We are broadcasting 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 in the 60s. If you look around the hall, unique industrial features remain, including the imposing chimneys that you entered between and coal cart rail tracks that run under this stage. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus toward the innovations of the net zero revolution. The Powerhouse acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which our museums are situated. We respect their Elders past, present and future and recognise that continuous connection to country. My name is Paddy Manning. My most recent book was called Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us, and I’ll be talking to Ketan Joshi today.

Ketan is an Australian communications consultant, analyst and author specialising in climate and energy issues, now based in Oslo, Norway. He’s the author of Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil Free Future, which examines some of the factors leading to a decade of destruction and inaction on climate change in Australia.

So let’s start with the problem. On Monday, the final instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report warned that it was now or never for climate action and unless there was, quote, ‘Immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is beyond reach.’ Global emissions need to peak before 2025. That’s just three years away and then fall by 43 per cent by 2030. IPCC scientists conceded it was now quote almost inevitable that we would exceed 1.5 degrees, the target level agreed in Paris. Do you think these latest warnings from the IPCC will have any impact Ketan?

What I really hope is that this report, which looks at the mitigation of climate change, has much, much more impact than the previous two editions of this reporting phase. The first one being the physical science of climate change and the second one being the potential impacts for the different pathways into the future. The really tricky part and the big problem is, of course, how do you get the message about the solutions out into the world out of this 3000-page report? It’s so big. The PDF nearly wrecked my computer. It’s just like it’s incomprehensible when you don’t have a background in these particular problems.

I read the 60-page summary for policymakers and the 140-page technical summary, which is almost a ridiculous thing to think of them as summaries, but they’re really synthesising a synthesis and there’s so much in them. And the thing that really, really stood out to me is that this report from the IPCC actually has a lot more humanity to it than previous reports. It’s not really all that technocratic. It’s not just about the cost of wind turbines or the feasibility of integrating electric vehicles into a grid. Of course, that’s covered in great detail. It’s also about the things that everybody can do on climate change. And interestingly, there’s also a lot about the different options we have for cultural and political and social change.

We need to think about toolboxes that include ways that society can change, ways that people can change because that’s when people start to have a much closer and real connection with climate action. I spent a lot of time on social media earlier this week ranting that there wasn’t very much coverage of that report. But, you know, thinking about it last night, maybe it’s not the worst thing, but that there wasn’t all that much coverage because it’s really down to people like me and all of my colleagues who are climate activists and writers and authors to pick it up and run with it and show this to the world and say, Look, you know, it’s not just that the technology is getting better, we can actually work to make society better as well.

I did see some coverage of the IPCC report being watered down in the last days by the usual suspects. Do you sometimes feel that the IPCC is a broken model?

Yeah. So what happened is last year there was this big global meeting called the Conference of Parties. This was the 26th of these meetings, so COP26 in November last year, I think people would have heard about it on place in Glasgow. Yeah, that’s right. And just before that, the very first of these three IPCC reports came out and it was about the physical science of climate change and people were like, ‘Yeah, that’s a that’s certainly a real problem.’ And we all kind of agree now that it’s a real problem.

What I think what really should have happened is these reports should have been in reverse order. All of the information on solutions and actions and the urgency of acting like right, right, right now, that should have been just before that big global meeting. And then you can talk about like climate impacts and the physical science last because you know you need to invert it. I think what you mentioned is really important, which is that the summary for policymakers, which is the shortest summary available, which is still 63 pages. It wasn’t actually 63 pages originally, I think about 20 pages got added in that process of all these governments going through it line by line and arguing for changes to different bits of it.

The countries that really like fossil fuels and digging them up and selling them and burning them wanted much more emphasis on the technologies that serve as ways to extend the lifespan of those of those fuels. So things like carbon capture and storage, things like making hydrogen by burning coal or gas. And very notably, things like removing carbon from the atmosphere. After you’ve burnt a fossil fuel, all of those were given much more emphasis and much more focus, and the emphasis was taken away from things like wind turbines and solar panels. And importantly, emphasis was taken away from reducing demand. So changing the ways that cities, suburbs and people live their lives so that you’re not demanding as much energy when you live the same life as you do now. So that – obviously they were doing that because they have a vested interest, but it’s impactful.

