We find ourselves at a pivotal moment in history. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) has declared a “climate paradox” – public awareness of climate change is at an all-time high, yet meaningful action is faltering.

In their new report The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change, TBI calls for a “radical reset” of climate strategy, emphasising three key techno-fix solutions - carbon capture, artificial intelligence, and small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) - as pragmatic solutions.

In the foreword to the report, Sir Tony Blair argues that phasing out fossil fuels in the near term or curbing consumption is “doomed to fail,” pointing to rising fossil fuel use and soaring air travel demand. Instead, the report urges world leaders to double down on measures that extend the life of the incumbent fossil fuel system – capturing carbon at the smokestack, betting on next-generation nuclear, and other high-tech interventions. The underlying message is that only by accommodating continued fossil fuel dependence with new technology can we reconcile climate goals with “political, public, and economic reality.”

Contrast this with an alternative framework emerging from systems science. The “Planetary Phase Shift” framework offers a very different lens, integrating ecology, energy economics, and complexity theory to show that humanity has reached “an unprecedented historic and geological turning point”.

Multiple converging crises – from climate disruption to economic stagnation – are symptoms of the end of the life-cycle of global industrial civilisation, which has been powered by fossil fuels for over a century. According to this framework, we are living through the chaotic last gasps of the old fossil-fueled order and the birth pangs of a new, post-carbon civilisation. This planetary phase shift implies that incremental adjustments to prop up the status quo (like carbon capture on coal plants or unproven mini-reactors) misunderstand the deeper transformation underway. The choice ahead is stark: cling to a dying high-carbon system and centralised, accumulation-focused organising paradigm and face collapse, or actively nurture the emergent clean energy system and a new decentralising, earth-centric organising paradigm that could herald a new civilisational era.

In this analysis, I critically examine Tony Blair's proposed “radical reset” through the prism of the planetary phase shift. I explore how the Institute’s report misrepresents the economic and energetic dynamics of the fossil fuel status quo versus renewable alternatives. By focusing on short-term political convenience, TBI’s vision overlooks the powerful disruptive trends already accelerating the energy transition. We will highlight:

• The exponential cost declines and adoption curves of clean technologies (solar, wind, batteries) that are rapidly undercutting fossil fuels.
• The declining Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of fossil fuels, which signals deepening economic vulnerability for the incumbent energy system.
• The structural and thermodynamic limits of heavily hyped solutions like Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and SMRs – which suffer from poor energy return, high costs, and slow scalability, making them ill-suited to address the climate crisis at the required speed.
• Empirical evidence demonstrating that a fast transition to renewables is not only feasible, but economically beneficial – yielding net cost savings and reducing systemic risks.

Rather than treating technologies or policies in isolation, we will examine causal dynamics systemically: how declining fossil EROI and rising renewable innovation interact to drive a larger transformation of energy, economy, and society. It also means recognising the civilisational implications: the shift from fossil fuels to renewables is not just about swapping energy sources, but about the possible dawn of a new paradigm of development and society. Ultimately, TBI’s “reset” recipe – focused on propping up the old system – is out of step with the reality of a planet in phase shift.

Clean Energy Disruption: Unstoppable, Exponential Change

TBI’s “climate paradox” framing laments that despite growing climate concern, emissions keep rising. But missing from the analysis is a crucial counter-trend: the accelerating deployment of clean energy technologies and their plunging costs. In the past decade, solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, and lithium batteries have undergone spectacular cost declines and equally rapid increases in scale. These trends aren’t linear – they’re exponential. Every cumulative doubling of installed capacity has yielded learning-curve cost reductions, making these technologies cheaper and more competitive, which in turn spurs further exponential growth in adoption.

