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. Today is number 61 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. 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. 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 the climate crisis.

Greg Mullins is a firefighter with almost 50 years’ experience and an internationally recognised expert on responding to bushfires and natural disasters. He’s spent over 13 years as commissioner of Fire and Rescue in New South Wales and has worked with firefighting authorities in the US, Canada, France and Spain, as well as studying at the US National Fire Academy. He’s currently chair of the New South Wales Ambulance Service Advisory Board and a councillor at the Climate Council. When Greg retired as State Commissioner of Fire and Rescue in 2017, he immediately rejoined the Rural Fire Brigade, where he first started as a teenage volunteer.

Four years ago, he was on the front lines fighting the Black Summer bushfires that ravaged our country. That year Greg also formed the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, a group of former fire and emergency chiefs from every state and territory. They were deeply worried about the impact climate change was having on extreme weather events that fuel mega bushfires and mega floods. Greg’s memoir, Firestorm: Battling Supercharged Natural Disasters, was published in 2021, and we’re privileged to have him join us today so, welcome. Greg, it seems to me that your extraordinary path in life was forged when you were still a kid. Your dad took you to your first bushfire when you were just 12 years old. That was some sort of baptism by fire, wasn’t it?

Well, yes and no, because where we lived in Terry Hills in the northern suburbs surrounded by National Park, fires were just a part of life. Mum and Dad were true environmentalists. Mum was a schoolteacher. So, we’d go out in the bush, and she’d say, ‘That’s Banksia ericifolia and this is how it grows. And look at cones, that needs fire to make the seeds come out.’ So [we] learnt about the ecology. Dad really knew the bush. He was a volunteer firefighter, had fought fires since he was a teenager. Told me about the January 1939 bushfires when he was about 15 years old. So just sort of soaked it in. So, it was very natural thing, when fires threatened, everyone did their bit. It was a very small community. Everyone helped each other. And I’d sort of been doing things on the side lines out of danger. And this particular day there were no fire trucks available. My brother’s best friend’s house was endangered, and dad said, ‘Jump in. I’ll show you what to do when we get there.’ So, it was really frightening, but I sort of knew what to expect and he talked me through it. And I remember thinking, at 12 years old, I want to be a firefighter when I grow up and never really deviated from that.

Your father, I think, also taught you how to survive a fire. A very important lesson for a volunteer firefighter. It happened when you’re around 18 and in fact, you almost lost your life. What happened that day?

It was a really windy day. There were multiple outbreaks. We tried to hold this fire on a fire trail. It was spotting over the top of us. So big flames throwing sparks onto the side of a hill behind us. We’d go up and try and put those fires out because the objective was to keep the fire that side. And then it got to the point where we’d go up through the bush and we’d have multiple fires behind us, which is really dangerous. We were thinking about, we better pull out. I went down to scout further down the trail and then a fire literally engulfed the truck. Everyone else jumped in the truck and off they drove, and they thought I was with them in the confusion. And I was stuck there on the trail. Fire going across there. I looked behind me it crossed there, and it was about to cross where it was.

And I had to really slow down because I panicked. I was panicking because I thought, this is it, 18 years old, gone, I’m done. And there was a bit of a wheel rut in the trail were in the wet weather months, months before a truck had got bogged, got there and shovelled some sand over my back and the fire went through and I had some burns, a lot of blisters and everything, but I got through it. It was – if I hadn’t listened to my dad, whenever we went into a fire, it was safety first with Dad and that’s what was my approach, still is my approach. You teach people look for where you’re going to turn the truck around if you’re on foot, where’s a cave or a rock or a cleared area or a river that you can – a creek you can jump in. And that’s saved my bacon quite a few times from that early grounding Dad gave me.

I’m sure your mother was not impressed when you got home.

No.

But what kind of surprised me was that after that experience, which would have put a lot of people off, you went and joined up with Fire and Rescue New South Wales. What do you think drove you so hard to become a first responder?