At the release of the report, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, accused governments of lying and singled Australia out for unprecedented criticism. Neither the Coalition nor the Labor opposition are proposing anything like the immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors that the IPCC has called for. Is that correct?

Yes, definitely so. The Australian government has a target of 26 to 28 per cent reductions by 2030 on 2005 levels. The Labor Party is taking a target of 43 per cent to the next election. That is a reduction from what they previously had the target of 45 per cent. Now that 45 per cent target was set in 2015, seven years in the past. That was chosen from a range that was given to keep the world under two degrees C of warming and they picked the lowest possible end of that range, the weakest possible target. So they certainly have a higher percentage aim than the Liberal Party, but they have kind of been lowballing it for a while.

Obviously, the thinking is that they want to be not criticised for their climate policies going into the election. The idea is that if they take the heat out of the issue, they won’t be attacked for being too strong willed or ambitious on climate. They kind of got scared of the previous election. They feel like they lost it because they were too ambitious on climate, so they’ve lopped off two per cent from their aim. I I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think that’s a – they’re absolving themselves of responsibility. Of course, the goal for any political party going to an election is to do two things. One is to get elected. And then the second thing is to have policies that protect the health and safety of the people that live within the jurisdiction that you’re going to be leading. If they only fit one of those criteria, that’s not a good thing if they get elected, but they’re still allowing a huge volume of greenhouse gas emissions to hit the planet, we don’t really benefit from that. We live in that same atmosphere and we suffer those consequences. So I don’t think that’s a good thing at all.

There’s a lot of different estimates for a 1.5 degree compatible target for Australia. Generally, they’re sort of between like 66 to 80 per cent for the year 2030. Totally feasible. A huge, huge chunk of it would come from just getting rid of coal power. Then you electrify other parts of the economy that aren’t connected to the grid you electrify, transport, you electrify homes, you electrify some parts of industry. That’s another really big chunk. The really tricky, complicated chunk, there’s two of them. One is agriculture. There’s no technological replacement for dairy cows. And the other really complicated chunk is complicated for political reasons. A very large portion of Australia’s domestic emissions come purely from digging up coal and gas to send them overseas.

An increasing proportion, especially gas.

Very much so. Yeah, it’s really wild to see the gains that have occurred from growing renewables in the grid being cancelled out by growing particularly methane emissions from the extraction of gas in Australia. So if you, you know, enacted a plan to reduce fossil fuel exports, you would also very significantly reduce Australia’s domestic emissions. And Australia could then align comfortably with the 1.5 degree target. So no, Australia is not being ambitious enough, but I think that there is a widespread and incorrect worry about what it would entail if Australia were to aim for it. Australia needs to be setting a much, much higher percentage because historically we have emitted a much, much higher volume than other parts of the world who have emitted much less. So basically, we’ve used up a huge chunk of our fair share of the remaining budget of emissions than other parts of the world, which means we need to reduce faster.

A lot of the focus this election is on the teal candidates. Independents running in Liberal or National Party electorates on a pro climate platform and backed by Simon Holmes à Court Climate 200 in particular. The Powerhouse has already spoken with Zali Steggall, who blazed the trail at the last election in Warringah. She has a 60 per cent target by 2030. That’s what she’s – which is, I think, a little bit below the Greens going for 70 is my understanding. You’ve had a bit to do with Holmes à Court, as we’ll come to. Do you think the Climate 200 candidates could make a difference in the next parliament?

Yeah, definitely. They’re just striking a really important note with what they’re saying. They’re talking specifically about climate in the sense of opportunities and benefits and immediate positive changes that you get when you take action on climate change. I think that’s really, really important. I think that if the election ends up with them in a position where they have the balance of power, that’s going to be quite, quite significant. They’ll be able to influence whatever the government is. If it’s a minority government or whatever they’ll be able to have a really significant position of influence. Now, I think that they themselves will need to be held to account for aligning with a strong, ambitious climate goals after the election, whoever gets their spots in the parliament. But I think that’s OK because they are coming in on a really strong climate platform.

I’d like to turn to your own story, how you came to be involved in the climate movement in Australia. In your book Windfall, you describe your shock as a child arriving in Sydney during the terrible bushfires of 1994, a harbinger of what was to come as warming has driven worsening wildfires in this country. When did you first become aware of and concerned about climate change?

