Welcome, everyone, to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you for joining us. Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which the museum is situated, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. I would also like to welcome any First Nations people listening in or joining us today and pay my respects to their Elders. Today is number 89 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time: climate change. We’re recording live today in the Boiler House 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 into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. My name is Yaara Bou Melhem. I’m a journalist and documentary film director and often make public interest films that are at the intersection of art and science. Heidi Lee is a former architect with a background in environmental science who was appointed chief executive of think tank Beyond Zero Emissions in 2020. Lee is an expert in sustainable buildings and urban design, passionate about low-emission, locally made materials that can diversify and strengthen the local manufacturing sector. It is so great to have you join us today. Please join me in welcoming Heidi. Let’s talk a little bit about your background and how you came to be at Beyond Zero Emissions. You’re an architect, a designer and now the CEO of a think tank aiming to accelerate Australia to a prosperous zero emissions future. Where does this drive for sustainability and advocating for the environment come from?

For me, the opportunity to work in climate is just so intrinsically logical and rational. Like it comes from such a clear background in an engineering kind of focus on architecture and design. I was always as a small child from a very young age in the world, drawing what I saw and trying to understand how it worked and how to make it a better place. Like: How could we make this building or this school or this, you know? — I grew up on the coast of Central Queensland. Like: How could we make the erosion less impactful and to maintain the things we loved? So, it was not just being curious and observant, but then also having this, like: Well, I could do something about this. And if I did, what would that be? So, I think that for me, working on climate just always felt like the most logical thing to be doing when it comes to caring about humans, to be caring about communities and to be caring about place.

I think that’s a really good segue into Beyond Zero Emissions. Tell us about how that think tank operates and what it is that it does.

So, Beyond Zero Emissions is, I think, what we call an independent think tank. And we say that because so often research organisations are connected either to a university or to a political party or into a particular industry group, and independence means we’re not. So, we’re funded almost 100% by philanthropy and a little bit sometimes by a little bit of bespoke consulting work. But our mandate is to create research and technology and engineering solutions that rapidly decarbonise the economy. So, we’ve been working on ten-year-get-to-zero-emissions plans for almost 20 years now. So, it’s a really important goal to set and it’s a really important thing to continue to innovate around because the urgency is still here, but we’re not there yet. I got into this organisation as a volunteer. We have a citizen science-type model for how we do the work we do, and that means that we are able to put out through our networks these ideas around: Could we power all of our homes, our transport, our every building, every factory in the country with 100% renewable energy? And put out that idea: Could we? If you think we could, come and be part of that. And then so a lot of what we do is find –

So, you put it out to the public.

Right. Through our networks. Absolutely. So, we might I think in 2005 and 2006 – I wasn’t part of it then – but it was this story around how a bunch of engineers got together around a kitchen table, like drawn in by the idea of creating this plan to get all of the coal and gas power stations onto solar and wind. That idea was the thing that drew them together. They were volunteering. It wasn’t an organisation at the time. There was no seed funding to like create a structure and to get things happening. This was just ideas-driven. It was very, very purposeful. Smart people around a kitchen table creating the solution and then the word getting out that that was a thing that was happening and then attracting the kind of structure and support that helps that idea turn into a plan and a report. And, you know, it was launched by Malcolm Turnbull in the Sydney Town Hall in 2010. That was the first plan that Beyond Zero Emissions launched. But it came from that idea that smart people could get together to solve problems that individually none of us could. And that’s what I’m talking about when I’m saying it’s a citizen science-type model. Because even though our staff team is now sitting between 15 and 20 for the last few years, our staff still engage with volunteers, engage with experts from across so many sectors of our economy to create solutions that otherwise they’re not being solved, not at the scale that they need to and not at the speed that we need to either.

And what are the challenges that you’re focusing on at Beyond Zero Emissions?