Look, it was about helping people. So, our whole family, you know, I look at my cousins and aunties and uncles and sisters, everyone was in some sort of public service. Mum was a teacher, Dad was with Public Works building schools and colleges, had uni lecturers, had a cousin who was a firefighter, you know, Corrective Services. So, everyone was in public service, and it was just part of our thing was to serve and help. And I knew that I was good at that stuff. And I loved being in the bush. I loved being out helping people. And look, I’ve got to say, you know, I’ve seen some horrible things over the years and been involved in some horrific incidents, car crashes, fires, multiple fatalities. But it’s the saves that sustain you and you think, Wow, I actually saved a life today and there’s nothing better.

But also, natural disasters, floods, storms are very difficult because you clean up afterwards, but fires, you have a fighting chance. You have a fighting chance to pull them up and divert them and save homes, save lives. And that’s, I don’t know, [an] incredible challenge. I find it incredibly interesting. What’s the weather doing, the terrain, the fire fuel? How can we modify this? How can we make people safer?

Well, these days, of course, we know that climate change is challenging our understanding of bushfires and how to contain them. When do you think you first noticed the changes that were happening in our bushfire season?

Well, look, I know exactly when it was. It was the January 1994 bushfires in New South Wales, and I used to talk to Dad every year and say, ‘What do you think the season’s going to do dad?’ And he’d pick it every year. He’d say, ‘We’ll get some fires, but they won’t be too bad. We’ll get a few days that might give us a bit of a challenge, but it’s not so bad.’ And in 1993 we’re getting some early fires, but then it rained in November and that was to me, there’s a change in the weather in eastern New South Wales in October-November most years where you get storms and it gets very humid, very wet. And it depends, it can be bang, you get a few storms, then it goes dry again or it stays fairly wet.

And in November 1993 we got really heavy rain and I just thought, Season’s over, we’re right, we’ll be okay. I’m family and my wife and kids went away camping to Barrington Tops. We left on Boxing Day, I think. And yeah, a couple of weeks later I was called back to duty. My leave was cancelled because the state was on fire. And how did this happen? I remember talking to Dad and saying, ‘Did you see that?’ He said, ‘I just didn’t see it coming.’ All the normal indicators weren’t there. That’s when I started studying and I applied for a Churchill Fellowship to go overseas. And then people in France and Spain and Canada and the US were all saying the same thing. They’re saying the fires doesn’t make sense. We’ve got better technologies, better firefighting equipment, better training, more people. But the fires are getting bigger. We’re losing more homes. What gives? And these are early papers on a warming climate, and just a tiny little increase in temperature had thrown the weather systems out.

I think it was the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria that really changed the thinking in Australia about the bushfire season. You were, of course, Commissioner of Fire and Rescue New South Wales at this time. How much did those Victorian Black Saturday fires upend your thinking about what was happening to the bushfire season?

Black Saturday 2009 was the clincher. It proved everything. And why do I say that? There’d been a couple of events prior to that. Firstly, the frequency of major fire seasons was increasing, and the Blue Mountains is a good case study. Instead of 10 years apart, they’re becoming five and six years apart. So, we’re getting major fires closer together, which meant the weather patterns are changing. The weather that produced bad fires was happening more frequently. We had the 2003 Canberra bushfires, which the first recorded fire tornado in the world, about 500 homes were destroyed, four lives were lost. It was just a horrific – the fastest moving bushfire ever recorded. The speed was just frightening, snapped off trees that thick because of down burst from the stratosphere basically. So that’s another story. 2006, a big fire in the Blue Mountains connected with the stratosphere at night. It was theoretically impossible bringing incredible winds to the surface.