Consider the evidence: solar PV module prices have fallen around 85% since 2010, and onshore wind turbines over 50% in the same period, while battery costs plummeted nearly 90%. The result is that in most parts of the world, new solar or wind power is now far cheaper than new fossil-fueled power. In fact, solar plus battery storage is already “significantly lower [cost] than nuclear power in most markets today” and highly competitive with other low-emissions options

This cost advantage is not theoretical – it’s manifesting in real-world investment decisions. In 2023, global investment in renewable power capacity ($623 billion) was 27 times larger than investment in new nuclear plants. Countries around the world are prioritising solar and wind, and it shows in deployment figures. Last year, solar and wind power capacity grew by a staggering 460 GW globally, whereas net nuclear capacity fell by 1 GW (more reactors were shut down than added). Even China – which TBI cites as a rationale to stick with fossil fuels – added over 200 GW of solar in 2023, compared to just 1 GW of nuclear. Solar and wind are now generating 50% more electricity worldwide than all nuclear reactors combined, despite nuclear power having had a decades-long head start. This is a dramatic testament to the speed and scale at which renewables are overtaking legacy systems.

These are classic signs of a technology disruption. When Tony Blair asserts that any strategy aiming to phase out fossil fuels in the short term is “doomed to fail”, he ignores the momentum behind clean energy. The phrase implies that fossil fuels are so indispensable we have no choice but to continue using them (hence the emphasis on capturing their carbon or offsetting their impacts).

But the S-curve adoption patterns of solar and wind tell a different story: once a tipping point is reached, change can happen faster than conventional wisdom expects. According to one projection by Oxford University researchers, solar and wind are on track (based purely on economics and current trajectories) to become the dominant sources of global electricity well before mid-century. Looking at a range of various projections using the most robust empirical methods available suggests that solar, wind and batteries could disrupt, dominate and transform the global energy system within the next two to four decades. With supportive policies this could happen even faster, potentially achieving global energy dominance by the 2030s.

Crucially, these clean tech disruptions have a self-reinforcing dynamic. Cheaper costs lead to broader adoption; more adoption drives further innovation and economies of scale, which cut costs further. We’re already seeing this virtuous cycle. In the electricity sector, renewables account for the vast majority of new capacity each year. In 2023, annual renewable capacity additions jumped nearly 50% to a record 510 GW, a growth rate unprecedented in the past two decades. Solar PV alone roughly doubled its annual installations from 2022 to 2023.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel investments are stagnating or declining in many regions because they simply can’t compete on cost. Even battery storage, which addresses renewables’ intermittency, is scaling rapidly as costs drop – enabling renewables to provide round-the-clock power and further eroding the value of “firm” fossil fuel capacity. These trends undercut TBI’s implication that fossil fuel use must keep rising until 2030 due to demand. Demand for energy services is indeed growing, but new demand is increasingly being met by clean sources. The exponential growth of electric vehicles (EVs), for instance, is poised to dent oil demand significantly in coming years – a factor the TBI report downplays in favour of highlighting increasing airline travel.

And there's no good reason to assume that we can't also slow or reduce demand through societal change, greater efficiency, and even deploying technologies like renewables which don't lose up to 70% of primary energy to waste heat.

From a systems perspective, what we see is the emergence of a new energy paradigm within the shell of the old. The TBI report is correct that current climate policy isn’t delivering fast enough – but it misidentifies the solution. The answer is not to accommodate fossil fuel growth with bolt-on fixes, but to accelerate the disruptive trends already making fossil fuels obsolete. The more we invest in and deploy renewables, the faster their costs fall and the more they can displace coal, oil, and gas. This dynamic is how past major transitions (e.g. horses to automobiles, landlines to mobile phones) unfolded – incumbents were supplanted not by wishful thinking, but by better technology that simply out-competed the old.

Trying to solve climate change by propping up incumbents (e.g. capturing carbon from fossil fuels so we can burn more) is akin to trying to save the horse-drawn carriage industry by inventing a manure-cleaning machine – it addresses a symptom while the world is moving on. And it won't stave off the inevitable collapse of the old industry.

Fossil Fuels in Decline: Diminishing Returns and Systemic Risk

Another critical insight entirely missed by the Tony Blair Institute is that fossil fuel dominance is not only being challenged from the outside (by renewables), it’s also eroding from within.

