The public doesn't hate Net Zero as much as RW politicians insist they do

[Echobelly]

Politicians like Kemi Badenoch and right wing newspaper front pages love to talk as though everyone hates Net Zero and sustainability as concepts and wants us to get on with burning coal and drilling for oil. They seem to stake an awful lot on people not like sustainability mostly because they see it as 'woke' as far as I can tell.

I think most people don't think about it enough to hate it really and most people broadly want the outcomes of improved sustainability but would like it to happen without it needing any investment. I reckon some people don't like feeling 'nagged' about saving the environment and in many ways I don't blame them as, while we should all do our bit, really it's up to governments and big businesses to actually do the damn work to truly make a difference.

Maybe Net Zero has a bit of a PR problem as it sounds unachievable, and also maybe it sounds like you get nothing, or something will be taken away from you/society. It might do better to have a name that sounds more 'positive'. But it's a shame because ultimately, even if for some reason you don't believe in climate change it seems to me that the benefits of renewable energy (such as ending energy dependence on some not always friendly countries and less pollution) are pretty clear and I'm not sure people realise it's not just powering a few kettles, it's often around 50% of UK energy production

oers I’m really saddened by the renewed interest in drilling for oil and gas.
the world is on fire, for me net zero has to be a priority.

Do I wish net zero wasn’t necessary? Absolutely.

But it’s essential unfortunately.

The OP is talking about the UK. That study is global. The study itself says support is higher in countries where the impact is higher. UK polls vary, with some giving support as low as 50%., dropping to just 25% to 30% when there's a personal cost to involved.
(I support it personally BTW. But this thread is about whether the level of support generally is high, and it appears not to be.)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/10/avoid-using-gas-transition-fuel-move-clean-energy-study-urges?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Getting anyone ON to gas at the moment would be absolute madness. Wars, mad despots, blocked supply routes. Energy security comes from local generators with storage IE renewables plus batteries.

I don't 'hate' it, but I do think it's a relatively low priority for the country at present. Our emissions are a tiny percentage of the world's total, and until the larger countries sort out their massive contribution to these problems, it seems a bit of a pointless waste of money that desperately needs to be spent on other things. In an ideal world yes, fine, but I would think the majority of people here resent having to pay more for bills etc while other much larger countries don't seem to give a fuck. Nobody is going to say 'oh well, the UK's done this and that so now we're shamed into action'... they won't care.

People are happy with most things until there is a significant cost associated with them or it affects their quality of life.

I think most people see the sense of reducing emissions and the energy security that transition to renewables bring.

But that comes at a cost that many think is too great when the cost of living is high, or their ability to take foreign holidays is curtailed.

It doesn't help either that a lot of the very expensive projects associated with net zero such as carbon capture are mostly nonsense. Fortunately I believe the money slated to be spent on this sort of stuff never will be. It's just a headline grabber to sate the more militant voters on these issues.

I think the two major parties adopted fairly hard core green policies to head the green party off at the pass when it started making inroads into politics and stealing vote share around the beginnings of the 2010s.

You can see them both starting to roll back from that now that peoples concern over the cost of living crisis becomes in general bigger than their concern over emissions.

Now compare that to any other public policy area @5128gapand you'll see the general enthusiasm for climate action more starkly.

And how is it you are differentiating the 'cost of living crisis ' from the costs of climate change @GasPanic? Can you list the items for example?

Yes, China appears to be doing this the right way, using their own coal supplies to assist their sustainability transition while producing about 80% of the world’s solar panels.

I think it’s been poorly reported - some of the things my council are talking about re climate change are improving drainage (as climate change is increasing the likelihood of flooding) & planting more trees, yet I haven’t heard the anti-climate change councils being asked if they are cutting flood defenses or are against trees.

There’s also some interesting stuff about energy generation but again that’s not being communicated unless you follow local politics very closely.

Often there’s other good reasons to do stuff needed for net zero eg cutting transport emissions is good for reducing air pollution too but again that’s not always communicated well.

@justasking111& @Monvelo(great name) I agree about sustainable homes. One of the sad things about tackling climate change is that the stuff that makes people’s homes cheaper / more comfortable hasn’t been realised very well. There’s a number of fairly new glass-fronted buildings near me that really don’t look ideal with the changes in the climate.

We're talking about a specific policy here. Do the UK public support net zero. At least 50% do in theory. Only 25-30% do when it involves them paying for it. Those are the facts we have from the polls. Which makes this a challenge for the government.
It helps no one to project the views you think people should have over the ones they actually do, pretending something won't meet resistance when all evidence suggests otherwise.
The lack of public support needs to be faced and addressed with measures to mitigate the consequences to allay fears.

I think a lot of people do hate Net 0.

Sustainability is another issue and generally people are supportive of environmental initiatives they see as meaningful.