So, then 2009 came along. What it resulted in – so 173 people lost their lives in one afternoon. Over 2000 homes were lost. And we had these incredible phenomena called pyro-convective storms. You have lightning storms with no rain that start new fires. You get down bursts and incredibly strong winds. Firefighters don’t have a hope. So, after that, fire agencies nationally licked their wounds and said, ‘What the hell do we do now?’ And so, we added a new fire danger rating of catastrophic, which just meant run away. We can’t deal with this once it gets past extreme. It’s literally off the scale. We realised on those catastrophic days we couldn’t put the fires out. We just had to save lives. Sometimes it was the lives of the firefighters, and we couldn’t get to anyone else, and we had to make sure we got the messages out. So, we had the warning apps so that people got emergency warnings. Watch and act. We never used to do that before because we had enough time to warn communities. But with this extreme weather that we’re experiencing just with about one degree of warming at that stage, we couldn’t handle fires on the worst days anymore.

I want to take you back to when you were still commissioner, and that was after the Black Saturday fires in Victoria. And as you say, the big Canberra fires. You were obviously becoming more and more conscious of the impact on climate change on the fire season. You became a member of the Government of the Days Climate Change Council, the official one, but at the time you learned not to publicly speak out about climate change. Why was that?

Well, I made some comments to the Sydney Morning Herald, and they interviewed me while the fires were still burning down there. And I made the comment that people can’t expect to have a fire truck in every driveway when you’ve got massive fires over such a huge area and then said, ‘With climate change, this is going to get worse. You know, this is what we’re looking at. This fire season shouldn’t have happened. Should have been some years.’ Victoria had a pattern of major fires every 50 years or so you’d get the big ones, and we weren’t ready. We’d had Ash Wednesday, 1983. Should have been about this year. They were thinking about the next big fire or within this decade.

I was told in no uncertain terms by my minister at the time who was a Labor minister, a good person and on board with climate change. Just say pull your head in. Just it’s not your job. This is political. I thought it was about public safety and saving lives, but and I knew where he was coming from. And, you know, his track record was to take it seriously. But he just said, ‘Stay away from it. You’re a public servant. I’ll do the policy stuff. It’s a fraught area. There’s the left and the right of politics and just cease and desist.’ And I thought, Okay.

By the time you step down as fire and rescue chief in 2017, were you convinced that climate change would be a determining factor on our bushfire seasons?

Definitely. There was no question by then, and I was looking at what was happening overseas. Tasmania was another canary in the coal mine. Their big fire seasons were decades apart and they had the last major fires in 1967, Hobart was devastated. Then 2013 they had the Dunalley fires and lost hundreds of homes, and they had catastrophic fire weather for the first time. But then just three years later, 2016, the Highlands were on fire, places that had never burned before. And so, button grass and very fire sensitive communities and scientists had looked at carbon deposits and said, we’ve never had major fires in these areas. They’re always wet and cold. And the west coast rainforests, they were burning. And people said, ‘Oh it’s a one off, it was drought.’ Two years later they were burning again. So, by the time I retired, there was just no question.

And the US was burning again, 2017, they lost 10,000 homes and saying, my God, because I’d worked there on fires, I can’t believe this. A big season used to be about 2000 to 3000 homes have just lost 10,000. And then a year later, they’ve lost 20,000. And again, that was firefighter heaven when I was there, just whistle up more planes, helicopters, fire trucks, crews with hand tools, whatever you needed it was close by and they had a lot of money to throw at the problem and a lot of technology. And they were losing.

Well when you retired, interestingly, you returned to your local volunteer fire brigade but you also did something else that was very courageous, some would say. As a former senior government officer, you decided to join the Independent Climate Council with scientists like Tim Flannery. Why did you take that big step?

They approached me. I knew Professor Lesley Hughes, I’d spoken together with her at some functions, I knew Tim Flannery. And they approached me and had a cup of tea one day and just said look, ‘Would you consider becoming a climate councillor because we need somebody with expertise in bushfires, floods, storms, etc?’ And I jumped at the chance because I’d been thinking, as you do when you retire, you know what’s this all mean? How can I help people? And of course, I went back to being a volunteer firefighter where I’d fought fires with my dad many years before. He was delighted.