A key metric here is Energy Return on Investment (EROI) – essentially, how much energy you get out for every unit of energy you invest in extraction or production. High EROI means an energy source easily delivers a large surplus; low EROI means a smaller surplus, and you’re struggling to get net energy. Over the last century, the EROI of fossil fuels – especially oil – has been steadily declining as the easiest resources are depleted. Early in the 20th century, a barrel of oil equivalent might have been obtained with only a tiny fraction of a barrel’s worth of energy (EROI of 100:1 or higher); today, we’re drilling deeper, fracking harder, or mining lower-quality resources that yield much less net energy per effort.

We ignore the peak and decline of the global EROI of fossil fuels during the 20th century, and its projected continued decline, at our peril. By 2050, the global oil industry will need to re-invest about 50% of the energy it produces just to produce more oil – an “energetically and economically impossible situation”. Even by 2030, roughly 25% of the energy from oil could be required just to keep extracting oil.

This means the net energy available to society and the economy from fossil fuels is shrinking. We might still see large gross volumes of coal, oil, and gas in the market, but the quality of that energy – in terms of surplus – is inexorably worsening. Firms compensate by investing more capital and technology (e.g. ultradeep offshore drilling, tar sands upgrading, fracking dozens of wells), but that just raises costs and often only temporarily boosts output. The recent boom in shale oil, for instance, led to a short-lived surge in production at the expense of enormous capital expenditure and debt, because the wells deplete quickly and have lower EROI than conventional oil.

Why does this matter for the economy? Because EROI underpins economic vitality. High-EROI energy gives surplus that fuels growth; low-EROI energy forces more resources to be diverted just to get energy, acting like a growing tax on the entire system. Compelling evidence links the decline in global EROI since the 1970s to the end of the post-war economic boom and the onset of the long stagnation we’ve seen since. As energy returns diminished, advanced economies maintained growth only via debt-fueled financialisation, leading to periodic crises.

By the 2000s, the strain showed up in events like the 2008 financial crash and the 2022 inflationary spike when oil and gas prices skyrocketed – each crisis larger than the last. Declining EROI is a hidden driver behind recessions, stagflation, inequality, and even the breakdown of nation-states.

In short, our continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels carries not just climate risks, but systemic economic risks. We are tying our economies to energy sources that are yielding diminishing returns and greater volatility. The high gasoline and heating bills that anger voters (and feed climate policy backlashes) are a feature of this dynamic, not a fluke. Fossil energy is getting harder and costlier to obtain, so consumers ultimately pay more for less – breeding resentment and “energy poverty” issues. This is part of the “credibility gap” Blair notes between climate policies and public buy-in, but TBI obscures the fact that fossil dependence itself is a root cause of that gap.

If we view this through the planetary phase shift lens, the fossil fuel system is in its endgame: it’s becoming more complex, costly, and brittle to maintain (commensurate with moving into to the second late conservation stage of an adaptive cycle, which is about to move into the release/breakdown stage). Attempts to keep it running (drill more, dig deeper, subsidise extraction) face diminishing returns. Eventually, such a system either collapses under its own weight or is deliberately transcended by a new system with a better net energy profile.

Renewables, fortunately, offer a way forward. The sun and wind provide a virtually inexhaustible energy source with minimal marginal cost once infrastructure is in place. The EROI of renewables has been rising as technology improves – modern solar farms and wind turbines have EROI ratios that can rival or exceed those of unconventional oil and gas when assessed over their lifetime.

Oxford University’s 2022 study found that a fast transition to a decarbonised energy system by 2050 would provide more energy to the global economy than the status quo, while also costing less. In fact, the Oxford University Fast Transition scenario projects that a clean energy system could supply 55% more energy services globally by 2050 than we get today, and do so at lower total cost, precisely because technologies like solar, wind, and batteries convert energy to useful work more efficiently.

This turns the usual argument on its head: Continuing heavy dependence on fossil fuels is not the safe, pragmatic path – it’s increasingly risky and uneconomical. Meanwhile, leaping to renewables is not a costly indulgence – it’s a way to restore a high-EROI basis for civilisation and reignite broadly shared prosperity. The economic risk of fossil fuel dependence is also evident in financial markets: analysts warn of massive potential stranded assets if climate action – or clean tech disruption – renders coal mines, oil fields, and gas plants unviable.

