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Despite intensifying campaigns against net zero by opponents of green policies, our tracker shows support for the 2050 net zero target holding steady.
Support for net zero is plateauing, not plummeting
When, if and how to talk about ‘net zero’ has been on a lot of people’s minds this year.
Politically, the term has been at the centre of a collapse in the cross-party consensus on climate change. Media hostility has ramped up.
But despite intensifying campaigns against net zero by opponents of green policies, our tracker shows support for the 2050 net zero target holding steady.
Our latest data suggests that public backing for net zero is plateauing rather than plummeting, and support is still more than double opposition. The outliers are Reform supporters, who are disproportionately exposed to anti-net zero rhetoric from Reform politicians and Reform-sympathetic media.
But while Conservative MPs have largely followed their current leader in turning on the 2050 target, their remaining supporters haven’t.
The picture looks a lot more varied at the level of individual net zero policies
Our tracker shows the enduring popularity of policies that also save on household bills (like installing insulation, or incentives to do so).
Although Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) get a bad rep, our tracker shows support outweighing opposition and support gently rising over the past three years.
One way to look at levels of policy support across the piece is that they’re really quite stable – but some are not stable in a good way. When it comes to sales of new gas boilers, and the phase out of sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles, opposition started to outpace support around 18 months ago, and this trend has (slowly) continued.
Clean energy is a winner across the political spectrum – but support for fossil fuels is slowly creeping upwards again
Like support for the 2050 net zero target, support for renewables comfortably outpaces opposition. And people are much more likely to consider renewables as the route to building energy security than fossil fuels.
But there is a creeping growth in support for oil and gas – wrapped up in the very same conversation about energy security. Since the 2024 election, support among MPs for expanding drilling for oil and gas has inched up, driven by Conservative MPs pursuing an increasingly Reform-influenced agenda on domestic energy policy.
Yet, despite most Britons supporting clean energy, even when it means wind and solar farms in their local area, there remains a clear perception gap. As covered by Business Green this week, our most recent data shows that both the public and MPs continue to overestimate local opposition to these renewable developments.
What drives support for local energy infrastructure?
Last week, the government published its public participation plan, Energising Britain, setting out some principles for engaging the public around the push to become a “clean energy superpower.”
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 seen 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.
Climate Barometer tracker polling from October 2025 shows that the public primarily hold ‘businesses that pollute the most’, ‘the fossil fuel industry’, and ‘energy companies’ responsible for covering the majority of costs of transitioning to net zero.
This is consistent for almost every voter group, with the exception of Reform UK supporters, who are reluctant to single out the fossil fuel industry, and are more likely to say ‘nothing would make net zero fair (22%), and Green party supporters, who are more likely to hold the wealthiest 1% of households responsible.
Notably, the public do not hold airline companies, the motor vehicle industry, or households who pollute the most – to the same degree of responsibility.
While changes are being made to the Energy Companies Obligation and the Warm Homes Plan, our latest tracker poll shows that the majority (69%) of the public support government incentives for homeowners to improve home insulation. This support carries across voting lines, with even supporters of Reform, who are typically the least supportive of climate related policies, indicating majority approval (56% support).
The majority of the public are also supportive of financial support to low income families for green home upgrades. Not only is this a crucial aspect needed for a fair transition to clean energy, the relative consensus among the public is a rare opportunity.
The Autumn Budget and public opinion – bills, taxes, and more
The Autumn Budget is out. Here’s a preview of what the tracker reveals about what people blame for the cost of energy bills, taxing the super rich, and who pays for net zero.