So, I think to bridge between that first report being released in 2010 about energy, we had a theory of change at the time that what the world needed, what was slowing us down, was that we didn’t have the answers. So great, let’s get smart people together and make the answers. And so, we made a solution to get to zero emissions in energy. Then we wrote a plan for buildings. We wrote one for the land use sector, for transport for – and then things get kind of complicated, right? Because then you start to get to the edge of like where we really have legitimately quite commercialised technologies that can be deployed at scale to get things done. So, the work that we’re doing now is lifting off the piece of work from 2018 and 2019 where we started to look at industry and we started to look at materials that are made in our factories, we start to look at industrial processes and that’s where you don’t get scale, like you don’t get millions of electric arc furnaces being deployed in Australia, you get a few dozen. Like you are really looking for a few very large machines, a few very large bits of equipment that need to be swapped over to make these things work. So, we wrote a report called Electrifying Industry. We launched that, this is before I was on staff, obviously, and when I reached out to be on Zero Emissions in 2019, this was the project that I was given. It was: Hey, we’ve just released a report about how we could electrify every factory and all these common manufacturing processes. Can you go out and find a few places, a few factories where we could make a zero-carbon factory. We could implement some of this and we could study what happens. And, I don’t know, it sounded just doable and fun. So, I thought I could do that a couple of days a week.

If you get the big boys off first, then all the other smaller fry will follow.

And they’re already trading with each other. So, why not also coordinate to manage like peak energy demand or to be able to manage energy in the form of heat? In Europe, you plumb steam pipes between factories and locations. You put it under entire cities to be able to preheat and share heat because it’s so precious to be able to like, create warmth for homes. You do that in industrial scales as well. You just preheat steam coming into factories. And so much of the energy, the gas and electricity they’re using today is to create heat, so we can do that. So, we’ve been working on this program for a couple of years now, which is a policy program that looks at solving industrial decarbonisation at a precinct scale. So, taking clean industry clusters as the planning module to create energy solutions or renewable energy, the bits of kit that you need to replace to be able to electrify existing manufacturers, the planning that you need to do and the scale you could do it at so that those manufacturers can actually support a whole ecosystem around them and all of that. They’re already codependent – get them all moving. And these happen in communities that are currently all of the jobs in that region for many decades have been off the back of fossil fuels. We already have those communities ready to go. We have really strong workforces, a lot of talent, a lot of knowhow, a lot of skill. We can do this. This is – these are already innovation hubs. We just need to move that innovation focus from the coal sector and the gas sector into renewable powered industries and modern manufacturing. This is an enormous opportunity for Australia and that’s really been the focus of the last couple of years of work with Beyond Zero Emissions off the back of this report that said: You could just put an induction heater in there, or you could electrify all of those complicated things. Heat pumps, industrial heat pumps: they’re a great idea. Why aren’t they here? Well, the answer is a national program of renewable energy industrial precincts that could see Australia become this renewable energy superpower that we hear so much about.

Let’s tease this out a little bit more because this is something that you’re really passionate about. Tell us what exactly these renewable energy industrial precincts are. How many do you think that we could have around Australia and how could they contribute to the transition to clean energy?

So, renewable energy industrial precincts are the answer to that question of how to decarbonise heavy industry and how to quickly retire coal-fired power stations and gas-fired power stations and replace it with renewables. Renewable energy industrial precincts are clusters of manufacturers that are coordinating on their energy needs. I’m using energy instead of electricity because it’s like: it’s electricity, it’s heat. It might be green hydrogen. There might be other industrial processes that they can share to get efficiencies and optimisation. It’s taking a whole cluster and enabling, providing the policy framework, providing the communications platforms, providing the information-sharing platforms so that they can work together to decarbonise, because we know that that makes it faster and more efficient than not doing it. When we took a look at some of the preconditions for getting a precinct to successfully decarbonise quickly, we looked at things like logistics and where we’ve got roads and ports and freight opportunities –

So, existing infrastructure.

Existing infrastructure. How can we use what we’ve already got, and how can we make the most of this? How can this be part of the future? There are those preconditions for success, and a whole lot of them are really big bits of infrastructure that we’ve invested enormously in over many decades. And we have to see people as part of that solution as well. We looked firstly at like a national program level. Where would be the first places that you would go? And we nominated based on these criteria. We nominated 14 first-mover locations all around Australia. Every state and territory except the ACT. But it doesn’t mean that this model couldn’t work at a smaller scale. It just means that when we’re looking at the idea of decarbonising manufacturing through the lens of rapidly reducing emissions, you go with the biggest emitters first. You go with the largest facilities, and you start with the biggest challenges because that’s where the biggest wins are.

Can you go through some of the major precincts that you’re focusing on at the moment?

