Net Zero's PR Problem—and How to Fix It!

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0:37Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast, where today we're asking a big question. Is net zero actually working or does it have a major PR problem? And the reason that we're talking about this is that whilst public support for tackling climate change might still be strong, most people after all do still accept the science, the story around net zero has become increasingly fragile. Cynicism about the government's ability to deliver massive public overestimation of the personal costs and a deep distrust of politicians have created the perfect storm. The debate has become polarised, trapping the net zero debate between two abstract narratives, the government's grand growth opportunity and the opposition's catastrophic economic burden.

1:24Now joining me for this episode is Ruben Yogaraja, sustainability partner at FES Global and we're going to be delving into what the public really think about clean energy why the current message isn't working and what do we need to do to rebuild public trust and keep our clean energy ambitions on track all of that to come but first a very quick advert break our three free youtube channels on evs and clean tech are funded by our fun-packed test drive-tastic events in Farnborough, London, the South West, the North, Melbourne and Sydney and next up, Everything Electric Farnborough and new for UK viewers.

2:02You can now buy a battery EV and much more at everythingelectric.store. Now, back to the episode. Ruben, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. I am so excited about this conversation and we've been talking before we clicked record and every time you said something interesting, I had to sort of stop myself because I was like, no, no, no, no, we must, must save this for this discussion of the podcast. But for the benefit of our audience, can you kick us off by telling us who you are and what you do? I'm Ruben Yogarajra. I lead the energy and sustainability team at FGS Global. We're a stakeholder strategy firm.

2:39And what that means is we help big companies, big climate groups win the stakeholder support they need to really get things done. So if we working with a car company, we wouldn't really get involved in selling their latest EV, but we would help win investor support for their EV strategy or try and help them shape the government's thinking on the rollout of charging infrastructure to help grow their business and accelerate the energy transition. So when it comes to all things related to climate change and particularly the messaging surrounding that climate change, safe to say you are some of the global experts and very well versed in this particular topic, not least because you've been doing quite a lot of polling of public opinion.

3:22Can you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you've been doing in that regard and why you did it and perhaps who you're using those results for? I think we work with companies and NGOs in the UK, in the US, around the world. And it's been clear for some time that the conversation around climate and clean energy is evolving. And And particularly in the UK, it feels like there's been a big swing, at least in the media conversation. We're in this really interesting position here where you have a populist right-wing party, the Reform Party, that says net zero is the new Brexit. And they're getting a lot of attention for their opposition to climate policy and their opposition to clean energy.

4:04At the same time, you have a Green Party with the new leaders saying there's a silent majority that wants much more climate action in the UK. So we really wanted to dig down and say, what's really going on? Who thinks what? And how can we create the coalitions of support needed to really fast track the energy transition and maintain the widespread support that's needed to get the UK to meet its climate goals? I think that's the thing that we're seeing here is that there is cross party consensus from the general public that climate action is an important and necessary thing. And yet we are also seeing this evolving, very divisive messaging playing out from a political perspective.

4:47and something that we've spoken about before is perhaps this term net zero and why that term in particular might be sort of a really you know a bit of a a term that's helping to drive that debate rather than doing net good should we say um so i wonder if you could share what you know the polls say about the term net zero i think one of the important things that we found it sounds obvious but people haven't really paid attention is that people support what they understand so people are really confident explaining what renewable energy is and they really like it. For a term like net zero, less than half the public say they're confident explaining it and they're probably lying.

5:28In practice, it's quite a complicated term. How big should the net be? What is the net? There's a whole carbon removals conversation that hasn't happened. Net zero 2050 is a very different prospect to Net Zero 2070. It's become weaponised by opponents who want to present the whole climate agenda as the work of an out-of-touch elite that doesn't care about what everyday people think. So it's a term that isn't well understood, but it has been weaponised in that way. And actually, what it doesn't do is tell you what you get at the end. Net zero doesn't explain we have a stable climate. It doesn't say we have a much faster growing economy with cleaner air and more jobs.

