The Net Zero 'greenlash' means people are rejecting climate policies

When you're living comfortably and earning well, you have the financial security to plan for the planet's future.

I work in sustainability. We have solar panels on our home and a plug-in hybrid. I'm looking at a heat pump. I am comfortable and incredibly lucky to be high up on the Benedict Cumberbatch scale of public school-educated privilege.

But for millions of people across the UK navigating mortgages, rent and rising energy bills, the year 2050 (our Net Zero target year) is an irrelevance. They have to survive next week. For them, Net Zero policies are becoming an unaffordable, imposed ideology.

The Net Zero transition was introduced by an affluent political class, largely insulated from the direct financial implications of the policies. If you are an MP, a cabinet minister, or a senior civil servant earning north of £100,000 a year, spending thousands on a heat pump, solar panels and a new EV is a minor lifestyle change. Paying an extra £500 a year in green levies on bills? It barely registers.

Try telling a family on the average UK wage that they will save money "in the long term". It's meaningless when they don't have cash to spend today.

The "greenlash" is worsened by geographic bias. If you live in London or the South East, with high wages, a strong service economy and reliable public transport, green policies don't change your life much. But if you are in post-industrial Midlands or a northern city with a broken bus system, living in a terraced house with no driveway, the transition feels like punishment. The future promise of green jobs is great, but if it's at the cost of your current role, it isn't so appealing.

Clean air charges and ULEZ are another example. The health data is great - between 2019 and 2024, premature deaths linked to air pollution in London dropped by 40%. It saved lives. But these schemes are funded by a flat, regressive tax that hits people who cannot afford to upgrade their cars.

It's the same story with heat pumps. Even with government grants, the cost is more than double that of a standard boiler. And while new EV’s are becoming price-competitive, the most affordable used cars are still old petrols and diesels. Even if you do buy an EV, if you live in a home without a driveway, you are locked out of cheap overnight domestic electricity rates. Public chargers are a rip-off.

The greenlash is growing. A recent King's College London study found that the proportion of the public wanting to reach Net Zero sooner than 2050 has fallen from 54% to 29%. Those wanting to scrap Net Zero targets have doubled to 26%. Many people feel Net Zero is a top-down mandate they didn't vote for. They believe even if we achieve Net Zero, it won't make a difference globally - the world will still get hotter, and we'll just be poorer.

We can't clean up the planet by making working people pay for the moral comfort of politicians and wealthy households. We need to change the approach, but tinkering around with grants and installing local EV chargers won't be enough.

For people to buy into Net Zero, it needs to be more than an environmental crusade. We need green growth that benefits people here. That means manufacturing green tech, like heat pumps, batteries and clean power in the UK.

We've already proven it can be done. In Hull, the Siemens wind turbine factory created thousands of well-paid jobs in a city that desperately needed them. We need to copy this model and create engineering and manufacturing jobs across other post-industrial cities that feel abandoned by the current climate agenda.

At the same time, we should remove green levies from household bills and shift transition costs to progressive general taxation while introducing levies on those that can afford to pay them, like frequent flyers.

We need to get to the point where people see and feel the benefits in the form of cheap, clean energy and money in their pockets from real, secure local jobs. But until green growth makes Net Zero the cheapest, easiest, and most economically rewarding option for everyday Brits, many voters will reject it. And in a cost-of-living crisis, who could blame them?

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Barnaby Patchett is managing director of One Nine Nine, a comms and PR firm working in sustainability and co-host of The Sustainable Commodities Podcast.

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