Hello, everyone, and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. I’d like to acknowledge that we’re meeting on the Traditional Lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and future. The series presents 100 visionary Australians who are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum, and before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up until the 1960s. So, it’s fitting that in this Powerhouse Museum, we shift our focus forward to the solutions to climate change. My name is Marian Wilkinson and I’ve written and broadcast many stories about climate change. My latest book, The Carbon Club, describes the fraught political battles over our climate policy. Throughout these battles, Professor Frank Jotzo has been a clear, intelligent voice, reminding Australians to keep our focus on what really matters, how to cut greenhouse gas emissions in time to save our planet. Frank Jotzo is a professor of environmental and climate change economics at [Australian] National University at the Crawford School of Public Policy. He directs the Centre for Climate and Energy Policy and is also head of energy with the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions. He leads research on the economics of the energy transition and policies on how we can do it. He’s advised governments both in Australia and overseas, along with businesses and international agencies. In recent years, Frank has been a lead author doing vital work with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Please join me in welcoming Frank Jotzo. Frank, you have spent a long time researching how the world can avoid dangerous climate change by getting to net zero emissions by 2050. That ambitious target is now just 27 years away, and that’s less than the term of many Australian home loans. What do you think are our chances of making net zero in time?

Marian, our chances are really high to achieve this. The Australian economy is very greenhouse gas emissions-intensive, in part because of our heavy reliance on coal, traditionally, and coal-fired power stations like this building used to be. But we are also extremely rich in the alternatives, in the clean energy alternatives. We’re one of the places in the world where you can expand wind and solar at an almost infinite scale and at relatively low costs. And that’s the future of our energy system. That’s the future of our industrial system as well. And we actually benefit from the fact that the old system in Australia is relatively old. We haven’t built many of these traditional fossil fuel installations in recent years and in fact recent decades. And the old kit is ageing and so we can transition relatively quickly. And of course, we won’t be at zero emissions in Australia by 2050. There’s no way. But we also have tremendous opportunities to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — sequester negative emissions, we call that — carbon dioxide removal, and that can make up for the remaining emissions that will inevitably be part of the system.

Well, Frank, I have always admired your dogged optimism over the years about our future. And I was wondering, do you think you were influenced by your upbringing in Germany when as a teenager you saw dramatic change, change for the better with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War?

That is a really interesting question, Marian. And so, you know, every once in a while, we see or even experience really, really major change. Major change that you might not even expect it could happen, right? And that looks really, really scary at the time. That looks perhaps like a problem that is so large that it can’t be solved. And then when you look back at it, there’s usually a resolution for it, right? It’s crunchy. It’s difficult. Things don’t always go to plan. Certainly, don’t go to plan. Sometimes don’t really go well in all respects. But the outcome is oftentimes much better than you might expect when the thing first happened. And yes, German reunification, fall of the wall, the fall really of Eastern European regimes — all of that at the time looked firstly like something that would not happen within my generation. And I was a young person then. And secondly, when it did happen, it looked like something of such scale and tremendous difficulty that it might throw the German economy into recession for decades to come. It might dramatically lower living standards across the country, all of that. None of these bleak kind of visions actually eventuated. It wasn’t easy. It was a hard road for that country. But certainly, the outcome is one that is probably in many ways much better than most people expected at the time. And certainly, I’m optimistic in that regard. Also, regarding the greenhouse gas challenge.

Well, you didn’t begin your climate change journey until you came to Australia and a lot of people would have thought, ‘Wow, leaving Berlin in the 90s to come to Canberra’. How did that happen?

Well, it’s love that brought me to Australia and then I quickly fell in love with the country as well. I came to Canberra actually to study at the ANU. It was the go-to place, still is the go-to place in terms of studying the economies of South East Asia, which was my primary interest at that point. And then the Kyoto Protocol was signed that year that I was studying there for my Master’s and that really got me hooked on climate change.

I was going to ask you about that because there were many people of your generation who were really inspired by Kyoto, and that was really the landmark United Nations climate change conference back in 1997. Why do you think it had such a motivating effect on you and some of your colleagues?