6:15And by defining what we're doing in the negative, we start on the back foot. When I picture net zero, I picture the graph that we've all seen of how to get our emissions from where they are today compared to 1990 levels to net zero. And I once met this really interesting game developer and she was developing a game that would exist within your home and the whole idea was that you wanted to kind of reduce your energy bills and to reduce your energy bills it had this little game showing like a fish swimming or something like that and she said the problem with the game was that from a psychology perspective you don't want to do things that go down it always has this sense of burden or some kind of personal sacrifice and games that are successful are around doing more and increasing your points.

7:05So there's also like the psychological aspect that doing something that is diminishing something doesn't really resonate with how we're motivated as human beings. And that perhaps is also a bit of a, I think something that we need to get into into this discussion is that there's this huge perception of what net zero means in terms of, or misconceptions rather of what net zero means in terms of that, that, you know, what we need to do as individuals rather than the opportunity which it presents. So before we get into that, I just want to see what some of your other data tells us around, okay, we've got this term net zero that's being highly politicized and weaponized, but also there are varying degrees of different opinions around timelines, perceptions of the science, perception of the viability even of reaching net zero.

7:52So I wonder if you could share some of the really interesting and meaty nuggets that you've got. I think let's start with the good news. The UK is not in the position the US is in. So by and large, the public accept the science, though there is some evidence that that's eroding. It's still very strong support. And more people support net zero than oppose it. If you look at the figures from YouGov last week, it's about two to one. So really strong foundations there. But when you look beneath the surface there are some really clear warning lights that that support for net zero is not translating into people being willing to pay or for support for big parts of this or the last government's policy agenda and there are a few things that are playing into that.

8:41The first and I think most important is this perception of cost and when it arrives. Now if you ask people is net zero a threat they say yes. If you ask them is it affecting your life today, or when will it affect your life, around half the country will say now or in the next five years. But that doesn't really explain why they're acting. So we asked, when do you think the physical impacts of climate change will affect your standard of living? And actually half the country said 10, 20 years or never. So the negative impacts of climate change in terms of the standard of living seem very far away and the costs seem immediate.

9:20And from the research that we've done, we think those costs are being vastly overestimated. And people don't see the wider benefits of switching to clean energy or taking up EVs or using a heat pump in their homes. And that comes together to make a very difficult scenario to get things done. I suppose that's the thing, because this is not a unique thing to climate change, the energy transition. The future is always this abstract thing. It hasn't happened. And we kind of, I mean, what's the phrase? We overestimate short-term impact and massively underestimate longer-term views of things. And that I think is the perfect kind of melting pot, perhaps, for the clean energy transition discussion as well.

10:01But when it comes to, because all of this is becoming much more fraught and filled with tension. But prior to perhaps the last year or so, you know, we did have this whole conversation around how the clean energy transition was going to be a huge growth opportunity. And that message was peddled by both people on the left and right, or wherever they sit on the political spectrum. And that has been something that has shifted fairly recently. So I suppose, why is it? Well, maybe the first question, is net zero, is the clean energy transition actually good for the economy? It's a really great question.

10:40I think a lot of us see the changes in technology, energy, the falling cost of renewable energy, the fact that EVs and heat pumps are more efficient than their traditional counterparts. And we see that this transition is a huge potential economic gain. It really can boost efficiency. And beyond that, as the world goes through this transition, there'll be new markets opened up and there's a huge growth opportunity to supply those markets. However, we're in this difficult situation right now where we're kind of in the mid-transition. We have two energy systems, one fossil fuel powered and one renewable, that are both significant.

11:18They both need maintenance and neither is big enough yet to meet all our needs. So we're in this messy middle where the costs are high and we haven't seen the full benefits yet. But I'd go back to one simple point on the economics that I think is getting lost. People don't feel that climate change today is costing them money. So there's a story out this morning saying that the hotter summer cost Europe 43 billion euros. That's the equivalent of around 100 euros a person. It's having a real impact, but people don't see that. They don't associate their higher food bills, their higher insurance bills with climate change.

11:59And that's part of the problem when people think of the economics. I think from my, I can't believe I'm sharing this, but this is where my brain has gone. But I think about how weird the weather is. And actually, I'm someone who's very sensitive to temperature. And I would say that my personal cost, or my personal experience that's most tangible to me, the cost of climate is how many different types of coat I need to own to live in the UK. hey, like right now it's 18 degrees, but it's also been the most monumental rain. I mean, wind, sorry, we were meant to be doing this podcast in person. I couldn't get to London because there's been trees falling on the tracks because the wind is so wild.

