I remember the chill that went down my spine when I first heard the right-wing billionaires-owned UK media use the phrase “Brexit”. My immediate gut reaction was that they will now definitely win!
I felt that their whole campaign to drag Britain out of the collective democratic institutions of the EU, so that they could avoid its power to environmentally regulate huge corporations in ways and to impose taxes on their tax-haven entities in ways national government’s sovereignty could not, was beautifully and powerfully summed up in that invented simple but powerful word.
ULEZ (the acronym for the Mayor of London’s clean air initiative Ultra Low Emission Zone) was grabbed in a similar way by the right-wing billionaires media as a powerful simple catch-all phrase to sum up their opposition to this “evil tax on hard working drivers”!
I did not have the same reaction to the phrase net-zero, as it slowly crept into use, gradually replacing the term carbon-neutral, which had come under fire from some campaigners, for its association with carbon-offsetting.
Net-zero means that an individual, an organisation or a country has reduced its carbon pollution as far as practical and removed or paid for the removal of the equivalent of any carbon pollution that they were unable to avoid releasing.
However, my alarm bells about the phrase finally went off when the US dark-money funded Global Warming Policy Foundation changed the name of its campaigning arm to “Net Zero Watch”. I thought that the multi-millionaire business-people on the board of GWPF would very unlikely have made such a move, without having first done market testing or had a deep discussion about the thinking behind the phrase.
I came to the conclusion that the phrase was the equivalent of Brexit for the right-wing opponents of climate protection, but with an equivalent negative power, to the positive power Brexit had for them.
I am no psychologist, but there is considerable support in the profession about the psychological power of the choice of words to elicit strong emotions. They can trigger joy or happiness with positive words or negative emotions like anger or frustration with negative language.
Though I do not have the evidence to back it up, my hunch is that the GWPF think that the phrase net-zero may trigger unconscious subconscious opposition to climate action, as the phrase “net zero” echoes phrases like “zero sum game”, “a big fat zero” or “we got zero out of it” etc.
And their allies in the billionairist climate-action-opposing media have gone to town with the phrase transforming it into a pejorative term of abuse and added to their divisive culture war lexicon of phrases around “wokeness”.
So I agree with Chris Stark, the former chief executive of the government’s Climate Change Committee, who said he was intensely relaxed about dropping the phrase for these culture war reasons.
For some time now, I have sought to drop the net-zero phrase in any interviews, talks or articles that I am writing.
My favoured alternatives are “carbon-free” or “carbon pollution free”. I also try to avoid the term emissions in interviews, as it’s more of an obscure scientific term, whereas pollution is a more accessible concept to the person in the street.
A positive example of how a change of word enabled climate campaigners to take the heat out of a billionaire media attack on a campaign, is the London Mayor’s project to roll out a comprehensive network of protected cycle lanes across London.
Boris Johnson called the first major modern European style protected cycle-lanes “Cycle Superhighways”. The media went to town on the phrase and the plans to install them led to vociferous and vitriolic campaigns to block them.
However, the Commissioner for Walking and Cycling appointed by Boris Johnson’s successor as Mayor of London, decided to try and take the heat out of the issue and changed the names to simple Cycleway 1, 2, 3 etc. And miraculously almost over-night, the media vitriol largely disappeared. The power of the phrase Superhighway as a “threat” to the local community had been removed.
So I would urge you, wherever relevant, to consider dropping the phrase “net zero” and adopt the psychologically uplifting phrase “carbon pollution free” instead.
Photo by Katelyn Wamsley on Unsplash