But big picture, how could I sound the alarm? Because I was deeply worried about what was coming, and it was dry, 2017, there were some big fires in New South Wales. So, it was a great opportunity to add my voice to people who were warning – we had a government that really didn’t believe climate change was happening, or if they did, they covered it up pretty well. So, you know, there were people in the government who understood it, but it didn’t fit what they were saying, and they just wouldn’t take action. So, I felt a deep need to do something.

Well, you did do something because the following year, I think in early 2019, you recognised it was going to be a devastating fire season that year and you decided to bring former fire chiefs together to try and pressure the government about this crisis. How did that happen? That was also a very big step.

2018 was going to be the big year. So, Tasmania burned, Queensland burned. We had fires in New South Wales very early season, but then it rained and then New South Wales provided firefighters to Queensland and Tasmania. So, we dodged a bullet in New South Wales. Then early 2019, we had fires, we’d had fires in Tathra at a time – south coast of New South Wales – at a time it should have been cold and wet, probably getting wet, no fires, but they lost 69 homes. We had a big fire in the south of Sydney, Holsworthy, in April with gale force westerly winds. Shouldn’t be getting bushfires at that time of year.

So, I started ringing round my former colleagues. I’d been the head of the Peak Council for Fire and Emergency Services for a number of years before I retired, and I had good networks nationally and internationally. So, I rang around former fire chiefs, and I was just blown away. Every single one of them said, ‘Thank God you’ve rung. We were wondering what we could do.’ Two said, ‘We can’t join you because we’re doing government work. Hope you understand we’ve got a bit of a conflict there.’ So very quickly I had a group of 23 former fire and emergency service chiefs from every fire service in Australia. A number of SES agencies, National Parks, Forestry, who all wanted to sound a warning and say, ‘We can’t handle this anymore and we’re not constrained by our former employers, and we don’t care if people say you’re being political, we’re actually doing what we were charged with doing for decades, trying to save lives and property and the environment.’

Well, that year you wrote to the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, warning about the impending crisis. Why did you do that and what was the response?

Look, we were really worried that the coalition government was just treating climate change as a nothing, that it wasn’t happening. They said openly that it has no impact whatsoever on natural disasters, bushfires. We wrote to Anthony Albanese as the Opposition Leader as well and we said after the election whoever is Prime Minister, we’ll be knocking on your door. But Anthony Albanese got straight back to us. Scott Morrison no. After the election we wrote to Prime Minister Morrison again, pleading to speak to him. We were ignored. And it wasn’t until there was media coverage, I think in September, after the fires had destroyed dozens of homes at that stage that we had a phone call because it had been in the media.

How did that meeting go?

Look, it was a joke. It was a tick the box exercise and it was quite bizarre. We had Angus Taylor and David Littleproud, who was Emergency Management Minister and they very nice and nodded. And after we left, within 15 minutes the Prime Minister and Mr Littleproud spoke to the media and said how they’d assured the poor old, retired fire chiefs that the new breed have this and we can go off and go fishing or whatever. And it was just – so it was all set up. We said to Anthony Albanese, he asked to meet us, and we said, no, we won’t meet you until we meet the government ministers. And it was a totally different approach, it had a number of his shadow cabinet there and said, ‘What can we do?’ So, it was very clear to us which side of politics took climate change seriously. And as the fires progressed well, we saw what happened.

The Black Summer bushfires, the whole experience, I think, really convinced Australians, the vast majority of Australians about the urgency of the threat from climate change. I wanted to ask you specifically, you were on the front lines at times fighting some of the biggest fires we’ve seen in this country. I’d like to ask you to explain for ordinary Australians what that’s like, because we’re going to be putting our volunteer firefighters as well as our professional firefighters through this a lot more. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the Grose Valley and the Blue Mountains fires at that time and what it was like to be a firefighter there.

