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YouGov polling from Sept 2023 shows drivers and non-drivers split on who ‘gets the best deal’ from travel policies
Among those who drive on at least five days in a week, 41% say that government policy tends to favour non-drivers, compared to just 18% who say it favours drivers. Britons who don’t drive say that policy favours drivers over non-drivers by 35% to 13%.
In both cases, there’s a sense that other people are getting a better deal – but what surveys like this (and the rhetoric from the current Government around the idea of a ‘war on motorists’) obscure, is that many people drive, cycle/wheel and walk on streets and roads.
The idea that there are ‘motorists’ and a group defined in opposition to cars, doesn’t tally well with the reality of how people experience their neighbourhoods. And other polls looking for differences between drivers and non-drivers, don’t always find any: In 2021 YouGov found support for clean air zones, and increasing the amounts levied in congestion zones, was almost identical between people who drive, and those who don’t.
Reviewing research on climate adaptation behaviours, a report prepared by the CAST centre for the Climate Change Committee concluded that most people know very little about how they can prepare for changes such as extreme heat, droughts, or flooding. The authors highlight that it is important for politicians to clearly communicate what types of behaviours are most effective in preparing for a changing climate, and provide advice tailored to the type of risk, alongside other measures like financial incentives for homeowners.
A report commissioned by the Climate Change Committee, outlines a broad range of factors that impact people’s food choices.
It makes several recommendations for how the UK Government could encourage people to change their diets in line with net zero goals, including:
The report builds on the Behavioural Insights Team’s 12 behavioural science approaches to encouraging greener diets.
In polling carried out by Redfield & Wilton, people were asked ‘how expensive’ it will for the United Kingdom to commit to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. They report that a majority of voters (61%) believe it will ‘expensive’ or ‘very expensive’ for the country to pursue net zero targets, with only 26% agreeing that the costs of the transition have been ‘fairly applied so far’.
In this poll, people were not asked how expensive they thought it would be for them or at a household level, so it is not clear on what basis the cost estimate is being made. Wider polling shows there is a general expectation that the fossil fuel industry and energy companies should foot the bill for climate change, rather than this coming through taxation.
That said, there is a clear flag here for campaigners: the public will need convincing that the costs of the transition can be fairly applied (and that in practice they actually are).
Policies like IPPR’s ‘Fairness Lock‘ are designed to articulate what ‘fairly applied’ means in practice – aiming to protect lower-income households from the costs of green policies. And Climate Barometer tracker data (below) offers another way to gauge what ‘fair’ could look like.
We asked people to imagine that the UK taking effective action to reduce climate change required some increases in tax to pay for these efforts. Who should pay these taxes?
As the figure shows, the most popular responses are split between ‘everyone’, those who earn over £50,000 (the higher tax rate) and ‘no one’, although the balance of these responses moves around according to voting intention, underscoring the different notions of fairness held by different voters.
A poll conducted by Opinium for the ethical bank Triodos found alarmingly high numbers of young people are seeking mental health support for environmental and climate anxiety. The survey of 2,000 UK adults, reported in The Times, found that 14 per cent of the population have sought help, however, this figure more than doubles to 29 per cent among 18 to 34-year-olds. In striking contrast, the figure falls to just 3 per cent amongst the 55+ age group.
Commenting on the findings in The Times, Dr Carloline Hickman at the University of Bath said:
We do not want to classify it as a mental illness. It is socially, collectively, politically caused. There is nothing wrong with people worried about climate change.
Based on a set of interviews with 15 MPs, and a focus group with civil society representatives, new research – based on the findings of a collaboration between the Climate Citizens research group at Lancaster University, The Climate Coalition and the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, and supported by Green Alliance – shows how the climate opinions of MPs have changed since 2018 when a previous round of research was carried out. The report states that:
MPs are now much more concerned about climate; for them, it’s become a mainstream issue, but they have specific concerns that were not so evident before, particularly around how to manage the complex process of change.
All the MPs interviewed stressed the importance of protecting people from potential negative impacts, such as higher costs or job losses in high carbon industries. They also fear a political backlash if climate action is seen as unfair.
The report shows how the political agenda has shifted over five years, from the need to ‘do something’ to the pace of change.
The mainstreaming of climate change in the political discourse over the past five years is important to recognise. But significant challenges remain in closing the gap between the political and the social mandate, with Climate Barometer tracker data showing that MPs continue to underestimate the salience of the environment among voters, to misjudge support for onshore wind, and to underestimate support for Net Zero (which outweighs opposition across society).
June-August 2023 was the “warmest on record globally by a large margin, with an average temperature of 16.77°C, 0.66°C above average.” In addition “August 2023 was the warmest August on record globally, and warmer than all other months except July 2023”.