Well, when you take an economic view of world affairs, then you would typically estimate that questions of global coordination about a long-term problem are nearly impossible to solve, like climate change. Because the old argument Australia constitutes 1.5% of global emissions and hence it’s not really in Australia’s interest to do anything about it. The Kyoto Protocol was the first tangible effort to actually forge a treaty among nations to address this problem, this global externality together. And that’s just tremendous to see for an economist that, despite the inherent adverse incentives for every single country, this can nevertheless be done in the sphere of international politics. And so, from that, of course, flow on all sorts of difficult processes of coordination, of backtracking, of sidetracking, of trying to avoid, but also the realisation of opportunities that can come with that transition.

Well, about a decade later you land a job on the Garnaut Climate Change Review and that was at the time the most important work on climate change really being done in this country. It was led by Professor Ross Garnaut and it examined, amongst other things, the cost that climate change would have for the Australian economy and what to do about it. For you, out of that amazing volume of work, what do you think was the most important message that came out of it?

Well, the Garnaut process indeed was really the defining piece of analysis at the time, when we had the first federal government that was taking the climate change issue seriously, and in fact made it a centrepiece of the agenda. The Garnaut Review really painted a holistic and very, very rich picture of the challenge and of the many different elements that a solution could have for Australia. What stood out for me at the time already was the mindset of possibility. And so, in contrast to many kind of government reports, the Garnaut Review took a perspective of, how can we do this? and took a very long-term perspective as well, and didn’t get caught up in the status quo. So, this wasn’t a marginal analysis, wasn’t an analysis of, okay, so what are a few small things that we can do between 2008 and 2013? No, it asked the question, ‘How can Australia get to the point of being a very low emissions economy and one that successfully deals with climate change impacts by the year 2040? By the year 2050? What does that mean for the country and what does that mean for our economic prosperity?

So, it was really sweeping in its vision. But sadly, it also was drowned out in the subsequent decade by all the partisan fighting in Australian politics. You said to me once that you thought the Prime Minister of the day, Kevin Rudd, had made a fundamental mistake by wanting a more technocratic solution and there wasn’t enough effort to bring the people with him. What did you mean by that? What went wrong, do you think?

And Marian, of course, you’re one of the people who knows all of this better than most in this country. My interpretation of part of what happened at the time, under the Rudd government, was that there was a political determination made that this issue was best dealt [with] high level statements on the one hand — such as, you know, Prime Minister statement at the time of climate change being the greatest challenge facing this generation — coupled with a kind of ‘Don’t worry about the policy, we have this in hand. There’s nothing to see here’ kind of approach to policy. And leaving the policymaking really to the technocratic system, the government departments, the research sphere, of course of which the universities are part of, but not really. There was a missing middle layer in terms of bringing Australians as a whole along in understanding and embracing the particular changes that addressing climate change will mean and would mean at the time. And so, you had ministers on television saying, ‘Don’t worry about the details of this, it’ll work out. You will not be significantly worse off’. And that then of course, led to a situation where many people felt that they didn’t really understand what was going on. And that opened, in my interpretation, the opportunity for the political opposition. And also, to the opposition among the business community to say, well, if you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it, which is usually a very successful political strategy, unfortunately.

During these difficult years you kept writing, you kept teaching, but you also did something very important. You began working with the UN advisory body on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that’s the body that informs world leaders about where the climate science and climate policy is going. Now, you worked on the 2014 report, I think that was your first one. It turned out to be an incredibly important report in what came later. Why do you think that report was so important?

The 2014 report really was sort of a call to arms in terms of the severity of the problem in front of us. And I think that really was very instrumental at the time to drive home to governments that this is an existential challenge. And that temperature rise needs to be kept to below 2°C, which then subsequently, of course, turned into the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement, which is really the fundamental international agreement that to this day, and into the future, drives global climate change action. So, the report– and, you know, I mean, it’s not the IPCC creating the scientific insight, it’s the IPCC assessing the state of knowledge and channelling and funnelling and validating the scientific insight and elevating the insights on the global stage. So, to my mind, that was really the key impact of the 2014 report, coupled with an element of, ‘we can still do this’. The assessment of all the opportunities as to how emissions can be reduced and can be reduced rapidly in order for us still to make it through that closing window.

Last year, there was an election of a new government in 2022. You and some of your IPCC colleagues have said that our current target by the new government isn’t actually as ambitious as it needs to be. Why is that? Why aren’t we, in your view, doing enough today?