A 2022 MIT study estimated that under aggressive climate policies, the world could see $21-30 trillion in fossil fuel assets stranded (wiped out) as we pivot to net-zero emissions. A more recent analysis in 2024 broadened this to consider knock-on effects and found that even in a late transition scenario (delaying action until 2030), a staggering $557 trillion of global wealth could be at risk.

Even if that higher figure is debated, the direction is clear: the longer we invest in and entrench carbon-intensive infrastructure, the greater the economic shock when the music stops. For context, even the lower end of these estimates ($20-30 trillion) approaches the scale of the 2008 global financial crisis many times over. This is the financial time-bomb underlying a “business as usual” approach. By not addressing how declining fossil EROI and climate constraints will strand assets, the TBI report offers a false sense of security about continuing on the present path. It asks the public to accept ongoing fossil fuel use coupled with expensive end-of-pipe fixes, without acknowledging that this path may lead to an economic cliff.

The planetary phase shift framework suggests the incumbent fossil system is not just environmentally unsustainable, but energetically and economically unsustainable. TBI’s call to not “phase out fossil fuels in the short term” misses the reality that fossil fuels are increasingly phasing themselves out, via geophysical and economic limits. The real question is whether we prepare for this phase-out in an orderly way by scaling up the new system – or whether we ignore the warning signs and sleepwalk into crisis.

Techno-Fix Pitfalls: CCS and SMRs vs. Renewables

Confronted with the twin truths that (a) we must cut emissions fast, but (b) our societies still run on fossil fuels, the TBI report reaches for incumbency-embedded technological stopgaps. The headline recommendations include massively “prioritising global investment in carbon capture” and “investing in new generation nuclear” (particularly SMRs, and even fusion).

The underlying pitch is seductive: rather than force a traumatic break from our current energy mix, we can invent our way out by capturing carbon dioxide before it warms the planet, and by conjuring up new limitless sources of clean energy via nuclear. TBI paints these as pragmatic solutions. Unfortunately, a hard look at the evidence shows that they are more mirage than magic. They suffer from low energy efficiency, high costs, and slow timelines, which means relying on them heavily is likely to delay real climate action rather than accelerate it.

Let’s start with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The concept of CCS is to attach machinery to power plants or industrial sites to grab CO₂ and bury it underground (or sometimes use it for other products). On paper, this addresses the symptom (emissions) without altering the core activity (burning fossil fuel for energy). In practice, CCS has a formidable record of underachievement. Despite decades of research and subsidies, the total CO₂ capture capacity worldwide today is on the order of 40–45 million tonnes per year, which is a mere 0.1% of global emissions.

In 2022, for example, roughly 43 Mt of CO₂ was captured globally, out of ~36,600 Mt emitted – a proverbial drop in the bucket. Even with a recent uptick in projects, if every announced CCS facility for this decade succeeds, we might reach about 279 Mt captured per year by 2030. That would still be only 0.6% of today’s emissions. In other words, after 20+ years of efforts, CCS is failing to scale anywhere near the pace needed.

By comparison, global solar deployments in 2022 alone offset far more CO₂ by generating clean electricity (solar PV output avoided an estimated several hundred million tonnes of CO₂ that year). The physics of CCS also impose a harsh penalty: capturing CO₂ from flue gas or air is energy-intensive. A coal or gas power plant that installs carbon capture typically must burn 15–30% more fuel to power the capture equipment, effectively reducing the net energy output for society. This lowers the effective EROI of the whole system – now even more energy is spent just dealing with the waste of energy production. As a result, CCS only tends to be economically viable (if at all) when used to enhance oil recovery (pumping captured CO₂ into old oil wells to force out more oil). Tellingly, about 73% of captured CO₂ in recent years has been used for oil recovery, not permanently stored. That rather undermines its climate benefit. And building out CCS at scale would require a vast new network of pipelines, compressors, and storage sites handling volumes of gas comparable to today’s oil industry – an infrastructure mega-project that would take decades and trillions of dollars, all to maintain an energy system that remains fundamentally polluting, inefficient and literally dying at an accelerating rate.

