Analysis
Fears net
zero is ‘next Brexit’ as oil crisis fuels political climate divide
Fiona
Harvey
environment
editor
Rising
energy bills give Reform and Tories opening to attack net zero while government
hesitant to make case for clean energy
Thu 26
Mar 2026 08.00 GMT
Could net
zero become “the next Brexit”? That is the fear stalking climate advocates as
the oil crisis caused by the war on Iran starts to bite.
A
powerful coalition of the well-funded Reform party, led by Nigel Farage, the
Conservative party, some business interests, and the UK’s right-wing media, are
engaged in an onslaught against the longstanding target of reaching net zero
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Their
central claim is that net zero is worsening the oil crisis, and that drilling
in the North Sea is the remedy – despite clear evidence that more North Sea oil
will do nothing to reduce UK bills, while climate action will reduce bills, and
protect the UK from future energy shocks.
While
support for net zero remains strong among voters, with more than 60% in favour
of climate action, experts warn that the same techniques that won the Brexit
referendum for the Leave camp – despite it being the underdog to begin with –
are now being brought to bear on the climate.
“These
are largely the same people [as those who campaigned for Leave] and they are
using similar arguments,” says Shaun Spiers, former executive director of the
Green Alliance thinktank. “They are blaming climate action for everything
that’s going wrong – the cost of living, the economy – even though it’s clearly
not to blame. They think it’s an easy target, it’s easy politics, and they’re
presenting [scrapping the policies] to people as a panacea.”
Net zero
can also seem remote to people, which does not help, added James Meadway,
director of the Verdant thinktank. “Like the EU, net zero is an idea that can
seem big, vague, distant, technocratic and not easy to describe,” he says.
“People support it, they think it’s a good thing, but there is a distance
between net zero and how people live. It’s not something they think of as
having an immediate impact on them.”
Even more
worrying, for the government, is that while the challengers to net zero are
outspoken and confident, the supporters can seem weak. “It’s what we saw with
Remain during the Brexit debate – the advocates are often sheepish about
speaking positively about it,” says Luke Tryl, executive director of the
research group More in Common. “Some Labour politicians seem to regard net zero
as a bit of a barnacle they are stuck with, rather than something positive.”
Farage
has made no secret of his intention to find a new dividing line in British
politics over the climate. He told the Sun on Sunday last year: “This could be
the next Brexit – where parliament is so hopelessly out of touch with the
country.” Presenting net zero as an obsession of the “elites”, in opposition to
the interests of the ordinary voter, is key.
Yet this
is not how people see the climate, or at least not at present. “People see that
lots of aspects of climate action are just common sense, like renewable
energy,” says Sam Alvis, associate director of energy and environment at the
Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank. “They want homegrown clean
energy, it’s popular. There is a lot of good faith in climate action – the UK
public is actually very green.”
One of
the problems, according to Tryl, is that the climate is not a “salient” issue
for voters at present, ranking about eighth as a concern, below more pressing
day-to-day issues such as the cost of living and health. That is a big slip
compared to a few years ago, when the UK’s successful hosting of the Cop26
climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 drove more than half of the public to say the
UK should meet its net zero target sooner than 2050, and the record-breaking
summer of 2022, when UK temperatures for the first time topped 40C, ensured the
climate stayed a top three concern.
Alvis
warns that voters who switch to Reform because they are persuaded on their most
salient concerns may later end up shifting to Reform’s stance on other issues.
“What Reform try to do is bring people into their camp, on issues such as
migration and welfare,” he says. “Then they try to get them to adopt other
positions, like on climate. There is evidence that this is happening.”
The cost
of living has eclipsed longer-term concerns, but the argument that climate
action will cut bills – while made forcefully by energy secretary Ed Miliband –
has yet to be heard so clearly from chancellor Rachel Reeves and prime minister
Keir Starmer. Whispers that Reeves would like to cut the windfall tax on the
North Sea and encourage more drilling do not present a unified front.
“I can’t
remember when Reeves or Starmer last spoke up in support of net zero,” says
Spiers. “They need to persuade people, and they need to do it emotionally as
well as rationally – to talk about the threat of the climate crisis, and
extreme weather, and what avoiding that means to the UK.”
“If they
[the most senior government politicians] were to step up, it could make a big
difference,” says Alvis. “Messages only sink in for the public when they are
repeated consistently and constantly across government.”
Labour
has nothing to lose and much to gain from going “all out” for net zero, adds
Robbie MacPherson, a Kennedy scholar at Harvard University and former head of
secretariat for parliament’s all-party climate group. “You’ve got to show what
Labour stands for,” he argues.
“When you
have a half-arsed position, that drives unpopularity. People are not looking
for half-baked politicians, they are looking for people with authenticity. When
this government stays strong on what it believes in, it wins. Otherwise, it has
serious problems.”
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