Agree about the communication
Pretty much everyone in the UK cares about the countryside. Even right wing parties will have trees as their logo, or lots of promotional material showing the English countryside. You lose a lot if English oaks are dying due to heat stress, or our green fields are parched and brown far too early in the year or the little villages flood.

I don't need to.

My belief from what I see is people want a better balance between achieving net zero and the cost of living now (the cost in the future is relatively unimportant to them, rightly or wrongly). Everyone else is free to believe differently if they wish.
Technical arguments on the economics of achieving net zero are extremely complex and are gamed by both sides to support their views. That isn't unusual in economics.

The main parties are responding to what they believe the public wants, and you can see the debate changing in the media regarding the issue.Certainly a lot of the media I read which before was very pro net zero maybe 5 years ago is now shifting to a debate as to whether the cost is realistic.

I think people can disagree with a lot of what I have written above. What they can't really disagree with is that the debate on net zero has shifted, and the main political parties are starting to shift policy in response to what they believe the public wants.

I saw a great example of the lack of logic in net zero in Australia.
So Australia mines large amounts of coal, but because of environmental restrictions then don't burn it to produce electricity.
Instead they export it by polluting trains and ships all the way to China.
Once in China it gets burnt in very basic and highly polluting coal fired power stations but producing very cheap electricity.
This cheap electricity is then used to produce cheap solar panels (using Muslim minority Uyghur slave labour also keeps the costs down).
These cheap solar panels are then exported to Australia on another highly polluting ship.
But once in Australia the solar panels can then be used in the "drive towards Net Zero" and "stopping climate change ".

When logically if you kept the coal in Australia, burnt it in a cleaner coal fired power plant then on a global basis you would emit less CO2 as well as providing cheap non intermittent electricity.

Since when has China denied climate change?

YANBU it’s now a matter of self interest for nations. Green energy is cheaper and more secure than fossils. We can’t keep enduring price shocks from Trump and Putin.

Not everyone right of center opposes net zero, nor does everyone left of center support net zero.
The public wants cheap reliable power, from wherever.
If there was less opposition to nuclear in the past we would be sitting pretty by now.

It does feel a little arbitrary to say by x date we will be NET ZERO and most people probably think what does that even really mean?! I think climate issues have suffered greatly from activists like XR over the past few years. Everyone just thinks they’re nobs who sit on top of tubes or in the road. Then you had Just stop Oil throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting. Nobheads, in other words.

Normal people are worried about paying bills and making it through each day. Climate change also isn’t really impacting us much yet beyond the heatwaves. It’s a hard sell to the ordinary person. Also many people think like Karl Pilkington “why am I washing this tin of beans out when China exists” sort of thing…

The fact that the UK produces less than 1% of emissions is not a complete picture. We manufacture very few of the goods we consume so have essentially exported our emissions. If we take that into account our contribution to global emissions increases. We are also not a huge country. It is useful to consider per capita emissions. This is interesting https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita

The opening post feels a bit simplistic. There’s issues with net zero beyond ‘right wing press’. If you look at the unions there’s a split because some don’t want their members to face high redundancies.

Did that study look at the carbon footprint over 25 years for the life of the panels, or just the Year 1 carbon footprint? Notwithstanding that Chinese slave labour is bad, it’s a significant problem when procuring panels.

It’s a bit like the argument that EVs have a bigger carbon footprint on Day 1 - but that drops away once the car has been driven for c. 15,000 miles.

Having said that, the transition to net zero can’t actually happen carbon free. Carbon needs to be incurred to develop the tech that makes future production low carbon.

We are only 1% of emissions. We need to make energy cheap and plentiful. Scrapping the VAT on electricity was a good thing from Burnham. Expand that to gas as well.

Remove the green levies and taxes will bring costs down a bit. We need to focus on bringing energy costs down. Might as well use north sea for tax revenue. If renewables are the answer, build them out then.

My frustration with net zero is that the energy resilience piece isn’t hammered home as the primary benefit. People can’t grasp slim but real future risks like food insecurity, regular flooding of roads etc but they can grasp saving money today.

Buildings that need very little energy to heat or cool, and use renewable energy for their energy needs (and therefore are by definition low carbon to operate) cost less to run.

It has always baffled me until the very recent Future Homes Standard that no one has mandated that new homes have heat pumps, battery and solar panels as standard. Yes, it may cost in the region of £5-10k additional on build costs, albeit this is cheaper than a retrofit.

But (and this where the government really lets themselves down) average energy costs for a 3 bed house are around £150pm. A 30 year mortgage on the extra £10,000 is £50pm. By setting new builds up for energy sufficiency from Day 1, you can actually save people £100 per month.

Why this isn’t the approach of the government is beyond me.

There’s just the minor problem of dealing with the waste.