There are just so many experiences during it. So, I’ve seen a lot of fires around the world and thousands and thousands and thousands of different types of fires. And I know my bushfires, I grew up with them. I saw things during that summer that I’d never seen before and I talked about the pyro-convective storms, for example, So the smoke column would turn into a thunderstorm head and then lightning would come out and start new fires 20-30 kms away. But then the winds would hit, you would get a downdraught just like you do in a normal thunderstorm when roofs get ripped off, trees get ripped down. Same thing, but with no rain. And what that did to a fire was just unbelievable. You’re looking at flame heights, probably, you know, getting close to 50, 60, 70, 80 metres high. The heat output from that, I mean, I could calculate it for you, and you can’t get within a couple of hundred metres of a fire like that. The heat output will kill you. The sparks that are given off – this fire was 21st of December 2019, we were up in Blackheath and fighting fires all day and this southerly change came through, gale force, southerly change.

And I just remember this wall of flame behind these houses on Hat Hill Road at Blackheath and thinking, my God, but the sparks, the lawns were catching on fire, fire trucks were catching on fire. So, the only way we could get close to the fire was – I had another firefighter said, ‘Okay, put on our structural gear,’ which is thick for going inside burning buildings and breathing apparatus because we couldn’t get close just because of the ember storm and everything was catching fire around us. So, we’d run down the side of a house, firefighters with hoses were getting beaten back. We had the bushfire fighting, gear on. We’d grab the houses, gear on, knocked down the fire, get someone to go and check inside the house, the roof and everything. Make sure it wasn’t until I go to the next one. That was our night until we ran out of air in our breathing apparatus.

But what I remember thinking, What’s covering my visor? And we had water spray on when we were literally engulfed in flames and the visor would go black. And it was a water spray putting out every little spark was a bit of burning, bit of grass or leaves or vegetation. So, I had black mud at the top, and I had to keep going like that so I could see I got quite ill after that. I got badly dehydrated. We were drinking, drinking, drinking. But I was in bed for a couple of days after that, and I’m pretty fit. I keep fit, but there are a lot of people quite unwell after that night because we – that was a battle, but we saved every house. And so, this is what firefighters are dealing with. So, it used to be a one off. Once a decade you’d get a day or two or three or maybe a couple of weeks, where you would get this sort of weather. Now it’s every five years or so, every five or six years. And in between there’s a lot more bad days. But you’ll get months of this, and the weather is worse than anything that’s measurable. 2019 was the hottest, driest year ever and we had incredible westerly winds. Look at Bureau of Meteorology figures and it just shows, you know, fighting fires in 49-degree heat. I never did that when I was a young, firey, maybe 40.

What you say really underscores two things for me. One, you’ve really got to put the money up to get the equipment to your firefighters for these conditions. The other thing, I guess, is that you also need to protect your firefighters. And when I read your book, something really jumped out at me. You cited a Facebook post from the wife of one of your volunteer firefighter colleagues about the volunteer firefighters like you and her husband. ‘Remember that they mean the world to the ones they leave at home. We reluctantly but graciously let them go, all the while terrified they may pay the ultimate price.’ Now, she’s been through that. Your own wife, Erris has obviously been through that a lot. What do we do about educating our politicians and the public about looking after properly looking after the firefighters?

I had times where I was furious when I listened to some of the political commentary during the fires. It was obvious that some of the politicians waxing lyrical about ‘we’ve always had fires like this’ got their information from a mate at the pub or Wikipedia or something, rather than actually talking to anyone who knew what they were talking about or reading. That was infuriating. They need a big reality check, you know, get out of your offices, actually go and talk to people. Don’t force them to shake your hand, so you get a good photo or whatever. Actually, get out and talk to people.

