The power of key phrases to promote brands or to articulate complex political and social issues is well known and often exploited by communications experts and marketing companies.
Phrases such as “white van man”, or “lycra louts” coined in the 1990s, highlighted dangerous driving by delivery drivers and cyclists, and helped prompt safety crackdowns, while Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan took the brand to new heights.
In UK politics the Conservatives’ 1979 election slogan Labour isn’t Working campaign was highly effective – perhaps trumped only by the pro-Brexit slogan “Take Back Control.”
Few would argue that net zero can reach such heights. But communications experts warn that changing it could cause even more confusion.
“Net zero is not a perfect phrase,” said Simon Lewis, former director of corporate affairs at Vodafone, Centrica and NatWest, and ex-communications secretary to the late Queen, who now runs Lewis Advisors, a PR consultancy.
“But it is a term that is now broadly understood by the public to mean an overall and enduring reduction in carbon emissions.
“In communications terms, I think trying to introduce any new terminology now may confuse and dilute the message, which would ultimately be unhelpful.”
A Desnz spokesman said it had commissioned research to see how well people understood the phrase. “Achieving net zero is very much part of the public conversation, with research showing almost 90pc of people are aware of it.”
Those whose research actually prompted the phrase are mounting a powerful defence against ditching it – arguing that changing it would lead to even more confusion.
Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, co-authored the IPCC research that led to the idea of net zero and strongly defends the phrase against attacks from what he calls the climate establishment.
In a lecture last week he said: “The solution is absolutely not, as Chris Stark recently suggested, just to stop talking about net zero altogether and focus on reducing emissions.
“Net zero means what it says. It means we’re actively taking carbon out of the atmosphere and getting rid of it permanently at exactly the same rate that we are still releasing it by burning fossil fuels.
“It would be a great idea to tighten up the definition of net zero so as to exclude the more creative offsetting schemes and carbon accounting wheezes. If we’re going to meet our climate goals, we have to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming before the world stops using fossil fuels. And the only way of doing that is net zero.”
The jargon may be alienating, but the climate lobby is not willing to let go of it just yet.