Yes. So, Marian, let’s step back a little bit on ambition, actually. And this comes back to the Paris Agreement, because the main thing the Paris Agreement has done is to have all countries in the world signed up to a process that firstly requires countries to put forward national emissions targets and sets out a clear expectation that these national emissions targets will be ratcheted up over time. So, it’s a one-way street of greater ambition. And secondly, signs up all countries to a long-term ambition of staying below 2°C, which, you know, in rough terms can be translated to net zero emissions sometime by the middle of the century. And so, once these things are agreed, they actually become part of how we run world affairs and they do get reflected in cabinet processes and the like all over the world. And importantly, they get reflected on boards of major companies as well. This is taken seriously. And so, that shapes expectations and that shapes political outcomes. And, you know, I mean, fair acknowledgement, even the previous government under Prime Minister Morrison put in place a net zero emissions target for Australia. And it’s very important that that side of politics did that, because that means absolute durability for that emissions target. Now 2030 target — 43% now greatly strengthens from 28% earlier on. And so, that is a very steep reduction, of course. We’re about halfway there. Most of the reductions achieved come from reduced land use change and forestry emissions, some from the electricity sector that’s going really rapidly. But you know, to limit global temperature rise to below 2°C with a view to 1.5°C, we need to see extremely strong action everywhere and very, very rapidly. And that action needs to happen at first at an explicitly stronger pace in which developed countries, and in particular in the countries that have higher emissions levels than anyone else. And so, Australia is among the richest countries in the world and among the most emissions-intensive economies in the world. And so, obviously for the world to be on this trajectory, Australia needs to be on a very steeply decreasing emissions trajectory, more steeply than under the present targets. And, you know, 2030 target, that’s really only seven years away now. So, we’re now setting our sights onto a 2035 emissions target. And that’s where some of the crunchy decisions will need to be taken.

The federal government, the federal minister says he wants the national power grid to be able to be 82% renewable by 2030. That’s in seven years’ time. Now we’ve had a chorus of businesspeople, of even government advisors saying, we won’t make that — it’s not going to happen. Now you’ve looked at all this. What do you think?

We could make it. But, you know, not to underestimate just how big a thing that is, right? We have a traditionally coal-dominated electricity supply sector. Coal is plentiful and cheap, that’s the reason. Coal is still, you know, fossil fuels, still about two-thirds of the power mix now–

In 2023?

Yes, we’re talking about going from over 60% to 20% in a space of seven years. This is possible. And this is possible because we can ramp up wind and solar as well as store it to pump hydro and batteries very, very rapidly and at reasonable cost. And we will be building a very cheap and reliable and almost completely clean energy system of the future. It’s gorgeous, right? But it requires an enormous effort, and it requires enormous investments over the next decade, decade-and-a-half. And if we want to get this done by 2030, it requires these kinds of really, really huge efforts right now. And a lot has happened, a lot of investment has been made. And we need to have even ramped that up from that. And that means new transmission lines, and that means new energy storage facilities. That means a lot more wind and solar. That means speeding up planning and approval processes. That means being absolutely sure that private investors are not spooked by regulatory or market uncertainty. A lot of things need to come together to achieve that outcome. We see state governments supporting this in various ways. We see the federal government now with various approaches to provide additional support where state governments are perhaps not fully on top of supporting this. But no, it’s not a given. It’s not a done thing. And really, you know, I mean, there needs to be increasing awareness in society, overall, just how big this task is.

And I wanted to come back to something you said before. You said a decade ago, or more than a decade ago, the Rudd government failed to bring the country with him. And I’m wondering whether this is happening now a bit again, that we’re seeing history repeat itself because you have households being buffeted by big power price hikes. You’re seeing farmers upset and protesting about new transmission lines being built on their land, where they feel they haven’t been consulted. Are we again in the situation of not being able to rally the country behind this?

It’s easy when it looks like there’s no downsides, right? And there’s been easy wins in Australia on greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Many aspects of the coal-to-renewable transition kind of run themselves and are economically profitable and all the rest of it. As we go deeper in reducing emissions, you know, sort of below 50% kind of thing, we’re getting to the more difficult things, especially if we want to do it fast. If we have the time to just wait it out and let that transition unfold very gradually into 2050s, 2060s then there’d be very little pain. But as you speed it up, you get to the more difficult decisions. And we need to be conscious that not all of this will be easy. And you mentioned farmers, for example, and you mentioned local communities. And one of the largest concerns is, of course, about those parts of the country where the fossil fuel industries, both coal mining, gas extraction and using those fossil fuels, for example, in chemical production and so forth. The big concern is about job losses and declining industries in these places and in these communities. And what that will do in terms of, you know, slowing that transition. The focus more and more is on, like you say, buffeting that transition. And the key to my mind really is absolutely to look at alternative economic futures for those regions and for those communities. And thankfully, in contrast to many, many other countries, we have a very clear opportunity and also a clear vision as to what that economic future in the regions can be. And very much of that revolves around renewable energy-based industries.