The big thing that we really need to focus on now, so I’m getting away from that firefighter angle because I think state and territory governments have actually stepped up to the mark and are providing a lot of money. But none of that’s going to make any difference if we just keep warming up the planet and my grandkids will be around towards the end of the century. And my kids, you know as well. And that’s who I’ve got to worry about. And we’re bestowing on them a planet that’s stuffed because politicians worldwide are not taking this seriously enough. We had the IPCC summary report come out last week saying, we’ve got a chance, but it’s a slender one but we need politicians of every ilk in every country in the world to actually take this crisis seriously and wean ourselves off fossil fuels immediately without any delay. And there’s many, many benefits in that. Just the pollution load walking outside, you know, internal combustion cars. We’re breathing in a lot of crap every time we go walking and it causes disease. We cook with gas, nitrous oxide, our houses fill up with nitrous oxide and other gases that give our kids asthma and kill us.

So, we’ve just got to get off this stuff, use renewables, and we have to try to adapt to a more dangerous world, so building standards, houses that will withstand a bushfire long enough for people to shelter and then get out if they can’t escape beforehand, stop building on floodplains because the floods are getting higher and bigger and more destructive. So, the whole adaptation space is not being taken that seriously. And then the subset of that is those wonderful men and women and people out there who actually put their lives on the line to help others, whatever they need they should get in terms of equipment. But don’t think that extra firefighting aircraft or fire trucks, shiny fire trucks or new uniforms are actually going to stop the black summers of the future. We’re going to see more of them. And so, climate action is key.

And you raised the really important point about adaptation and what we can do better. There’s been a whole stack of inquiries since the last round of bushfires, often repeating the same recommendations. But one of the radical things that you have discussed is that we also possibly, probably have to look at relocation for some communities. How big a step do you think that is?

Look, it’s a huge step because it’s so expensive and you remember the 2011 floods in Queensland. I think it was the Lockyer Valley, Grantham Council relocated people up on a hill and most people took advantage of that scheme. But others who didn’t have been flooded since. Now Lismore, the state and federal governments are funding a buyback scheme so that people can relocate to higher ground. That’s crucial, but we now have areas where we know the bushfire threat is so serious that if conditions had been the same back when they put in their building applications decades ago, the answer would have been, ‘No way. You can’t live there. It’s just too dangerous.’

So right across the board we’re going to have to look at either relocating them or having hazard reduced areas that go kilometres to stop ember attack, etc. and stop fires running in. So there’s a major rethink in how we protect communities and a lot of the dialogue during the fires about there wasn’t enough hazard reduction and it’s demonstrably – the evidence says that’s rubbish. Nothing could have stopped these fires. The fires actually sped up. I was at a fire near Wombeyan Caves and an area that had been hazard reduced 12 months earlier. Once the fire hit it, it went faster, and we had to pull out really quickly because of the lighter fuels. So, on the bad days, fires go wherever they want to go. So, hazard reduction the New South Wales Bushfire Inquiry said it’s been about the same for the last 30 years. But you can’t burn everything and if you do you ruin habitats and hey, we’re not the only species on this planet, we’re trying to make sure that we get rid of as many as we can, it appears. By what we’re doing by clearing native forests and you know, you go to Borneo and see what’s happened to orangutan habitat, for example. Just cut it down to farm for palm oil. It’s the lungs of the world are being cut down. So, we’ve really got to look at what we’re doing.

Which raises a pretty obvious question. A lot of the inquiries have also said there needs to be much more cooperation and integration with Indigenous expertise on managing landscape. Is that actually happening, do you think, at official level or are we still way behind on doing this?

Way behind. But yes, Northern Territory there is a lot of engagement, there’s a lot of traditional burning going on in that tropical savanna, but there’s problems there because of introduced grass species, gamba grass that’s changed the whole fire dynamic, but buffel grass down in Alice Springs. But look, northern rivers of New South Wales, Bundjalung people, they’ve preserved a lot of that traditional knowledge. There’s groups in Queensland – there’s groups all over Australia, Western Australia in particular, where they’ve preserved that traditional knowledge of how to burn, when to burn, what to burn.

