Uptake of electric vehicles, solar panels and heat pumps and commitment to vegetarian diets remain strong – and in some cases is accelerating – even in the face of political attacks on climate policies, Sky News has found.
And fresh polling by YouGov, carried out exclusively for Sky News, also found that belief in and concern about man-made global warming remain as high as in their heyday in 2021, when the UK hosted the COP26 climate summit.
However, policies that come with cost or disruption appear to be shedding popularity in the polls, reflecting a split in Westminster about whether to sell net zero as the answer to or the reason for cash-strapped Britain’s woes.
Worried that both the public and right-leaning parties were falling out of love with net zero, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer dithered over whether to join leaders for climate talks in Brazil this year.
But he will today meet with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and around 60 other leaders in the Amazonian city of Belem, ahead of the UN COP30 summit that begins on Monday.
The YouGov poll found 65% of adults remain “very” or “fairly worried” about climate change and its effects.
And 71% still think humans are to blame.
In an interview ahead of COP30, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, who previously said man-made climate change was “garbage”, admitted humans have “possibly” played a “modest” role.
Policies that don’t require people to put their hands in their pockets also remain popular, like tree-planting and taxing polluting companies.
However, people are losing their appetite for measures that come with a cost or disruption, like banning new petrol or diesel cars and a shift to renewable energy – as the cost of living bites.
Anthony Wiley, head of political research at YouGov, said several factors are likely at play.
“There will be something of a reversion to the norm after the publicity around COP26, there will also be the impact of the cost of living and the fading of elite political cues with the rise of Reform and the fading Tory commitment to net zero.”
But Sky News has analysed the data of what people are doing and finds uptake remains strong, and in some cases is even accelerating.
Hannah Ritchie, data scientist at Oxford University and Our World in Data, said it was “easy to say that you care about climate change, [but] one of the key markers is whether people are actually willing to go out and take action”.
A record 164,000 new battery and hybrid cars hit the road between January and March this year – the highest ever increase recorded for a single quarter.
The number of newly installed solar panels and heat pumps were also near previous peaks for both the first two quarters this year – albeit government subsidies for heat pumps are incentivising the uptake.
The same proportion of people eating vegetarian diets has remained effectively the same over the past five years.
Dr Ritchie said there has been a “huge shift in the feasibility, the accessibility, and the affordability of these low carbon switches that people will have to make”.
That means some people are buying clean technology for climate reasons, but others because it could save them money or they just prefer the technology.
This trend is also playing out in the United States, where Republican states have deployed far more wind power, whether due to geography, air pollution or economics, despite being more climate-sceptic than Democrat voters.
Environmental psychologist Lorraine Whitmarsh, from Bath University, said: “You don’t have to be worried about climate change to see… particularly in the context of energy prices going up, that actually becoming more energy self-sufficient is a really sensible economically rational thing to do.”
However, the majority of Britons still have petrol or diesel cars, gas boilers, and no solar panels – and national advisers warn many will need help with upfront costs so they can cash in on potential long-term savings.
Consensus on net zero collapses
The contradictions between polling support and action in the real world both reflect and fuel divisions between political parties over the UK’s net zero target, which is driving many of these policies.
It was not long ago that environmentalists thought cross-party support for net zero would last forever.
But that consensus went up in flames this year when the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch announced she would scrap it altogether – hot on the heels of Reform UK, which has always been sceptical of climate policy.
Its voters are the least concerned about climate change, the exclusive YouGov polling found.
Mr Wiley said: “People often assume that voters choose their political parties based on their policies, but it’s as much the other way round – people like policies because they’ve been put forward by a party they support.”
Reform takes on ‘climate zealots’
Mr Tice told Sky News he is waging war on “climate zealots” – those who “keep telling us that the world’s going to end in a few years unless we get to net zero tomorrow”.
“All these people who… try and shove renewables down our throats with ever higher bills, and they don’t give a stuff about the thousands of jobs in British industry that are being slaughtered on the altar of net stupid zero,” he said in an interview before COP30.
Wind power has saved Britain £104bn over a 13-year period, a recent UCL study found. But tens of thousands of oil and gas workers are expected to lose their jobs in the next five years, and it is uncertain whether green jobs will be ready to take their place.
Pedalling another type of populism is the new Green Party leader Zack Polanski.
Instead of blaming net zero and renewables for why nobody has any money these days, he blames the “richest 1%”, and says climate action is the answer to our problems.
He told Sky News that Britain has the potential to create “millions of jobs that are about tackling the climate crisis”.
“We can clean up our air, we can bring communities together… move to a better world, that both tackles the climate crisis and the inequality crisis,” he said.
“These aren’t two things in opposition, they have the same solutions.”
Both messages are resonating somewhere.
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Green Party membership doubled to 140,000 in just seven weeks after Polanski took over – perhaps nudging the prime minister to attend COP30 after all.
But Reform UK is riding highest in the polls, on course to win the next general election, according to another recent major YouGov survey.
And while its voters remain most concerned about immigration, there are signs that environment policy is becoming a more salient issue, researchers at thinktank More in Common have found.
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Dr Ritchie is “sceptical” that the political attacks would filter down much into public opinion.
“I think at the margins you will see some [people] shifting based on the kind of overarching political narrative between politicians,” she said.
But “increasingly there are other reasons beyond climate for people to make that switch and uptake low carbon behaviours”.
Even Mr Tice has bought solar panels and drives an electric car.
He told Sky News: “I love technology. I drive a Tesla, not because I think it will save the world – it won’t. But it’s a great piece of kit, okay?”