Next, consider small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced nuclear. The allure of SMRs is that smaller, factory-built reactors could overcome the notorious cost overruns and delays of big nuclear plants. TBI touts SMRs as an example of “frontier energy solutions” that offer hope and need scaling.

Yet the empirical track record is, so far, not encouraging. No SMR is commercially operating in the West yet; optimistic plans say the first could be online by the early 2030s if all goes well. Cost estimates for SMRs have also ballooned as designs move from paper to prototype. Case in point: the leading SMR project in the US, NuScale’s 77 MWe modular reactor, saw its estimated construction cost jump by 75% from $5.3 billion to $9.3 billion (for a 6-module, 462 MW plant) just in the past two years. This drove the projected electricity cost up to $89 per MWh – far above the cost of not only wind and solar (which often come in under $30-50/MWh or less today), but even above new coal or gas in many regions. And that $89/MWh is after generous subsidies; without a $1.4 billion US government grant and tax credits, the cost would be much higher.

If this is “hope,” it’s extremely expensive hope. Other SMR designs globally face similar hurdles: for example, in the UK, Rolls-Royce aims to deploy SMRs by 2030, but financing remains uncertain and costs per unit are still projected to be high. Nuclear energy’s long history of cost escalation and complex construction isn’t easily solved by making reactors smaller – in fact, smaller reactors lose economies of scale in many cases, which can drive costs up unless manufacturing volume is very high. Moreover, nuclear projects of any kind take a long time to license and build (typically 5-10+ years). This means that even if SMRs become commercial in the 2030s, they will contribute nothing to the pressing task of cutting emissions this decade, and likely only modestly in the 2030s. Fusion power, another “frontier” solution mentioned by TBI, is even farther off; despite exciting lab breakthroughs, fusion will not be a practical energy source in time to deal with the 2040 and 2050 climate targets.

Finally, both CCS and nuclear suffer from poor comparative EROI when all factors are considered. By the time you mine and refine uranium, build a complex reactor, operate it with massive safety regulations, and handle waste, the net energy yield of nuclear power over its life, while positive, can be considerably lower than early optimistic claims. Some studies put nuclear’s EROI in the range of 5:1 to 15:1 (varying with assumptions), which is not particularly impressive compared to wind (perhaps 20:1 or more) or hydro (35:1 or higher). As for fossil fuels with CCS, the EROI is lower than most deployment of current scalable renewable energy. If we ever tried Direct Air Capture (DAC) at climate-relevant scales (capturing CO₂ straight from ambient air), the EROI would be abysmal – DAC is so energy intensive that we’d be spending a chunk of our clean energy production just to clean up CO₂ from continued fossil fuel use, rather than using that clean energy to replace fossils outright.

This is not to suggest DAC will not be needed in the future given the already dangerous overconcentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere: DAC, should not be built on a fossil fuel system, but instead on a clean energy system.

The structural issue is this: proposals like TBI’s seek to solve the fossil fuel emissions problem by layering additional infrastructure on top of the fossil fuel system, rather than by replacing the fossil fuels themselves. This inherently tends to be less efficient and slower. It’s akin to treating the symptoms instead of the disease itself.

Carbon capture on a power plant doesn’t make the plant produce more electricity; it actually makes it produce less (net) electricity but slightly cleaner exhaust. A small reactor might eventually produce low-carbon power, but every dollar and year spent on it is a dollar and year not spent deploying proven renewables that are already cutting emissions.

History warns that betting on unproven techno-fix solutions can fail – we saw a wave of CCS pilot projects cancelled in the 2010s after billions spent with little to show. Even now, of the handful of large CCS power projects attempted (like Petra Nova in the US or Boundary Dam in Canada), several have been plagued by operational problems or shutdowns due to cost. Nuclear, too, is littered with examples of big promises not materialising on time (the VC Summer plant in the US was abandoned after $9 billion spent, the Vogtle plant is years late and over $30 billion budget). SMRs will likely repeat these patterns on a smaller scale.