Where I live, you know, unfortunately when the first fleet arrived, smallpox decimated the Aboriginal population. They were pushed off their land in a lot of areas. And so, there’s traditional groups trying to re-learn the techniques that were lost. And we need to engage with our Indigenous brothers and sisters for a whole lot of reasons. And one of them is they actually knew how to manage Country and assist. But doing it at scale right now is a problem. So, we need a whole lot of different approaches. But if we did engage properly, there would be a lot of healing in many different ways.

Including the healing of Country.

And social construct and Country.

I think that one of the things that does disappoint people a lot is that when they see these horrendous natural disasters that are now increasing in their severity and their frequency, the clean up, the reconstruction afterwards looks slower and slower. Can we get better at that? And should we be involving local communities a lot more in what happens and how we rebuild better?

Yes, look, in some ways fighting the fire or dealing with the flood is, I won’t say the easy bit, but it’s the quickest. So that happens. And the long tail effort is in rehousing people rebuilding communities, getting power back on water, etc., sanitation. So that recovery phase is long tail and very detailed and it’s difficult and it costs a lot of money. And it’s not under the blaze of TV cameras because it’s not towering flames or bridges being washed away. So, you have people up around Lismore now still living in tents. When the floods hit in 2021, when they first hit the first round of floods, people were living in tents on the south coast.

What we’re finding with climate change internationally is compounding disasters and consecutive disasters. So, as you’re just getting on your feet from the last disaster, which happened to be a heat wave and fire, the next one comes, which is rain and flood and storm. And so, it’s like being trapped in an undertow at the beach and getting smashed every time you stand up, the undertow takes your legs out from under you and a wave until you can’t get up again. And look those least able to absorb the impact for example, a lot of our Indigenous communities, a lot of our rural communities, they’re the ones really struggling, and they just don’t have the resources to get back on their feet. So, one hit and they are just about out.

So, this is why we’ve really got to look at – and this is the adaptation space. So, we’ve seen in New South Wales they tried one approach with Resilience New South Wales then went to a reconstruction authority because the Government felt that approach wasn’t working. It was an approach that was never really given a chance because they were just – as soon as the fires finished, there was storms and floods. So, it’s really, really difficult. And this is what adaptation is all about, acknowledging that these things are going to happen more frequently from now on. And we might not have finished the job of getting people with roofs over their heads when the next disaster comes.

Sounds like we need to seriously rethink our budgets too, for the aftermath of these things and as you say, put adaptation to the happening climate change up there as a priority as well.

Well, exactly. And look little thing, but a major thing, because of our electricity grids we string wires up on poles over hundreds of thousands of kilometres to take power to communities. And I was in Batemans Bay on New Year’s Eve, and we lost power. So, we lost water because pumping stations went out, we lost communications because mobile phone towers were knocked out. So, we had no mapping because no one had paper maps for us. There was no refrigeration, so people, their food started to go off. We lost sewerage because pumping stations.

So, all of those fundamental things to a functioning community, we couldn’t talk to people, we couldn’t have a drink, you know, they all got taken out. So, we need to really think about microgrids because stronger winds in more serious storms, fires go through more frequently. They actually take out the poles that carry those wires or trees fall across them and they’re incredibly vulnerable, cost billions to put them underground. So why not have micro-grids powered by wind and solar, which is abundant and then your community remains strong after a hit, you can get back on your feet. So, there’s new thinking needed.

Well, I know a lot of people during the bushfires, and I had friends who were doing this were protecting their own homes, using hoses to hose down their homes. And our former prime minister, Scott Morrison, famously was criticised for saying I don’t hold a hose, but I was so pleased that in your book, Greg, you actually explained to people how to hold a hose when you’re defending your home. So, can you tell us through for this podcast, how do you hold a hose?

Oh it’s interesting. So, you know, I teach a lot of younger firefighters and it’s interesting, I call it garden hosing. I’ll grab the fire hose and go like that –

When you say go like that for our audio listeners.