So. In 2010, I started it at this company that was then called Infigen. I started doing this like data analytics, work on all these wind farms that were cropping up quite fast. So part of the job was connecting up new wind farms into our into our system to monitor it. And no one really knew what was going on because the grid operator was used to dealing with dispatch and control for coal-fired power stations that they could control. You know, like give me more megawatts, give me fewer megawatts. And all of a sudden, we’re hooking it up, these weird control systems, these like European control systems to these grid operators who are like, you know, they’re calling up and they’re like, ‘What are you doing? You know, you’re not following your set points’. And we’re like, ‘We’re a wind farm. We can’t follow the set points. You know, it’s the wind here. And like sunlight, we can’t do it.’

So there were some very awkward conversations with the grid operator, but everyone got a hold of it pretty quickly. And very importantly, we helped out with the establishment of these amazing new systems to help integrate wind and solar into their grids that I think a lot of people don’t hear about these things, which is a shame because they’re really, really clever and important things that have helped Australia integrate very, very large volumes of wind and solar into the grid so far. So one, for example, is wind and solar forecasting. You can get really, really big, you know, tricky fancy computer algorithms to forecast wind speed at extremely tiny little localities so you can get forecasts for wind. You can incorporate the wake effects of other wind turbines and you can get very, very localised forecasts for the output of a wind farm over the next like ten minutes, one hour, 24 hours, that sort of thing. Obviously, as you go further into the future, it gets more, more and more inaccurate. But they have helped so much, integrating so much wind and solar into the grid.

With solar, you can obviously forecast the movements of clouds and other sort of interruptions to irradiance for solar farms. It’s so cool and it was really great to see all of that help get set up. And it all went pretty well, to be honest. You know, like, we actually were doing a pretty good job of integrating these wind and solar farms. But unfortunately, I would like walk into the office and there would be like a copy of a newspaper there and it would have some nonsense headline that was just like wind turbines have caused a blackout, blah blah blah. And I’m just like, no, they haven’t. What are you talking about like, the first thing I would do is like, we would sit down and we would like log on to the market management systems and figure out what actually happened. And it was invariably just some person who didn’t really understand these systems trying to get a political point across about the technologies that we were working with. And so it sort of really interested and excited me to join the political fight about that, right? And so I started up a blog and I joined Twitter around that time, sort of 2012, 2013. That was how I got my first taste of the politics of energy and climate and it was really, really exciting. And I had a really good time writing about the technologies because most people who were talking about this, particularly in like traditional media, had zero clue what they were talking about.

But you’re on a learning curve yourself, right? So you didn’t study environment or energy or engineering or any of those things. You studied science, but it was psychology and you weren’t an activist. You didn’t come from an activist background all fired up about climate change. So you’re learning on the job and my understanding is it helped that you were doing night shift. Is that right?

Yeah, that’s right.

That’s how your vlogging career started.

Yeah. Yeah, I was doing night shift. So it was sort of wonderful in a way. What would happen is I would get on to my night shift at 7pm I would do all the stuff I needed to do and the rest was just like monitoring and keeping an eye on things, essentially. So I would read the news. And at midnight, a lot of media outlets make all of their articles for the next day live not at 7am or 5am, but at midnight. And so I would suddenly get the day’s news then and I would have a full like sort of five to six hours in the wee hours of the morning to read the article, look up exactly what it was talking about and write a detailed blog post. Get all my tweets ready. And then by the time everyone kind of springs into consciousness at like 7 and 8am, I would just be like ‘post’ and then I would just climb into bed. And then just like wake up and just be like, OK, cool, let’s see what happens. Policymakers, decision makers, executives, politicians, other journalists. They were all reading this content and getting it all kind of just swirled around as this thing with no real reference to the physical realities of the energy systems they were talking about. And I was like no, you’re not talking about the thing in the correct way. Of course, there were issues and challenges that needed to be addressed, but they weren’t really interested in those things. They were kind of interested in scoring a political point.

Well, you found yourself in perhaps the most contentious sector of the renewable energy industry of all. Wind farms a decade ago that were at the vanguard of the renewables debate, the most cost-effective technology and the most likely to roll out at large scale across the country under the country’s renewable energy target, which was, I think, 20 per cent by 2020. Is there something about wind energy you think that makes it especially contentious?

