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How much do you think support for oil and gas is coloured by misconceptions that there are centuries of resources left there that we are just ‘choosing’ not to use?
We haven’t asked specific questions about whether the public misperceive the level of resource remaining in the North Sea.
We have asked a related question of MPs: “According to the North Sea Oil and Gas Transition Authority, the projected volume of gas available for extraction in the UK will fall by 85% by 2040, meaning 90% of gas would need to be imported. Which of these comes closest to your view on what the UK should do to meet future energy demand?”
In response to this, in October last year, 78% of MPs answered that the UK should invest in renewables. A minority (5%) said they didn’t accept the projections about the amount of gas available, and this includes 16% of Conservative MPs.
Regarding the public’s views, since October 2023, our polling shows that a steady 33-35% of the public support ‘ending drilling for gas in the North Sea’ (without a timeline), while around 24-28% oppose it.
When we asked people to indicate their support for drilling policies with a range of timelines, we found the highest support for the option “gradually phase out oil and gas production in the North Sea over decades, and issue no new licenses” (39%) and the lowest support for “immediately phasing out all oil and gas production in the North Sea” (18%). This is broadly consistent with current government policy.
There does also seem to be some awareness about the limitations of fossil fuels: our polling over the last few years finds that only 16-18% say that ‘coal, oil and gas’ are better for the country’s energy security; renewables are seen by the majority as better for energy security (55%).
Opposing net zero can come from the other end of the spectrum – movements and individuals thinking that net zero policies are not doing enough and fast enough considering the nature and urgency of the problem.. what would your comments be with regards to that?
Like all policies, ‘net zero’ is a compromise between what’s optimal (for cutting levels of greenhouse gases) and what’s politically possible at any given moment (and over an extended period of time). We recognise people have different views on this and our data can shed a little light on it.
For example, in our latest wave, around 5% of those who opposed the government’s net zero target also said that the government “should be doing more to address climate change”. Digging in a bit further, this group likely falls into the Progressive Activists segment. When we look across past waves of our tracker, we find that around 5% of Progressive Activists are opposed to the UK’s net zero target. So our data suggests that a relatively small number of people (currently) oppose the 2050 net zero target because it is insufficiently ambitious.
Have you looked at whether linking to other social issues/campaigns makes persuadables more or less likely to support climate action? I guess my worry is that linking to issues like Palestine makes us less likely to convince groups like Rooted Patriots (however much we might care about it personally)
The answer to this question will definitely depend on which issues are being linked to climate.
One signal we highlighted was the rise of ‘green populism’, which draws a connection between wealth inequality and climate change – which some research shows has relatively wide appeal. Drawing links to other issues that are concerns across the political spectrum (e.g., health in the UK and US) have also been found to be fruitful.
Specifically on issues like Israel’s occupation of Palestine, we’d draw on data from More in Common, which (counter-intuitively, for many of us) shows that the majority of segments don’t have a strong opinion, and it is only Progressive Activists who overwhelmingly sympathise with Palestine (60%).
The same data shows that all segments think those who have ‘more extreme views’ about Israel-Palestine crowd out more moderate voices, and people who sympathise with Palestine think there are twice as many people in Britain who share their views than there actually are (51 per cent versus 26 per cent).
Is the data showing how politician’s perceptions of public support are different from reality helping to build politicians’ confidence to speak more publicly about climate and environment? If so, what does this look like in practice?
While we don’t directly communicate our findings to politicians, our partners and readers do. Some of the feedback we’ve received about how our perceptions gap data has been used include:
How have you ensured bias is avoided in the Climate Barometer data? Equal numbers of responses / data from across the political spectrum?
Our surveys are representative of the UK population along age, gender, and other demographic factors. The providers of our data “weight” each response according to these factors, which includes political views so that no political views are over- or under-represented.
If your question isn’t included here, it may be because it related to local organising or campaigning. Because we are not the experts on that, we have refrained from trying to answer those here.
