Essay by Eric Worrall
But a majority still say Net Zero should be achieved by 2050 or earlier.
UK Urgency on Net Zero, Climate Support Plummets
King’s College London
Public support for UK reaching net zero by 2050 is waningRead the research
declining-urgency-enduring-support-public-attitudes-to-net-zero-and-climate-policy (1.04MB pdf)
The share of the UK public who say the country needs to reduce carbon emissions to net zero sooner than 2050 has nearly halved since 2021, according to a major new study.
29% of the public now say the UK should achieve net zero before the government’s 2050 target – down from 54% in 2021, when this question was last asked.
The proportion who feel the UK either doesn’t need to reach net zero by 2050 or shouldn’t have a net zero target at all has risen from 9% to 26% over the same period.
But despite this declining sense of urgency, a significant majority (64%) still believe the government’s target for net zero should be at least 2050, if not earlier.
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Read more: https://www.miragenews.com/uk-urgency-on-net-zero-climate-support-plummets-1618630/
From the Kings College London Report;
Declining urgency, enduring support
Public attitudes to net zero and climate policy
Contact: bobby.duffy@kcl.ac.uk | gideon.skinner@ipsos.com
February 2026Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy
1. The urgency of achieving net zero
While the aim of getting to net zero still commands wide public support, the proportion of people viewing it as an urgent priority has fallen sharply.
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The belief that the UK needs to achieve net zero sooner than 2050 is no longer the majority view among young and middle-aged people, but older people are now most sceptical
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Read more: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/declining-urgency-enduring-support-public-attitudes-to-net-zero-and-climate-policy.pdf
The entire study is well worth a read, its only 38 pages long, and the information is well presented, with lots of informative graphs.
The report contains some interesting hi-lights.
Support among green party voters has dropped substantially for key net zero policies like low traffic neighbourhoods, taxes on flying, EV subsidies and high carbon food taxes.
Older people are far more skeptical of pretty much every green policy dimension. If it was up to older people, Net Zero would be over. But there is still solid support amongst young people.
A substantial number of Reform voters (26%) support Net zero by 2050, surprising given Farage’s open climate skepticism. Perhaps Farage is appealing to them on other issues.
The study contains some interesting comparisons between US attitudes and British attitudes towards Net Zero. Unsurprisingly the USA is far more skeptical than Britain.
The study authors didn’t provide a list of questions in their report, though the survey was conducted independently by Ipsos. I’d have preferred more detail in the study details section on page 38, but it looks like they made an effort to produce unbiased results.
What can I say? This survey is both exciting and disappointing. It’s great to see the solid wall of BBC climate brainwashing is starting to crack under the strain of Milliband’s disastrous Net Zero policies, though I feel sorry for people caught up in the consequences of Net Zero through no fault of their own. It’s sad that a majority of people still appear to support Net Zero, even after years of hardship.
Change is coming – but Britain is out of time. Over the last 26 years industrial output has halved as a share of GDP. Britain is no longer a nation which manufactures its own needs.
A lack of domestic manufacturing capacity and failure to develop domestic energy resources such as the trillion cubic feet of frackable gas sitting under Lancashire, with even more gas recently discovered under Lincolnshire, fully exposes Britain to global supply and price shocks.
Any further decline in the British economy, a near certainty under Mad Miliband’s net zero policies, will drive up inflation, and force British politicians to choose between brutal interest rate hikes or economy killing 1970s style stagflation. Things will get worse before they get better.
The opinion shift in the UK in spite of massive censorship and information manipulation is certainly encouraging. Truth always ends up on top, sooner or later.
I wonder how many of those “Prefer not to say” are converts from the strongly green to the strongly skeptic and don’t want to say so they don’t bolster their vilified “Other Side”
Avert all those who felt a change to Net Zero Wes needed before 2050 has been reduced by almost 50%…from 54% down to 29%. That 25% are now less stringent in their belief.
