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A review of Conservative’s net zero sentiment, as Kemi Badenoch rolls back her party’s commitment to the 2050 target.
Kemi Badenoch has announced that her party is dropping its commitment to reach net zero by 2050, as part of the Conservatives’ biggest policy review in a generation. The Tory leader argued that getting to Britain’s legally binding climate target would be “impossible”, while abandoning one of the Conservatives most significant green policies.
Former PM, Theresa May, who ushered in the net zero target, immediately criticised the move saying that “delaying action will only harm the next generation and increase both the economic and social costs of climate change”.
But is Kemi’s ‘climate impossibilism’ out of step with her own party’s climate opinion?
Conservative voters are in favour of the net zero target
The decision is not only a wholesale reversal of Badenoch’s 2022 speech, where she highlighted the “opportunity, growth, and revitalized communities” of the clean energy transition, which she called a “future-proofing force” for a better tomorrow – but it also puts the Tory leadership out of touch with her own voters, parliament, and the wider electorate.
Climate Barometer tracker data shows a majority of Conservative voters (55%) supported the 2050 net zero net zero target in Oct 2024. This is echoed by a YouGov poll, which found that a majority of Tory voters are supportive of the policy.
A striking jump in net zero support was seen amongst Conservative voters last year too, with levels of support rising from 59% (amongst 2019 Tory voters) in April to 76% (amongst 2024 Tory voters) in July – before leveling out again.
While this could partly be attributed to changes in the electorate – such as right-leaning voters switching to Reform – that’s not the whole story. In 2024 July polling, both 2019 and 2024 Conservative voters showed higher support for net zero, with approval for the target rising to 65% and 76%, respectively at the time.
MPs overwhelmingly support net zero
Ditching support for the 2050 net zero target also puts the Tory leadership out of step with parliament on an issue previously seen as a cross-party consensus. MPs across the political spectrum continue to support net zero, with 90% of MPs backing the target, and just 6% opposing (according to our Oct 2024 tracker data). This follows a high-point of 94% support amongst all MPs in July last year.
Badenoch’s stance could put the Tory leadership out of touch with her own MPs as well. Climate Barometer polling from April 2024 showed that out of 55 Tory MPs polled at the time, 70% supported net zero, and 23% opposed.
Sam Hall, Director of the Conservative Environment Network (CEN), who represent a caucus of 50 Conservative MPs, described the decision as a “mistake” that “undermines the significant environmental legacy of successive Conservative governments who provided the outline of a credible plan for tackling climate change”.
Will the move alienate the wider electorate?
Public polling has consistently shown majority support for the 2050 net zero target, with a majority of voters backing the policy over the past two years. In 2024 there was an uptick in public support around the time of the general election, while YouGov polling on the day of Badenoch’s speech found 61% of people in Great Britain support net zero.
Tellingly though, in her speech, Badenoch claimed that net zero cannot be achieved by 2050 “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us” (a statement which has since been factchecked).
In embracing one of the Reform Party’s key attack lines on net zero – Badenoch was likely courting Reform voters. But even among this group (the least likely to back green policies), the evidence is mixed.
Polling in the wake of Badenoch’s speech showed Reform voters were the only group opposed to the 2025 net zero target. This is consistent with the party’s tactics of bringing the concept of net zero – which has limited understanding amongst the public – into a wider culture war strategy.
But other research, including by More in Common, has found that when questions focus on the substance underneath the net zero concept it’s a different picture – with a majority of Reform voters positive about renewable energy.
The government’s newly published Local Power Plan points the country in a direction that the British public support: clean energy that’s transparent, affordable, and delivers real benefits to communities and their local environments.
When we asked about the three most important factors for involving local communities on infrastructure proposals, both the public and MPs were most likely to select “clear, plain language information about the project and its impacts” and “being asked for views early, before decisions are made”. These were followed by “a clear explanation of how views influenced the final decision” for MPs and “independent or trusted organisations running the process” for the public.
When we asked which 3 factors people felt were most important in terms of influencing their support or opposition for local infrastructure projects, they picked: the project’s impact on the local environment, on energy bills and on the local community as the top considerations.
These three priorities are consistently the highest for all groups across age, gender, region, social grade, housing tenure, political support, education level, ethnicity, and whether they live in urban or rural areas; a rare point of alignment between these different subgroups of the public.
Strikingly, what made much less of a difference were people’s views about climate change and net zero.
This doesn’t mean that belief in (or concern about) climate change isn’t a critical foundation on which to build engagement around clean energy in general (this is the core idea behind linking the ‘how and the why’ on net zero, as we argued in our recent message testing work with Public First).
But when it comes to specific clean energy projects, the local impacts and financial considerations loom larger: as the transition becomes ever more place-based, this trend is only likely to accelerate.
A divisive COP30 ended last week with tripled funding for adaptation (though a delay on timeline), and roadmaps to end fossil fuels and deforestation being channelled to processes outside of the UN.
Despite the absence of the USA and China not wanting ‘to lead alone’, Climate Barometer data, featured in Business Green last week shows that the UK public continues to think that the UK should be one of the most ambitious countries in the world when it comes to addressing climate change, regardless of what other countries are doing (43%). 31% think that the UK should not take steps to address climate change until other bigger countries like the US and China agree to do the same.
And on the whole, MPs and the public still recognise that climate change is a shared global responsibility. 61% of UK MPs and 44% of the public say that when it comes to climate action, countries that individually account for less than 1% of global emissions, collectively have a broadly equal responsibility to big emitters like China.
There is a noticeable perception gap between Conservative MPs and their constituencies, where only 18% of MPs believe that (individually) ‘lower emitting’ countries have a (collective) responsibility equal to China, compared to 42% of their supporters. By contrast, Labour MPs and supporters largely agree on shared responsibility.
“The UK might ‘only’ account for under 1% of global emissions, but we are also less than 1% of the global population – that’s the kind of basic principle of fairness that most people can get behind”.
Adam Corner (quoted in Business Green).
Signal in the Noise: Climate opinion trends for 2025/26
Signal in the Noise is Climate Barometer’s annual publication that monitors and makes sense of patterns and trends in opinion on climate change