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In response to the government announcing changes to Net Zero policies (around the phasing out of petrol and diesel cars, and gas boilers), a survey asked people to select the words they would use to describe the government pushing back or scrapping key climate policies.
The most commonly selected word was “untrustworthy” (40%) – followed by “sensible” (29%) and chaotic (25%). Respondents said they’d describe Rishi Sunak as “reckless” (33%), “backwards” (31%), and “sensible (29%) if he were to push back these policies.
Whilst these findings suggest there’s no straightforward political capital in watering down Net Zero goals, the percentage of people selecting ‘sensible’ to both questions is also important. For some members of the public – concentrated among Conservative voters – there’s a sense of pragmatism in delaying Net Zero targets.
Wider research suggests, though, that the reason for this is important to take into account. Voters are not sceptical of green policies, but people don’t believe the government has a credible plan, that the infrastructure is ready, or that changes are currently being made affordable enough to undertake.
These are all issues that a bolder, fairer offer to voters on Net Zero could address.
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.
Commentary & Analysis
27th January 2026
Signal in the Noise is Climate Barometer’s annual publication that monitors and makes sense of patterns and trends in opinion on climate change
Has the Green Party really stopped talking about the environment?