So, Beyond Zero Emissions, we work closely with two communities at the moment: one based around Newcastle. So, this is the Hunter where we’ve got the Port of Newcastle, the largest coal export terminal in the world, with a decarbonisation plan. Independently there was a full stop in there. There’s the largest coal export terminal in the world and has a decarbonisation plan.

And it’s a huge coal mining region. It’s the biggest in New South Wales.

It’s enormous. That means that we’ve got some of the most skilled workers, some of the most robust modern bits of infrastructure and logistics planning. We have incredible skills. We’ve got a CSIRO base. We’ve got the University of Newcastle, University of New South Wales. We’ve got an enormous amount of talent in that region too, to innovate, to create solutions. And also, we’ve got some incredible things already happening on the ground. So, the Hunter is one of the places. And the other one is Gladstone in Central Queensland, which is not exactly where I grew up, but it’s 80 km down the road. So, you know, basically next door to where I grew up. And these two places we saw as the most challenging places to get moving. But we have been working there for a little while now and I think that there’s already so many seeds of opportunity that are really starting to shine through from us and many other organisations working together to make this shift happen.

I know that in the community of the Hunter Valley that there is a lot of talk about the transition from coal, what happens when we decarbonise and all the coal mines go offline and the power stations go offline, as I know that the Liddell Power Station has. What sort of conversations are you having with people, families and people who’ve been employed or are employed in these industries, about how those skills can be transferable. What exactly is transferable – like, what sort of jobs can people get?

I love this question because I feel like when we live in the city and we consume national media or city media, we listen to a really narrow band of voices around what these issues actually are. And it’s completely different when you go to Newcastle and the Upper Hunter and you walk the streets and you sit in cafes and you have conversations with people. A lot of our work is not ‘grassroots’ grassroots, so we don’t do broad ‘community’ community engagement. We’re working with community organisations – we’re sort of grass tops. It’s like organisations that already exist –

That’s a good way to put it.

Thank you very much. Grass tops, not grass roots. Other organisations do that so much better – they can actually facilitate establishing the groups that we can then deal with. Because we’re a pretty small organisation. We don’t hear the same level of scepticism about the energy transition happening that you might hear about in the national media. We hear people very aware that this is going to happen, that we export most of our coal and our gas. So, coal for the Hunter; gas for Central Queensland is a big deal. Coal and gas, but gas is a big deal up there. That’s already happening. People on the street, if you work in the mines, you know what the global market price for a tonne of coal is – every day, you can tell me that. I can’t tell you what that is today because I’m a consumer of national media and I’m here in Sydney. But people on the street can tell you what those things are worth. And they can also tell you the last time that that market crashed, and it was worth next to nothing. They know because they live this, that the ups and downs of that export market already are oscillating quicker than they used to and they are already reading the tea-leaves. They know that mines are closing. They see people shedding workers slowly, not just the big lay-offs that you hear about in the national news. We already know this is happening. Communities already know what they’re looking for is what comes next. And that’s where conversations that we’re facilitating come to play, because not enough conversations are happening about ‘what next’, or if they are coming about ‘what next’ they’re not an optimistic vision of the future. We can get really, really out-of-step ideas like: everyone is going to work in tourism or they’re going to be baristas. And you hear that – that cynicism that comes through when you don’t have a credible answer and you don’t use actual skills. So, when you look at people who work in or jobs that you have in mines at the moment, they’re things like drivers: driving trucks, not even the trucks that are – I’m really into the technology side of things – they’re all automated.

All automated.

Yes. But you still you still need that designed and given. So, you’ve got technology workers, you’ve got engineers, because they are still physical things. At some point they need to be built, maintained. So, it’s all of those support industries around the mines that involve people employed directly by mining companies, but it’s the mining ecosystem around them that supplies products into it, that supplies the trucks and the equipment. Mines are already electrifying vehicles, huge – they don’t look like vehicles, they look like moving buildings. Like these enormous bits of equipment that are moving rocks around in our mines, and making them electric is really important. Our mines have some of the highest safety standards in the world, like it’s a huge focus on safety and precision. We already have that. It’s about moving away from the fossil fuel side of it, those industries that pollute, and moving into industries that don’t, that actually, you know, focusing on hard-rock mining and critical minerals and transition minerals and things that we need there to be able to make batteries that perform well in these extreme conditions that Australia has, with a very high heat, very dusty work environments on mine sites. We’re still going to need a whole lot of stuff from Australia and from Australia’s regions. We can use the skills that we already have in those workers almost directly across. And that’s what some of our research showed with some of these future manufacturing –

It did show that almost half, more than half of the new jobs needed would come from the existing skill set in mining. So, technicians, trades, machinery operators, drivers and labourers. I mean, these are all transferable skills. And how do people in the community react when you say: Well, actually your job is needed in the clean energy transition?