Slowly but Shirley Liberals may be waking up.
It seems the politicians in charge in the UK are incapable of changing course.
The UK economy is falling apart because of Net Zero policies, but Mad Ed and cronies are continuing down the Net Zero Road to Ruin. That’s what happens when those in charge cannot admit they are wrong. They stay the wrong course.
” cannot admit they are wrong” implies that it is a mistake and pride is the decisive factor for doubling down,
while in fact it is an agenda that is being pushed..
Instead of constantly applying Hanlons nonsensical razor
you may consider what Roosevelt(slightly more politically experienced than Hanlon or Heinlein) said :
” In politics nothing happens by accident,
and if it happens by accident, you can bet it was planned that way”
This also explains why the significant shift in popular opinion( almost all not result of enlightenment, but the pain that cam along with Covid, Vaccines,massive overreaction)
ain’t happening amongst the legacy parties.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
It’s happening, it just will take some time.
“Things will get worse before they get better.” Yes, and how much worse before the people say it’s enough? Unfortunately the media is spinning all the setbacks in the economy and lifestyle as having nothing to do with NZ and blaming it on Capitalism, religion, and lack of empathy for invasion by people who make matters worse, not better. Trump may be a pariah when it comes to diplomacy and tact (understatements) but he’s taking good care of his own. Isn’t that what we vote for?
I don’t think Trump47 is a diplomatic pariah. He simply isn’t diplomatic. But with good reason, since that hasn’t works for decades. Pretty please didn’t get NATO to meet its spending commitments. Or else did.
As for tact, there is no need for it when faced with the likes of Schumer, Jeffries, Fauxahontas, and AOC.
I now truly love to hear politicians speak bluntly. I used to hate that, growing up and living all my life in Wokeachusetts- where most people think politicians should sound like Ivy League professors. Not just Trump- but also, a favorite of mine is Senator Kennedy. I watch and enjoy all his videos on YouTube.
“But there is still solid support amongst young people.”
How young? Those who do not pay bills but who live with parents, I presume.
I was young and idealistic too, many years ago. I grew up and got wiser.
It’s unfortunate that ‘idealistic’ has always meant aligned with the ideals of the Left, at least during my lifetime. Liberals (in the classic sense) have ideals too, but sadly none of them are conveyed to young people by the educational establishment. This, more than anything else, is why we’re always fighting uphill against the Left.
PJ O’Rourke provided an interesting explanation.
Kids brought up in supportive family environments are often communists, because communism superficially mimics a family environment.
From each according to their means, to each according to their needs. Kids have to do chores, but only what they could reasonably be expected to do. Regardless of what chores they are able to do, they get taken care of – their clothes get washed, they receive regular nutritious meals, and they have somewhere warm and safe to sleep at night.
Kids even experience a communist command structure. Dad (Stalin) and Mom have the final say over what happens in the house. Household finances are controlled – parents manage their choices, discourage them from blowing all their cash on junk.
A loving, supportive family is a miniature communist state. Or what communism superficially attempts to mimic.
This post is something to mull over.
Must be that the education system beat that into them.
I’ll be long dead in 2050. So “net zero” is not a goal for me as I will never see it being achieved.
Therefore, I have no interest in it because planning for the future requires a stake in the game.
I also have no interest in planning the future for unborn children. They will be more than able to plan for their own futures once they get here.
No one can live in the past or the future. Get used to it.
The climate is always changing and we always adapt. BUT THE CHANGE IS MOSTLY NOT MAN-MADE and it cannot be influenced by him. Net Zero is a useless sham.
Check back later when their economy is in decline and falling further behind sensible countries with better non-advocacy science and leadership.
