Essay by Eric Worrall
Is the British establishment detaching from Labour’s Failed Net Zero policies, while still claiming climate change is a crisis?
We analysed 73,000 articles and found the UK media is divorcing ‘climate change’ from net zero
Published: December 24, 2025 2.55am AEDT
James Painter
Research Associate, Reuters Institute, University of OxfordIn October 2024, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch declared herself a “net zero sceptic”, but “not a climate sceptic”. Most recently she doubled down, announcing plans to scrap the 2030 ban on new petrol cars in a 900-word Sunday Telegraph article that did not mention climate change once.
Badenoch is not an outlier. She’s following a similar script to one increasingly found in the British press.
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In 2018, when our data begins, the link was explicit. In that year, 90% of articles mentioning “net zero” also included the phrase “climate change” or a similar term like “global warming”. By 2024, this figure had fallen to just 42%.
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This is part of a wider trend of “response scepticism” over the past decade in parts of the UK media. I co-authored a report published in early 2025 which found that scepticism of climate science has largely disappeared from opinion pieces and editorials, but criticism of the policies required to tackle climate change is pervasive.
“By removing the scientific and policy context,” argues Chalkley, “net zero risks being reframed – no longer the solution to stopping climate change, but part of a green culture war.”
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/we-analysed-73-000-articles-and-found-the-uk-media-is-divorcing-climate-change-from-net-zero-272527
Research Associate James Painter also provided a link to his own work, which confusingly is written by a different author;
British media ‘divorcing’ net zero from climate change – analysis
22 Dec. 2025
Polling shows public confused over meaning of net zero.
By Will Vowell
info@eciu.netA growing proportion of articles in UK national newspapers focussed on ‘net zero’ are failing to reference climate change, new academic analysis has found. It points to a ‘divorcing’ of climate change from the solution to prevent it getting worse, despite low levels of public understanding around what net zero means.
Failing to reach net zero emissions will mean climate impacts continue to become more extreme. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in its 2023 AR6 Synthesis report, agreed by all the world’s governments: “Limiting human-caused global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions.”[1]
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It comes amidst public confusion and a lack of understanding around the term ‘net zero’. Polling from Climate Barometer in April 2025 found 22% of those surveyed wrongly thought net zero meant ‘producing no carbon emissions at all’, rising to 41% amongst supporters of Reform UK.[2]
Read more: https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/british-media-divorcing-net-zero-from-climate-change-analysis
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Nine months ago the Tories officially abandoned consensus with Labour’s Net Zero;
However, the Tories are not above promoting their own energy fantasies. From 2023, just before the Labour landslide victory in the 2024 General Election;
In my opinion this whole development stinks of wedge issue manipulation. The current poll leader, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, is openly climate skeptic. Perhaps the Tories are hoping to salvage their electoral hopes by appealing to people who have defected to Reform, who are still concerned about climate change.
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well duh- the climate has been changing since the earth was formed but man has nothing to do with it
Adapting an old expression: “With trends like these, who needs anomalies?”
It will be interesting to track the slow death of the 1.5C and 2C targets as politicians twist into whatever position they must, to stay relevant.
Climate Belief disconnected from the policies required to address it. The cognitive dissonance is palpable.
“I co-authored a report published in early 2025 which found that scepticism of climate science has largely disappeared from opinion pieces and editorials, but criticism of the policies required to tackle climate change is pervasive.”
This article is trash, these guys act like it is news that skepticism of climate change has largely disappeared when they have previously said they won’t report climate skepticism. And they wonder why people look elsewhere for their news. What a bunch of knuckleheads.
This is the part where the knight says, “It’s only a flesh wound!” Classic.
I’ve been told that there are “no backsies” on the ICE autos, as you are permanently locked into self-immolating EVs.
There are rumors that Europe is about to implode or explode or something. It seems there are several issues, some intertwined, some not. The hysteria about Carbon Dioxide will die, I think, just like the “Witch trials in the early modern period”, folks will just move on. A “green culture war” seems like a big tent. Inside: Eat bugs. Don’t eat meat. 15 minute cities. Fly only 2X in your life. Plant a garden. Be a locavore. Don’t use fertilizers.
When Ukraine is finally over and the European public realises the EU establishment has not only lied to them for 4 years, assuring people that Ukraine is winning, but also that they have swindled billions of taxpayers’ money and millions of soldiers’ lives, that same establishment is finished.
Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen, His Excellency Friedrich Merz, Sir Keir Rodney Starmer, Kaja Kallas and all the other far-left, Nazi-worshipping Eurocrats will hightail it to their Swiss châteaux with their bloodstained, personal fortunes.
