Many new governments and administrations around the world are taking office, Modi in India, Starmer in the UK, and we await news in France and the US. This is an opportunity to meaningfully engage people in the Net Zero journey.
This is a difficult political message, hence one best delivered early in the life of an administration, Net Zero will cost more, it will need us to change our houses, habits, and lifestyles. It won’t only impact low lying islands in the Indian ocean. It will change our climate, it will impact global supply chains, it will result in mass migration, it will cost a lot, and it will make our lives less secure. Delaying action makes this worse and changes will be forced upon us, delaying should make people scared.
There’s a positive message to deliver too, in a clean energy world, we get to keep the glaciers, coral reefs, our cities are less polluted, and our children get to live better lives than we’ve had.
The supply side has dominated the narrative, ‘we need to build more…’, but we don’t achieve NZ without both public permission for this build and changes in people’s demand side behaviours. It’s the people that need to change, and local solutions will be essential.
Governments have proven that they can be extremely effective at communicating when needed, ‘stay at home’ ‘turn off that light’ ‘life, be in it’. A combination of punchy phrases and clear imagery has been proven to work, in doing this they can counter a lot of misinformation.
Solutions will take time to implement, governments will need cross party consensus to make commitments that will outlive their time in office. They will need to establish organisations with long term responsibility for implementing the changes – rolling out heat pumps, insulation, alongside building nuclear, wind, networks.
It has fallen on this generation of politicians to address this challenge. A balanced, reasoned case needs to be made. Future generations will put us alongside the appeasers of the 1930s if we fail to act.