12:43And we've had horrific rain over the past week. We've had days that have felt like the peak of summer and then sort of the, you know, deepest, darkest autumn at the same time. That's where this unpredictability sort of manifest itself. And yet, I think, again, we can just forget about that quite quickly. And when you hear a number like 43 billion, that seems so far outside of your daily experience, that it's difficult to connect with that. And I can see how that manifests that all of these things just feel totally abstract. I think that's right. When we looked at the costs, we asked people, how much do you think it will take to get to net zero in the UK?

13:26The average estimate was 28 % of GDP, or 28 % of the national income was the phrase we used, compared to 0.2%, so a 14 ,000 % overestimate. When you dig into it, you can see people respond to the way you describe that number in very different ways. So if you say, hey, getting to net zero is going to cost 320 billion, support collapses. If you say it's 0.2 % of GDP, that feels like a small number and it goes up massively. If you take the middle path and say, hey, it's about£1.30 per person per week, actually support really firms up. The number of people that say, I don't know, drops. That lead that net zero has versus supporters versus opposition really hardens.

14:15So I think there is this task, how do you make it tangible? How do you make it real and get away from some of the bigger, grander numbers that are thrown around? I want to come back to this idea of why we're operating or the impact of operating in the messy middle and how that is potentially threatening the economic opportunity message. And part of that, it seems, comes down to timelines, that we have to peddle this narrative that we need that long-term future and that we need to invest in clean energy but as we know marginal pricing the mechanism that we have here in the UK that determines the cost of electricity that for now remains a problem because we don't have sufficient amounts of clean energy on our grid to ensure that our electricity isn't costed by the price of gas in a lot of cases and so we're not seeing the cost of our electricity come down in a meaningful timeline.

15:08So it becomes this proving ground for people to say, okay, well, it's going to cost us a lot of money and no one's going to feel the benefits. So how can we take the heat out of that messy middle and prevent it becoming this big political hot potato that can be really weaponised? I think it's going to require two quite different things. On the one hand, the cost of living is the public's number one concern when ask them about what's facing the country. There are a lot of ideas out there right now for how you bring down energy prices in the next two or three years, rather than waiting for 2030 when there's a lot more clean energy in the system.

15:49There's going to be a big argument about that, and I think for the average member of the public, a bit like the zonal pricing debate that happened in the UK a few months ago, they're not going to be able to follow the detail or decide this policy is better than that policy. Instead, it's going to come down to vibes. Who is on my side? Who is really acting urgently to make things better for me? That's where both the government and business probably have to take a different approach to communications to show people they're on their side. The populist right has been really effective at tapping into the dissatisfaction with the status quo.

16:25And it's important that people that are in favour of the energy transition show their dissatisfaction too, and that they're really focused on helping immediately and not just on this aspirational long-term goal. But then it's interesting because some of the shorter term measures, for example, better insulation in our homes, those are quick and easy fixes in terms of, you know, from a cost perspective, technically. And the impact of those could be felt very immediately in terms of reducing bills. But would there be value in actually decoupling some of these things from the climate change conversation and accept that these are also good for the planet, but that's a serendipitous outcome?

17:02I think that's exactly right. If you look at some of what the GB Energy has done with local councils, that's involved giving out warm homes packs to people to really kind of stop the draft coming in through their doors or put up a secondary glazing film on their windows. And that's really been positioned as A, bringing bills down, and B, when it's come to work on schools and other public buildings, freeing up money for frontline services. And those things just make sense in and of themselves. They're attractive in and of themselves and are a natural starting point when we're thinking about how to build support.

17:39And then I suppose some of those bigger sort of more systemic things, you know, again, would there be value in removing climate change from the conversation entirely? For example, thinking about industrial revival and creating energy here in the UK. Does climate have to feature in that conversation? I don't think it does. One of the problems I think for the last few years is that there hasn't been that vision of why the UK should be such a great place for industry. If you think about it, the UK has a third of Europe's geological storage capacity. So you can have low carbon industry. We have a history in the nuclear industry that means that we should be at the vanguard of the rollout of those technologies.

