support for how we do it.”

But Mr Blair, in his foreword to the report, had said the case for net zero was faltering and that global emissions were mostly down to China, India and south-east Asian countries anyway.

“These are the inconvenient facts, which mean that any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail,” he wrote in what was widely seen as a direct attack on Labour’s commitments to tackle global warming.

He argued instead for a greater focus on carbon capture and other adaptation strategies, with the debate on the issue having become “irrational.”

Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said: “What a surprise. A political dinosaur is a big fan of fossil fuels.” 

And an anonymous Labour MP told the Guardian: “It’s maddening. Blair parachutes in and is handing talking points to the Tories and Reform on a silver platter. TBI might want to remember it’s not running the country.”

Lady Brown, of the independent Climate Change Committee, was concerned that “people might take away a message from that report that we should do adaptation instead of mitigation, and that is absolutely the wrong message.”

And major Labour donor Dale Vince, a “green entrepreneur” said, mysteriously, that he “expected better from the TBI,” adding: “This from Tony Blair is net-zero nonsense. Prevention is always better and cheaper than the cure.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was forced to pretend that Mr Blair’s remarks aligned with government policy when challenged in the Commons.

“If you look at the detail of what Tony Blair said, he’s absolutely aligned with what we’re doing here, these are the jobs and the security of the future,” he said.

Sixty-one per cent of people back the government’s plan to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, YouGov polling found.