Do people think net zero will be expensive, or can the costs fall fairly?

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.