Yesterday, the Tony Blair Institute published a report with a foreword by Tony Blair, in which he argued that limiting fossil fuels is “doomed to fail”. People in developed countries are being asked to make “financial sacrifices”, he wrote, “when they know their impact on global emissions is minimal”. According to Blair, current Net Zero policy is unrealistic and needs re-setting.

Blair thinks that any demand-side action is unrealistic and misguided. He regards it as inevitable, for instance, that air travel will double over the next 20 years – just one of the highly uncertain forecasts that he describes as “inconvenient facts”. The trouble with his thinking, apart for it being more assertive than scientific, is that tackling climate change without making any attempt to reduce our aggregated energy and resource consumption is like going into battle with one hand tied behind one’s back.

Of course it isn’t easy for people to give up things once they have access to them. Various studies in psychology, by Kahneman and Tversky and numerous others, have found that most people are less happy if they are given something (money, cheap flights, or whatever) and then have it taken away than if they never have it in the first place. And yet, it is also the case that people who live in countries with a “high” material standard of living are not obviously happier than people with an apparently lower standard of living. Sometimes the reverse is apparent: most studies of the kind suggest Costa Ricans are typically happier than Americans, for instance.

It takes political courage to tax frequent flyers, say, or to encourage us to keep our clothes for longer, or cycle more and drive less. Or to question the mythology of GDP growth. But isn’t that what we want in our leaders – courage?

Since his intervention, the British government has been falling over itself to deny that voters need to make any “financial sacrifice”, and to say that actually its approach is remarkably similar to Blair’s. And some of what he has to say makes sense: we probably do need to be more committed to carbon capture and storage, for instance, and nuclear power also.

But that is because we need all of the weapons at our disposal, including rather than dismissing out-of-hand a social willingness to show some restraint in carbon-intensive activity, at least while that activity remains carbon-intensive. We need not to believe that technology will rescue us until there is real evidence that it will. Blair’s wishful thinking in this respect shows the same “lack of realism” that he so easily sees in others.