Europe is imploding, driven by the greed, fame, ambition and personal ambitions of a succession of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic for the last 30 years.
The wants and needs of the public mean nothing to these people. In April 2022 two months after the conflict began in Ukraine, Russia and Ukrainian negotiators reached a peace deal brokered by the Turks in Istanbul. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Zelensky decided that, like preceding agreements, it could be violated at will in an overambitious lunge to overthrow the Russian government by violent means and Balkanise the country, robbing Russian citizens of their right to profit from their own lands.
It has failed, but rather than concede their own defeat, they have defied Trump and Putin’s peace efforts over the last year in order to keep the war going for their personal ideological beliefs, blind to the expendable lives of the soldiers and the wasteful cost of a futile conflict on their citizens.
You seriously think there’s still anybody who does not know? (some make a lot of effort, but obviously if double-think is engaged, they already know)
How? And why then it wasn’t finished the previous time, or the one before that, etc?
They don’t just move on, they move onto something else.
It was coldening, then it was warmening, then it was C…VIDening, then who knows. All we can predict is: whatever the next month’s end-of-the-world will be, the “responses” will be the much same, and Holdren will be on top of it until he croaks.
They’re abandoning the Net Zero target because they finally have realized it’s unattainable to begin with. So now they’ll try to dredge up some other long-shot target in the hope of convincing people that if they aim for it it’ll be an important step toward winning the climate fight. Except people have stopped falling for these arguments because they know they entail nothing more than higher taxes, new restrictions, unnecessary mandates and all the other gimmicks that drive up living costs while affecting the climate not one iota.
Some people will never stop falling for these arguments
For a UK temperature check, I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/countries/united-kingdom/average-temperature-by-year. The Tmax and Tmin data from 1901 to 2024 are displayed in a table. Here is the data for those two years:
Year——Tmax——-Tmin——-Tavg. Temperatures are ° C
2024——12.9———6.9———9.9
1901——11.8———4.7———8.3
Change–+1.1——-+2.2——-+1.7
After 123 years the UK has warmed only a small amount which is most likely due the reduction in air pollution and the use of cleaner fuels which begin after the killer smogs of 1950’s.
In 1901 the concentration of CQ2 was ca 295 ppmv (0.58 g CO2/cu. m. of air) and by 2024, it had increase to 426 ppmv (0.84 g CO2/cu. m. o f air) but these increases has little effect on the temperature the UK. It needs to be determined the range of variation Tmax and Tmin for the last 123 years. Note how little CO2 there is in the air.
In summary the empirical data shows there is no need of Net Zero by 2050.
For the third time in four years the UK is about to set a new warmest year record.
The 10 warmest years in the UK have all occurred within the past 20-years.
The Clean Air Act was passed in 1956, but the 1960s and 1970s were cooler decades in the UK than the 1950s were.
The current warming is very much in line with UKMO forecasts.
Although the last few years in the UK have been the warmest of record, there will always be long cold snowy and rainy winters.
As I mentioned there is too little CO2 in the air to cause warming of air. Shown in chart (See below) is a plot of the average annual temperature in Adelaide from 1857 to 1999. In 1857 the concentration of CO2 in air was ca. 280 ppmv (55 g CO2/cu. m. of air) and by 1999, it had risen to 338 ppmv (0.72 g CO2/cu. m. of air), but there was no increase in air temperature at this port city. Instead there was a cooling which began in ca. 1940. The average annual temperature was 16.7 ° C
To obtain recent temperature data for Adelaide, I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year. The Tmax and Tmin data from 1887 to 2025 are displayed in a table. The computed Tavg for 2025 is 15.9° C. This datum confirms that CO2 does not cause warming of air.
NB: The chart was obtained from the late John L. Daly’s website:
“Sill Waiting For Greenhouse” available at: http://www.john-daly.com. From the home page go to end and click on the selection “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “Australia”. There is displayed a list of stations. Click on “Adelaide”. Use the back arrow to redisplay the list of stations. Click the back again displays the “World Map” Be sure to check the chart for Brisbane which shows no warming since 1949. John Daly found over 200v weather stations that showed no warming up to 2002.
NB: If you click on the chart it will expand and become clear. Click on the
“X” in the circle to contact the chart and return to Comments.
CO2 does not directly warm the air. No one thinks it does.
You show a chart of temperatures in one city, stopping more than 25 years ago, and you conclude from it that CO2 doesn’t cause global atmospheric warming?
Can’t place much faith in the Met Office when they commonly use nonexistent measurement sites and class 4 and 5 sites which have an error margin of between 2.0C and 5.0C.