I keep wondering how Britain managed to completely lose its former good sense on the “climate” claims. In meteorological terms, Sir George Simpson and Professor David Brunt knew exactly what to say about Guy Callendar’s attribution of a reported warming trend to rising concentrations of CO2 in 1938. More here in detail about their comments at the time.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/04/06/open-thread-138/#comment-4058322
I often post about the hourly “vertical integral of energy conversion” values from the ERA5 reanalysis model. It is the modern equivalent to what they had already described without any computers at all – that dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation would overwhelm the incremental radiative effect of increasing CO2. Should one expect to ever work out a conclusive temperature response at the surface by computing the radiation? No.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PDJP3F3rteoP99lR53YKp2fzuaza7Niz?usp=drive_link
If the academics in the U.K. would get back to the fundamentals learned the hard way many decades ago, maybe Parliament and the public could begin to see how the core premise of the “climate” movement was unsound all along.
Thank you for listening.
I am a bit surprised UK opinion hasn’t shifted more in the past four years. Guess it will take seriously worse difficulties for the majority to finally see the light.
The thing which bothers me is Venezuela. The political opposition are socialists. After decades of left wing corruption and narco-terrorism, a majority of Venezuelans still think socialism is the answer, they just need to find someone who can do it right.
The nightmare scenario is things in Britain might have to get worse than current conditions in Venezuela to wake up people’s brains.
Interesting point. I hadn’t thought about Venezuela that way before.
UK will probably get worse, but not directly in a Venezuela sense. Outside petroleum, Venezuela never had an industrial base to collapse, nor the winter heating and grid power needs of the UK.
I hope you are right. But in Britain pensioners and poor people are already choosing between heating and eating, and have been for at least the past decade, so I think its going to take more than a winter heating affordability crisis.
It is depressing that 64% of Britons think that achieving Net Zero by 2050 is a good idea, especially since this date is utterly impossible. This shows the level of ridiculous propaganda still being promulgated by the British media. At least this figure is steadily falling which shows that the truth is gradually spreading.
Even according to the UK government Office for National Statistics survey 2025 the overwhelming concern of the UK population is the cost of living:
“When asked about the important issues facing the UK today, the most commonly reported issues were the cost of living (87%), the NHS (83%), and the economy (72%).”
A poll asking about attitudes to Net Zero without relating it to the economic costs is a leading question: ‘Leading questions are inquiries designed to guide respondents toward a specific answer, often implying or suggesting the desired response within the question itself’.
Lots of socialist and Utopian pipe dreams fade when the bill is presented.
Mamdani is experiencing that already in NYC, just a month into his mayoral term.
And as per usual, he is blaming others who were unenlighted for the problem.
Communists always do that. That’s their excuse for establishing their own tyranny while “fixing” the prior problem (execution of the disbelievers) before the “workers paradise utopia” can ever be achieved.
While it is good to see progress for us whether big steps or small we still need to do a lot more. Number one this is a problem,
“Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy”
I don’t give a damn what the social science and public policy faculty think. They are not reporting on the dangers or benefits of added CO2 in our atmosphere rather they are reporting on the effectiveness of the main stream media and clueless government to indoctrinate us into the dangers we face for not minding them. Thank god they are losing their grip.
This shows how important it is to concentrate our efforts on the tax payer and rate payer rather than trying to convert the media and government.
If support has been dropping, it’s probably due to the increased costs and decreased convenience that has been evident with green products and green restrictions and mandates. And when people can’t see any major changes in weather and climate events except the normal fluctuations, they are left wondering why worry about Net Zero to begin with. The clincher has to be that despite all the apocalyptic scenarios that alarmists keep presenting, somehow the global population keeps rising along with life expectancies and food supplies. So who’s really being affected by events that are making reaching Net Zero so urgent?
The UNFCCC Secretariat annual budget is cir US$44 million. Reduce it to net zero well before 2030. Problem solved!
Is that before or after USA withdrew and took our money out?
Thanks for asking. Before. For the details of the USA’s contribution in 2025 see FCCC/SBI/2025/INF.7, for the expected contribution in 2026-27 see FCCC/SBI/2025/8, accordingly.