18:24We have the best offshore wind resources pretty much in Europe. So as the continent thinks about bringing industry home, and whether it's preparing for defence or preparing to retool our cities for the future, we should be the home for those industries. And I think there is a growth story that we need to tell that should be attractive. I think the challenge is that all of the indicators are that the public are incredibly pessimistic right now. And just sharing this very positive long-term view is not going to resonate because people have sort of given up on the idea of the country being able to build anything.

19:03So you've got to be able to walk and chew gum, really show that there's near-term things happening that will make a difference to bills in the next year, two years. three years, whilst beginning to build the credibility of that long-term story. It's not one or the other. Both of them feel they need to belong together. It's such a difficult line to tread, isn't it? Because as you say, and I think this has been an emerging theme from this discussion, how do we make things feel extremely immediate and to allow people to feel positive and optimistic in the very, very short term, whilst also having that long-term view whilst also doing all of that on a backdrop of quite a grumpy nation in which the cost of living is our number one concern and there is this sort of increasing discontent with the fact that some people feel or a lot of people feel that that they're not their budgets are not really understood and that the people who are in charge don't understand what it feels like to be an average person here in this country and so on the one hand we've got this idea that we we need to do those two things simultaneously the short-term delivery and this long-term vision but also we have this challenge of who is driving that message and I interviewed Ed Miliband on the podcast a few months ago I think our audience generally feel pretty positively towards him but you only have to open the telegraph probably every other day to find a pretty negative story about him.

20:31He is a politician and he's also someone who, and I say this in a nice way, is quite easy to caricature and quite an easy person to make fun of, partly because he is so enthusiastic. He has obviously been a key driver of Desnez, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and a lot of our climate change ambitions here in the UK. But people don't trust politicians generally. So does this come down to the individuals we're choosing to push this message? Or actually, should we reframe the types of people, the types of organisations, perhaps, that should be pushing this message? I think in practice, it's going to be both.

21:12Starting with politicians, we did some research over the last few weeks that found that you can asked about the popularity of pretty much any policy on the economy, on immigration, on healthcare, and it becomes less popular when you tell people it was generated by a political party, no matter what that political party is. So the scepticism towards politics is really, really intense. And the country is pretty fractured. There are all of these different groups. They respect different people. They use different vocabulary. And so there isn't going be a one-size-fits-all solution here. It's going to be a matter of different groups taking different messages to different people.

21:54Business certainly has a role there. The government eventually might have a role. Climate groups need to think about who they're communicating to and whether it's just preaching to the converted or they can find new language to reach that wider audience. But it's probably going to be a kaleidoscope of different options. We're often asked, who should be the spokesperson for this? There are only two people that the country trust, David Attenborough and Martin Lewis, and they're probably not going to come together to save the day on this. It's going to have to be a much wider effort involving many more people.

22:32Is that a surveyed fact that the two people who are trusted in the UK are Martin Lewis and David Attenborough? Yeah, that's a well-received fact, because there are very few people that actually everyone's even heard of nowadays if you think about pop music. We're past the days of one song being at number one for 16 weeks and everyone buying it. We live in just a much more fragmented media landscape. And it does raise this question about the role of the individual. We are in mid September now in a couple of months time people will be preparing for their arguments around around the Christmas dinner table and actually how, you know, there are lots that you can do to persuade your Daily Mail or sun reading friends or relatives that this is the right thing to do, but you have to frame it in terms they understand.

23:23And that doesn't mean preaching and it doesn't mean patronising. It means understanding what they're interested in and building from there. I suppose actually it's not even oftentimes what they're interested in, it's what they are concerned about um and certainly we find when we obviously talk a lot about electric vehicles here on on the fully charged show and everything electric show and people don't like hate the concept of an electric vehicle they don't tend to love the idea of change or something feeling imposed on them and it becomes a much more constructive conversation if you can understand motivation and fear for people 100 i mean if you look at electric cars um our figures suggest around half the country don't know that their running costs are cheaper, much cheaper than their petrol cars.

24:12Then you have the anxiety about, are there enough charging stations on top of that? Then maybe a higher upfront purchase cost. There's a lot of education that is needed and people are still getting to grips with what is this technology, is it better, is it for me. The analogy I like to draw is with air fryers. Three years ago, no one knew what an air fryer was and now everyone's got one. Can we do the same with electric cars by just making them a normal thing? Talking about what you love about them, driving your mates around in them. It feels like there's a lot of very practical things that could be done to push that forward, some of which you guys are doing by offering test drives.

