What 2025 has in store: Increased contestation over Net Zero

Since its publication in October 2019 under former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the government’s Net Zero Strategy has been politically contested. The election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency is likely to embolden several prominent climate sceptical political leaders in the UK opposition and media over the coming year and beyond. These culture warriors made immigration a fruitful battleground in the last decade and are now lining up to add climate change to the mix. 

There is a long-established consensus in the scientific community that human activity is primarily responsible for climate change. A majority of the general UK public supports this view and believes that the country could be doing more to tackle it. Despite this, the Net Zero agenda has been politically exploited and contested since its inception.  

During Liz Truss’ short term in office in Autumn 2022, Conservative MPs who were connected to claims that climate change mitigation is pointless were given prominent government positions. This included the Secretary of State responsible for energy and climate change mitigation. Several climate change policies, such as the green levy and the ban on fracking, were reverted.  

We did not see Net Zero make much of a comeback in the 2024 UK General Election, where the issue was given remarkably low prominence.  

Despite several new initiatives by the new Labour government to push the net zero agenda, 2024 was a year of increased climate scepticism among many political leaders. Nigel Farage and other members of Reform UK for example pushed misinformation on pylons (ACT, 2024) and sowed doubt about GB Energy , the Labour government’s planned green power company. Reform UK have announced that they will make Net Zero the “big battleground", as they did for immigration, in the next general election.  

The newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, is closely connected to the UK’s principal climate science denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation, whose campaign arm Net Zero Watch’s chair donated £10,000 to her leadership campaign. Badenoch recently described herself as a “net zero sceptic”. Her false claim that net zero is “making energy more expensive and hurting our economy” fails to consider the much higher cost of failing to meet net zero targets. 

These political voices, which have become more prominent and more openly sceptic in recent years, increasingly share common ground with online influencers and conspiracy theorists who similarly bring climate issues onto the culture war battleground. They are onto something. To most ordinary British voters, who are not directly affected by extreme weather events, the challenges of climate change are primarily challenges of cultural change. For the net zero agenda to gain momentum – and retain its current levels of majority support – scientists and politicians alike need to understand and appeal to how people experience such change, rather than rave at the NIMBYs.