I want to briefly talk about transport in this country and the transition there. You flagged that Australia’s transport emissions aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re rising rather than falling. We’ve been very slow in rolling out the infrastructure, not only for electric vehicles, small electric vehicles, but also even for things like public transport and electric buses. Why are we so slow on this?

Well, we are a heavily road transport-dependent economy, both for goods and personal transport. And so, road expansion has been the default mode of catering for population increase, really. And of course, you know, we’ve had a succession of governments who very unfortunately, I think in my view, used the issue of car-based mobility as a point of political distinction and now almost sort of culture war-type territory over electric cars versus combustion cars. I think we’re very clearly past this. And, you know, the road is open to electrification of road transport. So, we’ve seen enormously fast uptake of electric cars now, even though the upfront capital costs are still higher. You know, the total lifetime cost of running an electric car is probably just about on par now for most models. And we’re seeing a really rapid embrace of that very broadly, it‘s very positive development. There’ll be some policy measures that will actually increase supply of electric cars into Australia. That’s a good thing. But of course, then what we’ve done is we’ve greatly improved the environmental balance of road transport in that way. We will see battery electric also for transport, even for trucks down the road. But we haven’t solved the problems of congestion and all of the other negative externality of road-based transport. We need a much better train system in this country ultimately to also displace many of these short-haul flights that are so big in Australia. So, there is quite a fundamental revolution that’s actually needed in our transport systems, as in many other systems, and that requires a lot of upfront investment. This won’t be cheap, but it’ll be the foundation of a better transport system that’ll serve us well for the next hundred years.

You have in the past written a lot about hydrogen. You understand where this debate is going. I wanted to raise it with you because, as you know, at one point people thought hydrogen would be the fuel for the new vehicles. There was a lot of talk, even by Ross Garnaut, about hydrogen being huge industry for Australia. And that it could replace gas and oil. That doesn’t seem to be happening now. There seems to be much less optimism about the role that green hydrogen can play. As someone who’s looked at this a lot, what do you think? Where are we going with this idea of hydrogen becoming the big alternative fuel?

Yes, so hydrogen will have a role, an important role in the future decarbonised world energy and industrial system, full stop. We know that. That remains. The question is, how large will that role be? And in particular, what role will hydrogen play in transport? And just to step back a little, hydrogen is a beautiful thing because it can at the point of use, it is completely clean. There’s no exhaust emissions of any kind, and it can be produced in a totally clean way as well through electrolysis. There’s other production methods currently. Most of global hydrogen produced is a very dirty fuel because it’s derived from coal, but it can be produced from renewable energy and thereby be a completely carbon-free production chain. The trouble is you lose a lot of the primary energy invested into it on the road from electricity to hydrogen and from hydrogen back to electricity or other forms of usable energy. That’s the difficulty. And so, you’re kind of starting behind the curve in the competition with renewable energy use directly. And so the idea is, can you produce hydrogen in locations where renewable energy successively cheap and then use it in applications where renewable energy is not so cheap. For the transport system in particular, competition is with batteries, because batteries, of course, are very highly efficient. You know, the low energy loss is 10% or less. And so, the idea was always that batteries might be either too expensive or too heavy to use in larger vehicles like trucks. We’re now coming to the point where batteries are becoming so cheap that they’re winning the race over hydrogen, even for larger, heavier vehicles. And so, there you see your hydrogen market shrinking a little, but the largest share of hydrogen use in a future economy, as we see it now, will be in industry. There are industrial processes that require molecular energy input and steel production, iron ore refining is chief among them. Fertiliser production is among them. Various industrial products that you currently use gas as an input, can use hydrogen as an alternative input. And these are all opportunities for hydrogen to play an important role in global decarbonisation. There are also other energy carriers that aren’t hydrogen, but that will also rely on clean energy and provide those opportunities. Ammonia, methanol, synthetic fuels, including synthetic fuels for aircraft. This is absolutely not just a theoretical possibility, but something that’s already being done. And it’s a question of bringing down the cost of these energy chemical production systems to rival the costs of fossil fuels. And then we are where we need to be.

