Last month’s newsletter explored the high levels of support amongst the UK public for environmental action, after the Uxbridge by-election led to a race by politicians to distance themselves from the green agenda.

While the point still stands – the evidence on public opinion is consistent and remarkably clear – it is always worth interrogating attitudes to specific rather than general policy proposals.

Environmental issues are often framed as questions of personal sacrifice, which can drive scepticism as to whether they would be accepted: sure, people might care about climate change, but what will they gave up to fix it? The answer most commentators and politicians seem to arrive at is “not much”.

This a problem. We know that climate mitigation and adaptation will require lifestyle changes. In the context of high inflation, stagnant wages and following a decade of inflation, this is a tough sell.

But is the focus on personal costs even the right question?

Here in my car, I feel safest of all

As much of the recent debate has been triggered by the weaponisation of a supposed “war on motorists”, let’s start with cars.

An Ipsos poll last year found that 71% of the population supported actions to “encourage more people to walk or cycle instead of driving a car”. Yet the exact same proportion said that they personally “need a car to suit their current lifestyle”.

This is a great illustration of the tension between support for environmental policies in general and resistance to change at an individual level. But it also shows how polling can be interpreted in wildly different ways depending on your worldview.

One interpretation of that polling is that people are happy for other people to give up their cars but won’t make the sacrifice themselves. And, so it follows, any government that tries to force commuters into Lycra will be punished at the ballot box.

But another interpretation is that this shows there is massive unmet demand for lower carbon lifestyles. There is a distinction between “needing” to drive and wanting to and individual behaviour will always be shaped by wider factors. For many, being helped to get out of their car would not be a sacrifice, but a liberation – and this applies across other policy areas.

As John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has argued, “in the richest part of the country [London], as people continue to grow more prosperous they are using cars less, and using public transport more”.

Environmentalism can’t just be about what we must give up. It must also be about what we can gain.

The public will change their behaviour – but they expect government to lead

There are some wider points worth making.

The first is that the public’s willingness to bear the costs of tackling climate change is higher than you might think and not meaningfully different from most other policy areas, other than healthcare.

The second is that people are more likely to say they will change their behaviour as consumers if the government act to bring down the up front cost of doing so. This intuitively obvious based on financial incentives. But it also reflects a general understanding that tackling climate change requires collective solutions, driven and supported by the state.

Some really interesting recent research – conducted as a long-term focus group, rather than as an opinion poll – sought to find out how the British public think about Net Zero. What the researchers found was that the public believe the government are the most important actor in the transition but are pessimistic about the level of leadership displayed. In turn, this left participants “frustrated with the heavier burden placed on individuals and less willing to make more expensive or difficult choices to reduce emissions… Inconsistent messaging and a lack of information from the government were seen as barriers that were just as big as insufficient funding.”

Similarly, recent polling has shown that 57% Tory-to-Labour switchers say the Prime Minister has “not gone far enough” on tackling climate change. Or, from More in Common:

“Our polling tells us that far from being sceptical about green issues, voters are nearly five times more likely to say that the government is not doing enough on climate change than say they are doing too much. Even those in the most conservative segments are much more likely to think the Government is not doing enough.”