Spray it around, you know, they move the hand around and a little bit of water goes everywhere, and it does nothing. It evaporates. And so, you actually have to have a nice strong jet, not a spray, and hold it in one place until the fire dies down and then move it on and move it on. And look, if Scott Morrison had been in Australia and put on a helmet and come on my crew, I would have shown him how to do it and he would have been able to say, I hold a hose mate.

On a more serious note, of course. You mentioned the latest IPCC report. We’re talking 2023. And I think that report clarified for a lot of people that it is possible within possibly a decade that we will cross the 1.5-degree threshold, that threshold that is famously said, 1.5 to stay alive. If we do cross that threshold, you obviously could still be alive, but certainly your children and grandchildren will still be alive. How much harder do you think it’s going to be if we do cross that threshold for dealing with these mega disasters?

One study that really chilled me was it estimated on current emissions trajectories worldwide by 2040, the Black Summer, the weather of Black Summer, the hottest, driest year ever 2019 will be average. That will be an average summer in Australia, and by 2060 that will be exceedingly cool. So, the fires by 2040 and certainly by 2060 will be unimaginable and it will change the landscape. A lot of the vegetation we have now will die, won’t be able to regenerate because the fires will be too hot to frequent, and it will kill the seed stocks in the soil, and they won’t be able to survive. So, we’ll see whole environments change the types of animals there lots of animal animals and plants going extinct.

We’re seeing it with mountain ash in our Mount Kosciuszko, places like that. There’s too many fires and they’re dying. They’re dying off. So, we’ll see large scale environmental change. For every degree increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7 per cent more water, which means more violent downpours, flash flooding, storms. The oceans are soaking up most of the additional heat. And what that means is strange thing, actually less cyclones and hurricanes and typhoons. But when they happen, they’re going to be doozies. They’re not going to be category ones and twos, they’re going to be three fours and fives and probably in years to come there will have to be a category six because the wind velocities are getting higher. So, it’s going to be a really dangerous world. We’re at 1.47 degrees in Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology has detailed that in CSIRO –

Our land temperature.

Yes. And we’re again, canary’s in the coal mine of what a rapidly warming world looks like. The rest of the world’s 1.1 degree on average, and that’s 24/7. And so, you’ve got the drying effect, that extra moisture that’s held by the atmosphere, that actually means vapour pressure density. It pulls moisture out of the vegetation and makes it more flammable. So, there’s all these subtle little effects that is changing the whole profile of natural disasters. And we can twiddle our thumbs and say, ‘Oh, we’ll just leave it a lovely life and she’ll be right, and the next generations can deal with it,’ or we can be responsible and moral and human and actually bloody do something about it.

Get the emissions down. At the end of the day, we’ve got to get the emissions down.

Yeah, and if the people in Canberra and Macquarie Street and in Washington DC won’t do it, they need to be voted out. You know, people need to understand this stuff and not think that it’s a lunatic fringe. And the figures say the majority of Australians, for example, I think 82 per cent understand that climate change is real now and Black Summer reset a lot of that thinking and then three years of record flooding. People now know that something is seriously wrong. Use the ballot box to change things.

Your book Firestorm is dedicated to your grandchildren, Aman and Olly, and you say in that dedication, ‘I want you to know I tried my best.’ What do you hope that they’ll think when they read that when they’re older.

I hope that they’ll look back and they’ll read about the fires and what the ex-fire chiefs did when we came together. There’s a whole lot of other groups Farmers for Climate Action, Bushfire Survivors for climate Action. There’s Parents for Climate Action, church groups. So many people screaming out for action. And I look back and I think that’s when it changed, and pop played a bit of a role in that. And we’re proud of him because they’ve stabilised the temperature, they’ve electrified everything. There’s no gas or coal or oil being burnt. Things are starting to calm down and we’re on top of it. That’s what I hope.

That’s a great thought to leave us on. Thanks, Greg. Thanks to all of you for listening. And please join me in giving Greg a round of applause. 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.

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