Well, that brings me to, I suppose, the most recent IPCC report that you worked on. And what that report told us is the clock is ticking for all this to happen. I think the UN secretary general called it the climate change timebomb. So, there’s a limited time in which this can happen. You worked on that report and when it came out, you said in one of your interviews, I think what the report tells us is that we’re up the proverbial creek. That you, the optimist, said we still have a paddle. What did you mean by that?

Yes, and I borrowed that quote from Jim Skea one of the co-chairs of a working group on mitigation. That’s it, right. The message really is, we are already seeing massive impacts from climate change. We know this is absolutely going to get worse. You know, 1.5°C is basically gone, even though it’s a worthwhile ambition. It’s not one that we will meet in terms of staying below 1.5°C. So, we are absolutely up that creek, but it’s not like we’re helpless. We can still steer our trajectory on that and perhaps we’re even able to paddle back a little way into a better direction. And this is precisely the message that reflects reality and the message that needs to reach the broader community and politicians, in particular. It’s a dire situation, but not a hopeless one. And in fact, in terms of that paddle, that paddle has got larger over the years because we now know that we can reduce emissions more quickly and at lower cost than we thought just seven years ago at the time of the last IPCC assessment. And the reason for that is technological progress. The crucial clean energy technologies have all reduced in their cost by factors that we would not have imagined. Solar energy, solar panels — 10 times cheaper than 12 years ago. Lithium batteries at price points now that five years ago we thought would never, ever be achieved. And this opens opportunities for relatively low-cost new energy systems that are carbon free that we did not imagine would be available to us in the 2020s. Same for transport, for example. You know, when we worked on a decarbonisation pathways study in 2014 and we put out what at the time was a really radical picture of decarbonisation in Australia and many people thought we had gone crazy, right? We look at some of these assumptions in that 2014 report. We thought that things would happen in particular in transport in the 2030s, maybe early 2040s that we now see unfolding the 2020s already. So, now the picture of what we can do is continually improving. And so, that’s really the fundamental source of realistic optimism.

I wanted to ask you about young people today. We’re seeing a lot of young people taking to direct action. We’re seeing them sometimes take very risky action as a protest against fossil fuels. When you ask them why they say that they’re angry, they’re frustrated. At the same time, governments are clamping down on these protests. But I wonder, you have students this age. Are they angry and frustrated that we’re not going fast enough and that they do fear that we have lost the 1.5 ambition?

Oh, absolutely. So, there’s a great feeling of loss, really. But on the positive side of the ledger, there’s a great energy for change. And so, I think it’s fair to say that a really sizeable share of our young generation do not accept that the system overall can, would or should continue in its present form in terms of heavy on material consumption, kind of stuck in its old ways and this kind of thing. The assumption in that generation that’s coming up is that we will change things because we must. And I mean, to me, that is a very, very powerful driver of change. And I think we can look back at several kind of youth movements through the ages that at the time, perhaps to the older generation, looked like a folly or, you know, something that is perhaps shooting for the stars in a totally unrealistic way. And then that 20, 30 years down the track is actually what is mainstream and what is the new way of doing things. In terms of our students. I mean, we see a tremendous increase in interest in topics around climate change, environmental sustainability and the broad energy transition, industrial transition. And, you know, by and large, the outlook of our students, in particular and postgraduate programs where I teach, is a sombre one, but also one of seeking the opportunities. And I think, you know, the concern that we see among younger people will by and large translate into stronger action down the track.

Well, one of the things that is driving that protest, I think, is partly what is happening with the fossil fuel companies, because especially since the war in Ukraine, this seems to be an upsurge in the fossil fuels, profits and exploration, for new fields of development. And it appears in this rush to, if you like, exploit the energy crisis, they’re losing sight of the Paris Agreement. And I think it was just last week Exxon, biggest oil company in the world, came out and said that society won’t accept the degradation of its standard of living required to meet net zero. When you hear things like that, does that give you pause that maybe this is going to be even harder than you think?