But they claim they can determine down to 0.2C what the temperature across the country is.
The peer reviewed paper describing their method is here for anyone to refute. No one ever seems to be able to do so. Funny, that. Have a go yourself! Might fill the gap between Christmas and New Year.
TFN: What is the emissivity of CO2 at one atmosphere or less and 30 C or less.?
It’s not its emissivity that causes CO2’s warming influence in the atmosphere; it’s its ability to absorb and re-emit infrared at the 15 μm wavelength. CO2 doesn’t warm the atmosphere by emitting heat; it warms it by preventing heat escaping to space. (Similarly, a blanket doesn’t warm you in bed by emitting heat.)
Net Zero was introduced by the conservative government in 2019.
The Conservatives thought that Net Zero was a vote winner then. Now they realise that it isn’t.
A 2023 Unherd poll found it was still a vote winner.
Whilst the mood may have shifted by degrees, far too many people are still convinced the climate is a threat.
https://britain.unherd.com/net-zero/
That poll wasn’t specifically on Net Zero.
Therefore… in some sublime sense this did not happen? Or what?
The Climate Change Act was also introduced by the Tories.
The moral is never trust the Tories.
Vote for Reform UK at every opportunity.
Is there any reason to think it will not be the business as usual?
The same rats can and will move onto the adjacent barge. Why wouldn’t they?
There is no such phenomena as climate change because most of the earth’s surface is water, rocks, sand, soil, ice and snow. Activities of humans can have no effect on the vast Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans; the Andes, Alps and Andes mountains or the Sahara, Gobi and Mohave deserts. Activities of humans in cities can effect local climate due to the UHI effect. In some countries, the stripping of the land of plants for food and for feed for animals has led to desertification.
Climate changes as it always has done. We adapt, but there is no crisis. Net Zero policies on the other hand are purely political and can’t be supported scientifically. They are designed to impoverish people entirely unnecessarily.
Climate change, net zero, they are all just rotting fruit hanging from the same tree. Our political ‘leaders’ profess to care so much that they want us to believe in any old crap other than the science itself. The political parties in Blighty are just buttocks of the same donkey.
Perhaps this decline is fueled by big business, especially the car industry, who have realised they backed a wrong-un? The facts and figures don’t lie, but NWO flunkies do…all the time.
It’s not an unreasonable position to take. After-all, even if you believed that the climate was changing due to our emissions, thinking that reducing those emissions by destroying the economy was a good idea would be pretty stupid.
They know net zero is nuts economically – but they’re so brainwashed by “climate scientists” and too stupid/lazy to find out for themselves by doing the research (like reading this site)- that they’re afraid many people will accuse them of being illiterate, since, they think, “the science is settled”. You don’t advance in society by saying there is no “climate emergency”.
It’s not as if the UK is a part of the planet most likely to overheat and turn tropical or desert even if the planet’s temperature goes up a few degrees. The weather should improve so they should claim to be in favor of climate change, no? I’ve never been to that side of “the pond” but my impression is that it’s mostly dreary weather.
I’m sorry – who is on first?
What’s on second.
Story tipP:
Climate change is decimating reindeer populations.
Multiple media hit pieces claim.
Yes, this is correct – Net Zero is no longer being justified in terms of climate change. Its become impossible to make the argument, because of the rejoinder that the UK does only about 1% and falling of global emissions so UK Net Zero will make no difference to it.
The really critical phenomenon in the UK political scene, of which Net Zero is a instance, is the split between the population and the political class. The political and social leadership of the country, media, large corporations, civil service, state employees, media have become totally divorced from the public. You can see it in the rise of Reform, you can also see it on policies to do with sex/gender, race, religion (including Gaza).
Increasingly managerial and establishment groups are talking a different language, and one that the population as a whole is mystified by. Diversity, gender, decolonization, climate, energy…etc. And advocating policies that masses of people find mad and bad.
The real danger in such a situation is the risk of decapitation. Normally in the face of disaster and the exit or dismantling of its ruling class a culture will rebuild from below. In cases like the present one, where there is such a radical split, rebuilding becomes impossible. There are not enough people who are qualified, or who even care, to rebuild. The result is an establishment vacuum into which almost anything can step and seize control. The history of the 20C is not encouraging on who or what that might be.
This is the real danger in woke. Not that its crazy or stupid in itself. But that it produces this split, which then leads to fragility, and the impossibility of rebuilding a ruling class after some disastrous event which has purged the old one. Someone like Reform comes in, throws out the lot, defaults on the debt and starts ruling by decree. And promising to keep the lights on and the trains running on time.