When you go, and I’m thinking now of a conversation that I had in in Gladstone with one of the local members up there, members of parliament and, yeah, they said to me: Look, I’ll believe it when I see it on SEEK.

Oh that’s interesting. On the jobseeker website.

Yeah. So, well, first of all, you can say: Well there are jobs on SEEK, that right now we’re trying to – you know there’s this company in Gladstone that’s employing and scaling up as quickly as they can. They’re called Alpha HPA. They make this high-quality alumina. We need that in batteries and all of this technology that we need to scale up enormously. They’re part of that solution and they’ve got jobs on SEEK right now. What it tells us, though, is that it is not enough to know that the transition is happening. You have to know where you are going. And that’s what our reports and our publications contribute into the conversation in regional Australia. It’s profiling renewable energy industrial precinct in the Hunter. Let’s talk about the billions of dollars of new revenue and the tens of thousands of jobs that that’s going to bring over the next decades. Let’s do that for Gladstone as well and look at the industries and the products that are unique, that Gladstone is uniquely well positioned to be able to produce. And let’s scale those up to meet the demand for it within Australia, within domestic markets, but also for exports. That’s where you can start to peg people’s ambition around the upper limits of what’s possible. So, it stops being a question of whether or not there’s going to be a job for you that’s listed on SEEK and starts to be a question of: Well, how many jobs and can we get the workforce and how quickly can we bring them across? And that’s the challenge that we’re seeing right now is workforce constraints. We don’t have enough people to do the jobs that are needed to be able to build renewable energy transmission lines and do this manufacturing work. We actually need the labour force that’s currently deployed elsewhere to move across more quickly. So, it’s a really, really important role for government, especially government, to be able to do this planning so that we can balance what we’ve got and put it in areas where it needs to be focused right now to be able to reduce emissions as quickly as we can.

So, it’s almost like there isn’t a jobs deficit. It’s more like there’s a labour shortage.

There’s a labour shortage and I would say there’s a lack of focus. We need to be laser-focused on moving the largest emitters to zero emissions first. We need to be able to not just bring on new renewable energy but retire fossil fuel burning across power generation in industrial sites, in manufacturing sites, like we actually need to turn all of that off – yesterday or preferably a couple of decades ago. Like we need to be transitioning now, not to nothing, but we need to be moving to a future that’s powered by 100% renewables, one where Australia has a diverse ecosystem of manufacturing and making and recycling. And we can do that if we apply ourselves, our physical resources, our human power to the right things and our creativity – apply that to the right things right now; we can make that transition.

And are there any successful examples or case studies from here or around the world of these renewable energy industrial precincts?

So, we’ve used to talk about overseas models. You can go to Germany or you can go to Northern Europe. You can see very modern manufacturing precincts because it’s a very rational approach to manufacturing. We’re also seeing that in Australia. In Kwinana, in Western Australia, they have an industrial cluster there that is already collaborating to be able to manage their resources, their energy needs, logistics requirements and plan together as a cluster of quite diverse businesses for a long-term future through an energy decarbonisation as well.

Because it’s smart for business as well.

It’s really smart for business. It’s efficient. Like, just get really logical about this. You need less stuff. You need less energy. It’s less cost. You can invest that saving elsewhere around productivity. It’s pure business rationalism here. There happens to be an upside that it’s really great for communities that are currently facing some really big challenges around what they’re going to be doing in the next ten years because it’s not going to look like what they did for the last ten or 20. That’s the upside.

Another major policy change that Beyond Zero Emissions has been advocating or researching about is a major upgrade of the electricity network. Can you tell us about this vision for a national super grid and why it’s important?