Well, degradation of standards of living to achieve net zero is bulldust. So, this is a self-interested interpretation or statement by companies that are fully invested into the old way of doing things. And we’ve seen this, of course. I mean you’ve researched up, Marian, on many occasions, the way that industries that have their backs against the wall fight in this transition. It’s of course, entirely unsurprising that you get these kinds of statements. And, you know, these companies also have a lot of money to spend on lobbying campaigns, on social media, on keeping politicians on their side and all the rest of it. So, we’re seeing a transition of a significant part of the world economy. And, you know, there’s many, many trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars of value on the line and corporations will fight tooth and nail in this. So, you get these kinds of perspectives out there and, you know, no one said it was going to be easy. In terms of fossil fuel research– okay, so with Russia’s war on the Ukraine, mainly what we’re seeing is a shift in global trade patterns and in a resulting way, a slight shift in global extraction patterns for fossil fuels. Because essentially what’s happening is a stop to gas and oil exports from Russia to Western Europe. That’s the main thing that’s happening, Russia will attempt to redirect its fossil fuel exports to South Asia, to East Asia. But that takes time because pipelines need to be built, ports need to be built. In the meantime, you’ve got less Russian oil and gas in world markets and that needs to be backfilled by other suppliers, right? That’s why we have elevated fossil fuel prices and that’s why we’re getting a little bit of a sort of a straw fire in terms of elevated fossil fuel extraction elsewhere. But in a global picture, it’s not like we’re using more fossil fuels as a result of the of Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s just a redirection of where that fossil fuel comes from. In the longer term, this war that’s going on in Europe will drive a faster move to renewable energy. There’s no doubt about that. And the reason for that is a greater, much, much greater emphasis on energy supply security. Western Europe, as a large energy importer, is asking very serious questions about their dependence on fossil fuel imports, questions they should have asked themselves 10, 20 years ago they’re asking themselves now, and the obvious answer is to rely much more on locally produced energy. If you’re not sitting on a wealth of fossil fuel reserves, then locally produced energy means renewables or nuclear, which are clean. Okay, that’s the answer. This goes for many other energy importers as well. And so, this will hasten investment in renewable energy technology and deployment, and this will make renewable energy technologies once again cheaper than they were even before. So, that’s the big long-term effect. In terms of opening new oil and gas fields and so forth, it’s clear to the global fossil fuel industry that this is the end game. The end game for coal is coming first, but for oil and gas is coming later. And we’re talking about an end game that will play out over decades. Nevertheless, this is a declining trajectory and in that declining trajectory, everyone’s incentive is to exploit the resources that they have as quickly as possible in order to make the money now, rather than not make the money in the future when you can’t make that money anymore. So, we’re seeing that rush to market in a sense, to enjoy it while it lasts.

Will they lose money, in your view, by doing this?

So, new fossil fuel extraction and use projects with long payback periods on capital are at risk of being stranded, are at risk of turning out to be loss-making enterprises depending on the speed of transition. So, any company investing heavily in long lived fossil fuel assets infrastructure is taking a big gamble with their shareholders’ money on the climate transition to take place more slowly than it should and can.

Well, you’ve been advising on these issues for a long time. I wonder now in 2023, if you could get Australia’s state and federal ministers in one of your lecture rooms, what do you think would be the main advice you would give them today?

The main advice would be to look at the long-term economic prosperity of this country. Develop a clear vision for what our economy looks like in a very positive way in the 2040s, in the 2050s, and then take a firm view with a really clear strategy of how we’re going to get there, without too much delay and in a way that brings the Australian public along. And really, I think where that then takes people, politicians, governments will be [able] to create a very inclusive conversation about this, put on the table all the difficulties, all of the opportunities and turn it from what has been sort of a game of political football, right? Stop doing that and make it a national endeavour. Most politicians are looking for opportunities for nation building. This is the big opportunity for nation building. Let’s do this together and be cognisant of the fact that we will actually be spending a lot of money. But we’re not going to spend it on stuff that is here today and gone tomorrow we will be spending it on the infrastructure, on the systems that will build the next wave of what will keep this country running for 100 years, easily. And that is now that we’ve got to make these investments. And it’s really– you know, you can take it back to a generational question, is now — the generation that’s in charge, with all the big decisions — is also the generation that got some of these big decisions a bit wrong early on? And the younger people are pointing to that generation saying, why are you leaving us this mess? The opportunity is now to actually build a clean energy and clean transport and clean industry infrastructure that this next generation will benefit from for a very long time to come.

Well, Frank Jotzo, it has been a pleasure talking to you. And can I ask you to join me in a round of applause for Frank? To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.