While TBI is right that we should pursue a portfolio of solutions, the emphasis and priority in their “reset” seem misplaced. Through a planetary phase shift lens, TBI’s preferred ‘solutions’ are resistance strategies of an old system – attempts to maintain “business as usual” (fossil fuel burning) by temporary ‘band aid’ technical fixes.

Economic Evidence: Net-Zero Benefits and the Cost of Delay

One of the most pernicious myths that TBI’s “reset” reinforces (albeit implicitly) is that rapid climate action is an economic burden, while a slower transition protects prosperity. Blair notes voters feel they’re being asked to sacrifice and pay more for negligible climate impact and he worries climate policies are fueling populist backlash. Those concerns are valid, but the solution is not to slow down the transition – it’s to make the transition work for people by leveraging its inherent economic advantages and distributing the benefits. The real costly scenario is doing nothing or doing little. The alternative is a win-win: avoiding climate catastrophe and saving money, while the costs of inaction or half-measures grow higher with each passing year.

The landmark study by University of Oxford mentioned above found that transitioning to a net-zero energy system by 2050 would likely save the world at least $12 trillion compared to continuing on a fossil-fueled path.

This study, published in Joule, is based on empirical technology cost trends (solar, wind, batteries, etc.) and shows that the faster we deploy renewables, the more we drive their costs down. By mid-century, we’d be spending less on energy than we do today, while providing more abundant energy services to people globally. In other words, speed is efficiency in the clean energy rollout. Delay locks in more fossil fuel expenses and misses out on near-term cost gains from innovation. This finding shatters the notion that there is a painful trade-off between economic growth and climate action. It flips the script: not acting fast on climate is economically foolish.

Meanwhile, continued fossil fuel reliance carries heavy hidden costs and risks – some of which we’ve discussed (energy price volatility, stranded assets, health costs from air pollution, etc.). Climate change itself, of course, poses catastrophic economic threats: damages from extreme weather, lost agricultural output, forced migrations, etc., could dwarf the investments needed for mitigation. The longer we delay bending the emissions curve, the more drastic and expensive adaptation will become. TBI’s report does wisely mention the need to “move adaptation up the agenda”. But adaptation costs will skyrocket if we do not also mitigate. By some estimates, each year of delay in peak emissions adds hundreds of billions in future climate damages globally.

When TBI calls for harnessing AI and other tech to decarbonise that is welcome – but AI cannot overturn hard economics. If anything, advanced analytics overwhelmingly show that renewables, storage, and electrification are the backbone of an affordable net-zero system. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the IEA have published roadmaps demonstrating that transitioning to predominantly renewable-based energy by 2050 yields net economic benefits when factoring reduced fuel costs and avoided climate damages. The upfront investments pay back through fuel savings – you no longer have to buy coal, oil, and gas at all once you build enough solar, wind, and efficiency.

By contrast, CCS requires continuous expenditures (to capture, transport, and bury CO₂) while still paying for fossil fuel feedstock. It’s like paying twice for the same energy service (once for the fuel, once for the cleanup). No wonder that outside of generous subsidy environments, industry has been reluctant to adopt CCS widely. Similarly, while nuclear power can provide steady low-carbon electricity, its historically escalating costs make it a more expensive route than the renewable-buildout-plus-storage alternative in most cases. The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (2024) bluntly states that nuclear power remains “irrelevant” in today’s market as solar plus storage eclipses it on both cost and deployment speed.

What about the social dimension? Blair worries about public pushback – people feeling climate action is an elitist agenda that hits their pocketbooks. This is a real political challenge, but the solution is to align climate action with tangible public benefits (jobs, cheaper energy bills, cleaner air), not to abandon or water down the action. The renewable revolution is already a huge job creator – far more jobs per unit of energy than fossil fuels provide – and tends to create them in distributed ways. For example, installing solar panels or retrofitting buildings for efficiency employs local labour in virtually every community. There is also a unique opportunity to radically distribute ownership to individuals, households and small businesses, so that people become owner-producers or energy.

