Don’t say ‘net zero’!

Last week, a cross-party committee of MPs urged the UK government to stop saying ‘net zero’. 

The Energy Security and Net Zero Committee’s report found the term has ‘lost much of its significant positive association’ and now works as ‘a lightning rod for opposition to climate action’. It recommended dropping the phrase from the department’s name and from ministers’ key communications, and talking instead about the benefits people will feel in their own lives. 

The committee’s reasoning is the revealing part. The political consensus that once let the UK lead on climate action has broken down, and rising living costs have left the public looking for something to blame. ‘Net zero’ became that something: one phrase absorbing years of bill rises and price shocks it didn’t cause. The transition didn’t lose public support. The word describing it became the scapegoat. 

That’s a striking admission from Westminster. Anyone working in energy communications will recognise it, because the problem was never the target. It was the language wrapped around it. In effect, the committee has told ministers what good communicators understand too well. Know your audience before you choose your words, not after. 

That lesson applies well beyond Whitehall. Net zero, decarbonisation, transition, consenting, curtailment: these are working terms, built by engineers, policymakers and analysts to describe technical processes precisely. They belong in industry articles, white papers and board reports. They do almost nothing for a household weighing up rising bills, a farmer negotiating a grid connection or a community facing a new substation along the school run. 

A consultation that misses its audience doesn’t just cost goodwill. It costs time, and time costs money. A contested application can add months, sometimes years, to a programme, plus the legal spend of defending an appeal that better engagement upfront might have avoided. 

An onshore wind farm’s connections argument might be airtight in a grid operator’s terms, but it still must survive a village hall meeting where residents want to know about road closures, construction traffic and the view from their kitchen window. Those two conversations use completely different vocabularies. The second one usually decides whether a project gets built without a fight. 

I’ve seen this first-hand in local engagement work with renewable energy developers, including Boralex, where community sentiment shapes the planning conversation as much as the technical case does. 

The approach that works starts long before a single leaflet goes out. Map who’s affected and what mattered to them last time round, not just who’s on the statutory consultee list. Go and listen before a line of copy is written, rather than drafting the reassurance first and hoping it lands. Build a community benefit fund with residents, parish councils and local groups instead of handing it over as a finished offer. 

It can’t sit with the comms team alone. Project managers, planning consultants and construction teams all need to be in that conversation from the outset, working to one consistent story, rather than briefed once the messaging is already agreed. 

Done early, that groundwork tends to surface the specific, local thing people actually care about, whether that’s a road junction, a listed church or a broadband gap, rather than an abstract worry about ‘the transition’. It doesn’t guarantee support, but it does mean the case a developer eventually makes is built on what the audience needs to hear, not on what’s easiest to write. Sometimes that means a change in timing. Sometimes it means talking plainly about traffic management instead of ‘delivering community benefit’.  

The same gap shows up nationally. At our recent roundtable with energy leaders in Glasgow several attendees agreed the sector remains too polarised in public and too fragmented in its lobbying, often approaching government individually rather than making a clear, unified, solutions-led case. Locally and nationally, the root is jargon used where plain explanation was needed. 

The temptation, once a word goes bad, is to reach for a snappier replacement and move on. That shortcut rarely survives contact with the same audience twice. Communities don’t necessarily reject ‘net zero’, or a wind farm, or a grid upgrade. They reject being talked at in language that was never built for them. 

The developers that get this right build audience insight into decisions early and close to the people making the call, rather than leaving it in a sign-off queue while the moment to shape the story passes. 

Got a consultation or planning application coming up? BIG helps energy and infrastructure developers get to know the people their projects affect – who they are, what they care about and what they’ll want answered. From there, we shape stakeholder engagement that speaks to those concerns in plain terms, from the first conversation through to planning and construction. 

If you’d like to talk to BIG about how we can solve your stakeholder communications challenges, please get in touch.