The problem with Net Zero isn’t the ambition, the science, or the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It’s the branding.
Net Zero is a scientifically meaningful target, but it is a poor proposition for the future we all need to create. To illustrate why, just decouple the words: ‘Net’ belongs to the language of accounting; ‘Zero’ suggests absence, reduction and restraint. It tells us what we must stop doing, rather than what we might gain.
Examining Net Zero through this brand strategy lens helps explain why the energy transition has increasingly been framed as something we have to endure rather than something we want to embrace.
And this matters, because words matter.
In branding, we know that words do more than describe an idea. They influence how we perceive an idea. The right brand name can make something feel familiar, desirable and progressive. The wrong one can make an otherwise compelling proposition feel complicated, remote or unachievable.
The same principle applies here.
We have a Net Zero branding problem
This isn't a new observation. There is now a growing body of work arguing that the language around the energy transition needs to change.
The UK Parliament's Energy Security and Net Zero Committee has gone further, arguing that ‘Net Zero’ has lost much of its positive association and can act as a ‘lightning rod’ for opposition to climate action. Other research has found that people respond more readily to tangible benefits such as lower costs, energy security, jobs and healthier communities than to abstract targets.
So, the argument that we need to communicate Net Zero better is becoming increasingly accepted. But perhaps we should go further.
Moving from Net Zero to progress with a purpose
Politicians have allowed (and some even have encouraged) ‘Net Zero’ to be associated with cost, constraint, regulation and sacrifice. Critics blame it for slowing economic growth, inflating living costs and imposing unnecessary regulations. Yet the same energy transition story could be turned on its head to focus on innovation, energy security, industrial renewal and economic growth.
The same future. A very different proposition.
This is not a choice between progress and conservation. It is about making progress that serves both people and the planet.
The narrative then changes:
From cost to investment.
From sacrifice to opportunity.
From preserving the present to improving the future.
From sustainability as an obligation to progress with purpose.
A new narrative cannot manufacture benefits that don't exist. Nor can clever language compensate for poor policy, unfair costs or technologies that fail to deliver. So the branding objective is not to disguise reality, but to describe the whole of it: the challenges we must address, the natural world we must protect, and the better future we have the opportunity to create.
Some technologies need a new narrative, too
If Net Zero needs a new narrative, perhaps some of the technologies needed to deliver it need repositioning, too.
Consider nuclear power.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima left a profoundly negative legacy. The safety, security, waste and cost questions surrounding nuclear should not be dismissed or rebranded away.
But history has a habit of becoming shorthand.
All too often, ‘nuclear’ still evokes accidents and radiation risks before it suggests reliable, low-carbon electricity. Nuclear is not risk-free, and its safety, waste and cost challenges must be addressed, but the International Energy Agency argues that achieving global net zero without nuclear power – and its reliable, low-emissions electricity to complement renewables – would be much harder.
The same challenge applies, in different ways, to solar, wind (refuting Trump’s ‘windmills’ rhetoric, for example), batteries, grids, hydrogen, carbon capture and electrified transport.
These are not simply technologies supporting a climate target; they are vital components of the new economy’s infrastructure.
Progress describes a future
To move the narrative forward and create a proposition about progress, we need to describe more than a technically correct but emotionally empty endpoint. The proposition must convey the wider benefits, positioning energy transition not only as an environmental programme, but an opportunity for economic and industrial renewal.
A new narrative must survive a deeply polarised political climate and move the debate from ‘You need to change’ to ‘We have an opportunity to build something better’. As ‘Net Zero’ has proved, people rarely rally behind a technical target; they rally behind motivating ideas of progress.
Reframing the energy transition as an economic opportunity, rather than simply an environmental imperative, would be a good place to start. President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act offers one example of this approach, linking climate objectives to investment, manufacturing and economic growth.
So, to get the goal of a Net Zero world back on track, we don’t just need the technologies to build it.
We need the right proposition to make people want to build it.
Peter Matthews
Founder & CEO
Thank you to Hans Strand for allowing us to use his photograph of Disko Bay, Greenland for this article.
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