By embracing that and investing in a just transition (support for workers to retrain from fossil industries, regional development in former coal/oil hubs, etc.), leaders can build a broad constituency for change. How we manage this phase shift is critical: it can be chaotic and met with resistance if mishandled, or it can be an opportunity to transform society for the better if we consciously direct investments toward inclusive, sustainable development. The civilisational implication of the energy transition is that it’s not merely about replacing technologies – it’s about redesigning our economies to operate within planetary boundaries while improving human well-being.

Finally, let’s address the “reset” that TBI is calling for. In their view, resetting climate action means depoliticising the debate, focusing on pragmatic solutions, and cooperating internationally on tech deployment. Those aspirations aren’t objectionable in themselves – indeed, cutting through political noise and getting on with action is important. But the risk is that in the name of pragmatism, we choose actions that are ineffective (or effective too slowly), simply because they are palatable to current industries or political forces.

Conclusion: Embracing the True Paradigm Shift

The Tony Blair Institute’s 'Climate Paradox' report correctly diagnoses a malaise in global climate progress: a disconnect between lofty goals and on-the-ground delivery, and a brewing public backlash to policies seen as burdensome. However, in prescribing a “pragmatic” path forward, the report clings to an outdated understanding of our energy-economic system.

It effectively proposes to prop up the incumbent fossil fuel regime with add-ons (CCS) and wishful thinking (rapid deployment of SMRs and fusion), instead of confronting why that regime is failing. The planetary phase shift framework reveals that the more profound, if less explicitly stated, paradox is this: leaders are trying to solve a crisis caused by fossil fuels by doubling down on fossil fuel-based solutions. This ignores the empirical reality that the world is already in the midst of a disruptive shift away from the fossil capitalist paradigm.

The alternative approach – the true reset – would be to acknowledge that we are at the end of one civilisational cycle and to proactively usher in the next. That means accelerating the collapse of fossil fuel demand (through superior alternatives) rather than resisting it, and accelerating the rise of clean energy networks rather than treating them as peripheral. It means investing in resilience and adaptation, yes, but hand in hand with mitigation, because a livable future demands both. It also means being really clear about what's possible: an economic future built on renewable energy will be better – not a sacrifice, but an upgrade to a cleaner, cheaper, more secure energy system, greater well-being, and far more fulfilling lifestyles creating new forms of prosperity that regenerate the planet.

The industrial-age energy system is in its sunset, and clinging to it (no matter how cleverly) will only prolong crises. Instead, we should put our efforts into designing the sunrise of the next system. We can already glimpse that new paradigm – imagine a world where energy is abundant and nearly carbon-free, where communities produce power locally and democratically, where the air is clean and people and wildlife flourish. This isn’t utopia; it’s the logical conclusion of making the best use of the tools we have today, to redesign our societies.

In the end, the “climate paradox” – high awareness, low action – can be resolved by reframing climate action not as a painful duty, but as an unprecedented civilisational opportunity. The renewable energy revolution offers a path out of the paradox by aligning environmental necessity with economic possibility. Far from being “doomist,” this outlook is genuinely optimistic: it says we are on the cusp of an evolutionary leap in how our civilisation harvests and uses energy. But it’s also clear-eyed: such leaps are turbulent, and missteps (like betting on the wrong solutions or delaying too long) could lead to systemic breakdown (collapse of ecosystems and economies under climate stress).

We must not replace the political timidity and irrationality that the Tony Blair Institute points out with a new irrationality of clinging to familiar but failing approaches. Instead, we need bold, empirically grounded leadership that recognises the planetary phase shift for what it is – a once-in-a-millennium chance to reinvent our way of life (before planetary crises destroy it) – and steers into it with confidence. In this narrative, capturing carbon from a coal plant is not bold or visionary; building a prosperous society powered 100% by clean energy is.

The future belongs to those who act on systems thinking: understanding the root causes, the feedback loops, and the non-linear changes underway. The climate paradox will be solved not by a tech band-aid here or there, but by embracing the deeper paradigm shift that is already in motion.

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