24:54we've seen some really incredible things um so for example here in oxford the council runs this thing where you can just go and try plugging one in and that might sound like a really basic thing and i'm sure there are so many people listening to that this podcast thinking what a patronizing thing to do but i don't think it is because if you observe people at a charger for the first time people do not enjoy feeling like an idiot and chargers look slightly different and sometimes like the writing is really low down sometimes it's high up sometimes you put the charger in first sometimes you tap your card first people don't enjoy feeling silly and I think it's always important to have grace in that situation to allow people an opportunity to fail or like to mess up in a totally safe environment and that's what I think those kinds of initiatives really offer and the test drives as well we see you know it's it's a very valuable way for people to have first-hand experience and to ask the expert the question rather than have to do their own research as well.

25:55I also think that climate change and the energy transition has felt very dowdy for a long time, very earnest. When you look at the new generation of electric cars, particularly those being developed in China, they're cool. They're being developed as consumer electronics with the kind of crazy features that you wouldn't expect. So the idea that you can charge an electric car in five minutes, that it has all these other features, I think a part of repositioning climate from being this earnest sacrifice, saying actually electrifying the economy is a great economic opportunity, but it's also going to give you some cool stuff.

26:35i think so i'm going to come back to this idea of of earnestness and sacrifice because i think this comes you know is attached to this idea of using the right data to talk to the right people in the right way but before we do and we started to touch on this slightly earlier i want to talk about the opportunity that's presented locally because we've also spoken about how so many of these things can feel abstract and sort of out of touch. And whilst we've seen the net zero terminology become highly politicized and vulnerable to being weaponized as well, actually, when you start to look at what's happening on the local level, where people can see these things happening in their own community, the clean energy transition is having a different kind of success.

27:18And I wonder what your views are and how we leverage local activity to keep driving this conversation. I think it's a really good question. One of the things that we found and one of the surprises was how few people think jobs are coming to their area. Fewer than one in 10 feel that the transition to net zero will bring jobs to their area. There is a missing piece here about what are those jobs and can I see them and are they available to me? I think the government missed a trick when it announced its clean power mission by not alongside it saying, we're going to have a green jobs mission and train half a million, a million sparkies, electricians, electrical engineers, AI experts, whatever it is to deliver that.

28:10Here's where you can start getting that training and doing those jobs. In the meantime, there's a lot being done by local developers and I think as people see change around them they become more comfortable you know there's different studies around the world that say once people see their neighbours getting solar on their roofs they want it too it just feels like a normal thing you do and and making it part of the everyday I think is a really important part of this. It's so interesting and I am you're so right why didn't Clean Power 2030 have that Clean Jobs 2030 component to it as well because even as someone you know I'm reasonably informed in this topic and I think about Clean Power 2030 and I think of big industrial size generation you know huge wind farms huge solar farms I don't necessarily connect it to how many heat pumps do we need to deploy do we have the right people to you know install those heat pumps is there any kind of upgrade of training that's required from current trades people to to facilitate that transition and if I'm thinking that as someone who like lives and roots us every day then I'm sure the majority of the population also think the same that is certainly a missed opportunity um okay so just to kind of recap on some of the things that we've touched on so far we've spoken about connecting this long-term optimistic future to shorter term action and making things feel less abstract and more real whilst doing this on a backdrop of a grumpy, very sceptical society that doesn't hold much regard or trust for elected leaders in the government.

29:53We've also spoken about the fact that net zero as a term in itself is perhaps not a good one, not least because it gives this idea of like, A, what is it? But B, it sort of conjures up this image of sacrifice. There's an earnestness to it. It's scientific. It doesn't connect to your everyday life. And we've spoken about the fact that actually the facts that we're leading with, the numbers that we're leading with, they can be framed, they can be the same number, or at least they can mean the same thing, but communicated slightly differently and resonate with people as a result. And lastly, we've spoken about the fact that actually, we're not just, we can't just choose one person as the mouthpiece for this, because our media landscape is so fractured, our political views are so fractured, and how we consume those messages is also extremely fractured.