I love the idea of a national super grid. Everything super right? Like superpower, super grid, everything’s going to be super. A super grid – it’s a policy recommendation and it’s about a five-year intensive investment in Australia’s poles and wires and batteries and energy generation. So, what we saw in the current way that Australia plans for energy for the future, we have a couple of different energy markets. We have a couple of different sets of not connected grids. So, the east coast is largely connected, the national electricity market. And then we have other grids as well. And then we have a whole lot of Australians who are not connected into the grid at all. This national super grid, it’s a headline. But what it’s actually talking about is moving the investment for front-ending that investment in the grid upgrade to prioritise, first of all, those renewable energy industrial precincts that I was talking about. So, those locations you actually need to prioritise coordinated investments. So, building larger transmission lines into those places first so that we can get those clusters going, because once those manufacturing clusters are going, we’re able to make more of those products that we need to deploy across everything else. And some of the products that we’re going to make in renewable energy industrial precincts are going to go into modernising the grid that feeds our cities and our suburbs, and that’s called distributed energy resources or virtual power plants. That takes not just computer programming, it also takes bits of technology, bits of kit. We need smart meters in everyone’s home. We need distributed batteries either in homes and businesses or at a neighbourhood scale. We need to be able to plan energy at that level. And the National Supergrid policy proposal is about providing that upfront planning for a very modern grid. But we need to be able to bring together, not just making sure that we’ve got enough energy for what we do today, but bring in those assumptions and align them with other policy mandates around reducing the amount of energy that we currently waste in our buildings and urban infrastructure, about making sure that we have enough energy, electricity coming in to be able to power cars and trucks and buses that are going to be all electric. It’s about making sure that those industrial clusters – that we’re not just decarbonising the big boys. We’re building enough infrastructure today that will enable that to become and grow to be a thriving industrial cluster that can be a part of this modern economy. So, it’s really taking that overall view of having everything electric, and then planning the grid to make that happen.

And your report, Beyond Zero Emissions report says that perhaps 81% of emissions reductions could be achievable by 2030 if this plan is implemented. Can you tell us some of the sources of renewable energy that will feed this grid? What are the different types of clean technologies that you’re talking about, that you’re thinking about?

So, the types of energy that feeds a modern grid, it’s everything. And so, think about some of the examples that I gave earlier: around a whole lot of energy that we use at the moment is just for heating, right – heating and cooling homes. So, when you start to make for homes and businesses like air and steam and water. So, think about a modern and efficient grid: we’re using heat for the sake of heat. So, it means being able to, if you have a very efficient home, you don’t need a lot of energy to heat and cool the air inside it. That’s a nice one to be able to localise that. You’ll be able to use solar energy distributed across rooftops. We’ll be able to use large wind farms that can be a part of a stationary energy or that grid-connected energy system. We still need that. We still need large-scale solar and wind. We need offshore wind. But to be able to balance the grid, we also hear a lot about the ways that we are moving from a burn coal or gas – burn coal mostly, 24/7 – to be able to provide a steady amount of energy into the grid. We hear about when you move to sun and wind, you’ve got variability. So, the role that batteries and pumped hydro and other types of energy balancing and storage plays is much more important than it has been to date in a fossil fuel-powered electricity grid. So, the rise of those technologies, different types of batteries – like you might have a battery that only lasts for a couple of hours and that performs a role in the grid. But we also need to be able to have pumped hydro and long-form energy storage where you can go for days or weeks where – of overcast or smog or fire smoke. So, we need to be able to take that performance outcome, that we want reliable energy all the time for the things that matter, but we need to meet that with a much more diverse set of energy generation because it’s coming from sun and wind, primarily, and with energy balancing things. And that’s a really important role for those small- and medium-term storage batteries – different battery solutions and batteries, and not just lithium batteries. We hear about some of the upper limits that we’re reaching around the potential for our critical minerals globally to be able to meet the global battery demand. But there are many, many other types of batteries, and some of that – it’s about being able to store energy as heat as well. In 2010, Beyond Zero Emissions wrote the stationary energy plan and was all about replacing coal and gas with concentrating solar thermal plants with molten salt storage batteries, which at that time PV or photovoltaic technology, which is prolific today and very cheap, but it wasn’t prolific or cheap back then. So, this seemed like – this technology that was used in Spain, in America, in California was seen as, you know, that’s a viable alternative. You’ll have a field of mirrors that will catch the sunlight. They will all focus that sunlight as heat onto this tower and that tower will get to enormously high temperatures, melt the salt battery inside it, which will then be able to cool and it will create energy back into – create the steam to turn the turbines, to make the electricity overnight when there’s no sun. So, you’re able to like balance out creating sun because you were using heat the same way it is at the moment: burn coal, boil water, create steam, turn a turbine, melt salt, create steam, turn the turbine, create electricity. So, that was the idea at the time. And it’s one of those technologies that is having a resurgence now. It hasn’t progressed the way that we imagined it might and probably the way it would have if the government had wholesale-adopted this radical plan to fill our electricity networks with fields of mirrors and salt batteries. But it is actually a bespoke technology that is reliable and does work. And that’s a kind of battery that we will see more of that kind of thing, not at the scale we were talking about in 2010, but it has a type of role in the future that we need to think of as part of the solution. It’s more broad than just lithium ion batteries and chemical energy storage. It’s actually about – a whole lot of the time we’re making energy to create heat, the different processes.