The All We Can Save project has compiled a list of resources that are designed to help people dealing with difficult climate emotions. The resources include a list of climate-aware therapists, methods to connect with feelings, networks to deal with ecological grief, and shared stories of climate anxiety. As Susi Moser writes in All We Can Save:
“Burnt-out people aren’t equipped to serve a burning planet … [so] the well-being of our hearts and souls must be reestablished to their rightful place as relevant, essential.”
In an investigation by Valent, analysing 13,000 tweets and 8000 retweets from 8,583 Twitter accounts (now ‘X’) evidence was found of online manipulation of the debate around the expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) ahead of the Uxbridge by-election in July 2023. The investigation revealed hundreds of thousands of pounds were spent on undermining London’s key clean-air policy – suggesting a coordinated and ultimate successful (in terms of the result of the Uxbridge by-election) attempt to create a backlash against ULEZ.
In a report covering a wide range of issues and working class voters’ views on them, support for climate policies was explored. The report found that support held up across the socio-political spectrum, aligning with similar findings from the Britain Talks Climate evidence base. But – with important implications for how politicians and campaigners present climate policies and how their costs will be distributed – most working class voters felt the costs of the transition should not be borne by ‘people like me’
More working-class voters said the government is not doing or spending enough to try and reduce carbon emissions (34%), compared to those saying they are doing too much (25%), or getting the balance about right (16%), showing the awareness of climate action across all social groups. That said, they have a clear view when it comes to who pays: 53% agreed that it is important to combat climate change but “people like me should not be paying the cost of policies to reduce global carbon emissions”, whilst 16% said they would be prepared to pay some costs and 19% said they do not believe climate action is necessary
In a poll of around 1000 people in early August, 2023, 51% said they’d like to do more to reduce climate change and help the environment, but that they couldn’t afford to.
The same survey found that people think that the economic costs of climate change itself will be greater than the cost of measures to reduce climate change (by 41% – 22%)
In the contrast between these two responses, a lot is revealed: whilst people want to do more, cost-of-living pressures put restrictions on this.
But there is an acknowledgement that tackling climate change is less expensive than not tackling it.
Policies that reduce the upfront costs of new technologies like heat pumps (through government subsidies or as uptake grows and prices fall) can help to square this circle, and are a crucial aspect of positioning climate policy as fair for voters.
Conservative Home polled its (Conservative Party) members on their views on Net Zero, in the wake of the Uxbridge by-election.
Famously unrepresentative of the wider population (or even of Conservative voters), this small sample were against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, strongly opposed to the 2030 phase out of petrol and diesel vehicles, and unpersuaded by the idea of a climate ’emergency’. They were only as unpersuaded as they were when the same question was asked three years ago, though – suggesting that although opposition to specific nearer-term targets may have hardened among this group, there isn’t necessarily a sense of worsening ‘polarisation‘.
Conservative Home wrote:
A picture of the typical panel member looks roughly like this. He (and it will usually be he) believes that global warming is happening, but isn’t necessarily convinced that human activity is driving it. He supports the Net Zero 2050 target, but not its presence on the statute book, and doesn’t believe that it will be hit. He is strongly opposed to the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars – and to low traffic neighbourhoods…the nearer the target, tax or measure, the bigger the opposition
In polling by Omnisis for Desmog, a number of questions were asked about public support for low traffic neighbourhoods, and the expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) specifically.
Notably, the questions carefully explained to survey respondents the details of congestion zone charging – i.e. that only a minority of vehicles were affected.
The survey found support for policies that selectively impose charges on more polluting vehicles, but also evidence of confusion about how many vehicles were impacted by the ULEZ expansion to Greater London (perhaps linked to online misinformation).
A More in Common focus group for the Guardian newspaper, carried out just after the Uxbridge by-election, concluded that
“The heated rows over green policy that have dominated Westminster over the past week, had passed voters we spoke to in Don Valley and Chipping Barnet by.”
Although our Climate Barometer tracker data shows that there are some (Conservative) voters who are opposed to clean air zones, this perspective from far outside of the ‘bubble’ of Westminster commentary is useful to keep in mind: even opposition is unlikely to be strongly held or ‘top of mind’ for most voters.
Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch writing on X (formerly Twitter) reported that:
The British public is much more supportive and united on Net Zero policies than the public in peer countries, with Conservative voters frequently as green as the centre-left elsewhere
Understanding opinion on 15-minute neighbourhoods
Despite their prominence in online conspiracy theories, there is no clear evidence yet of how widespread offline opposition to 15-minute neighbourhoods actually is.