Green but Not Heard: Why Net Zero Is a Marketing Problem (and How to Fix It)

The energy transition isn’t stalled by technology. It’s stalled by marketing. For two decades we’ve treated net zero as an engineering problem to solve, a policy lever to pull, or a moral argument to win. None of it has worked at the scale we need. The technology exists. The policy is getting there. And yet most households still haven’t made the switch. Mat Moakes argues the reason is hiding in plain sight: the energy transition is a marketing problem, and we’ve been doing it badly. We’ve segmented the market lazily, targeted the wrong people, and positioned the products in ways that turn off the audiences who would benefit most. Drawing on more than a decade inside the energy industry and on behavioural science, brand strategy and consumer psychology, Green But Not Heard reframes net zero not as a moral campaign but as a product launch on a national scale. It is practical, commercial, dryly funny in places, and politically neutral by design: a manual, not a manifesto. The future of net zero will be won or lost at the kitchen table or in the local pub, not in the lab or in parliament.