And so, how close do you think we are to overcoming those reliability issues when it comes to clean energy in the grid?

I think the biggest thing holding us back right now is policy certainty. If we were to commit to doing this transition, making this move to this shift to clean energy at 100%, if we stopped talking about if and maybe and all the reasons why not, we would actually create a policy environment that would allow enormous amounts of private money to flow into investing in these things. And then we would actually just get on with solving it.

So, the technology’s there. We just need investment and policy certainty.

Policy certainty unlocks the investment that will deploy the technology that already exists. When we wrote our deploy report that 81% emissions reduction by 2030, that’s possible by deploying technology not just into the grid, but through our homes and businesses and factories as well. That technology deployment – we’re running very straight line deployment graphs here. Like we’re not actually – for our work, we’re not factoring in huge learning curves, but others have done those learning curves. So, if we start to look at policy certainty, unlocking investment that unlocks innovation and creativity in a very focused way on some really important problems. So, you don’t just look at how efficient is this battery or this salt tower today, you actually start to see those optimise and you start to see incredible gains in performance and efficiency out of that. So, policy certainty is really a huge unlocker. It’s a huge barrier at the moment, and that unlocks that whole chain of creativity and focused momentum and actually achieving this emissions reduction that is entirely possible right now.

It’s really interesting because there have been some promising wins over the last 12 months, and the change of federal government which is very much committed to solving the climate change issue. Is there a sense in the industries, in organisations you work with that the job is done? Or is there still a sense of urgency to change things?

I think it was really important, I think, for Australia to see a federal and national policy, a national commitment to emissions reduction and to see one with the new government, to see one that was higher than what it had previously been. But the current target is 43% emissions reduction by 2030. Currently, action is around half what it needs to be to achieve that. And our report that 81% emissions reduction, why that was important to us was because an 81% emissions reduction by 2030 is necessary for Australia to be on the IPCC emissions reduction trajectory that sees us on a one-and-a-half degrees of global warming. Now, when we talk about that IPCC scenario, one-and-a-half degrees of global warming, it sounds really mild, but is actually a range that one-and-a-half degrees is an average. It’s a range. It will still see an increase in catastrophic weather events. This is still us committing to substantially changing the climate and locking that in, but it is seen as the best available scenario right now. For us to be on track to do our part in that one-and-a-half-degree scenario, we have to be at 81% emissions reduction by 2030 and our current Federal Government has committed to half that. So, that’s talking about an ambition gap, and we need to see action at a far greater scale than what we have right now. So, this is not just a criticism of government, right? This is actually about government, industry, communities aligning behind that common goal. And how boring and uninspiring is a goal of 81% emissions reduction. That’s why we want to talk about having fantastic jobs in safe environments that make products and services that we need for a modern economy. We want to be able to be inspired to be part of a solution to challenges that are currently impacting all of us. And that inspiration piece, that’s like: Let’s talk about this on the upside. That is where we see the role of Beyond Zero Emissions and all of these incredibly smart volunteers and staff that come together to create this vision of a better future. To localise that, to make that real. That should encourage policymakers and government decision-makers to act and to take those greater steps forward in ambition. And that’s where we see the role of educating people, of exciting them about the technologies and about the different things that we can be doing. Obviously, I’m excited about technology. Other people are really excited about the land use side of things, and there’s a place for all of this to be happening at scale and being done really well in partnership with communities that are impacted the most.

That’s a really lovely note to leave on. Thank you very much. Everyone could you please join me in a round of applause for Heidi. 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.