I always have a soft spot for wind. I love it for its complications. If that makes sense. Solar has a bit of a sci fi feel to it. I think you can actually see from where we’re sitting, some solar panels on that satellite hanging from the ceiling over there. But wind is just like this almost traditionalist thing and wind has very different routes to solar. Wind was developed – it was developed in many places in the world, partly the US. But it had its really, really early days in Denmark, and it was developed as part of a push to have more localised cooperative approaches to energy generation –

As against nuclear.

As against nuclear specifically. Yeah. And so it was a pushback against corporatised ownership of of energy. And so one of the first wind turbines in the world was this sort of almost handmade machine developed as part of the Tvind School in Denmark. You can see all this footage of people, you know, like 100 people all carrying the blade of a, of a wind turbine. A pretty big one too, like this is like not one of those tiny little 10 metre tall things. It’s a massive machine that somehow this community built and they had help. They had help from a few wind developers who gave them like specs and materials and things like that, but they physically constructed it themselves, which is amazing. So it has heart to it and that sits in such diametric opposition to the other side of how it has grown, particularly as a corporatised technology, which is it has inspired a lot of hate, a lot of strong reactions, particularly around aesthetics, particularly around the feelings of communities and ownership and the way like physical technological change happens around people. And so that drama, that conflict is just so incredible to me. I don’t think I’m ever going to stop loving wind power for that.

In your book, you make the point: fair decarbonisation happens faster than unfair decarbonisation. We need to roll out, as you describe them, decarbonisation machines at a huge scale. We have to get this right, don’t we? Why is fairness at the heart of this?

Yeah, this is there’s two schools of thought here, essentially. One is a slightly more, I guess you could call it, authoritarian approach. Sort of the nicer way of describing, there’s like top-down, which is you establish a federal or like top level rule saying because climate change is urgent, we need to have approval processes for energy and enabling infrastructure like power lines and batteries that is quicker. And communities have less power and less say. Right? And that way you end up with it with more stuff quicker. I think that is an extremely counterproductive way of thinking about it. Canada actually did this and Australia, to some degree, did it back in the sort of early 2010s, right? And when you break down the research about why people were objecting to these developments, it was because they were kind of coming from afar like it was just this distant thing, these disconnected people railroading communities and kind of just like chucking all of their things up without any real connectionion to the locality. And that was the root of the sentiment. If you do that again, the sentiment will return and it will be even more powerful than it was then.

One of the points you made was that sometimes the wind farm development would come in and create winners and so you’ve got neighbours who are suddenly getting completely unequal result. One guy, farmer, is getting huge payments from the wind farm and the neighbour gets none and is furious.

So physically where the turbine’s located, if it’s on your land, you get a lease payment. And if you’re 100 metres away, you don’t, right? That’s not a great situation. So now these new models are sort of radial, one km, two km five km, 10 km. You get paid a certain amount based on those distances. Completely changed the situation. And in Germany, for instance, or in Denmark, a lot of the historical development was done through local ownership shares that were similarly – they weren’t necessarily radial, but they were kind of just like, you know, the town that’s like a kilometre away, these people all get a share in the turbine fine, you know. Give them a certain amount of money for every amount of profit that comes in from selling the electricity from the turbine. Worked really, really well back in the sort of early 2000s.

Both Germany and Denmark are encountering problems because they’re moving away from that model and towards more corporatised private ownership model. And consequently, they’re seeing much more opposition and protest against new wind farm developments. So I really, really worry about the two different sides of this, right? One is being too insensitive to that sentiment, that human feeling from the results of development that isn’t connected to people. But then the other side is, when that all flares up the people, the bad faith actors going, OK, great. We can now exploit this to put a block on it.

On the positive side, can you talk about the community ownership model that you know, the pioneering Hepburn wind farm that Simon Holmes à Court had a lot to do with, as we mentioned before, and he’ll be talking in our series. That’s a much more optimistic model, isn’t it? And do you think it can be replicated and has been replicated successfully in Australia?

Yeah. So Simon’s project was fully, fully community owned, which is really tough.

So where are we? We’re down in country Victoria?

Yeah, that’s right. And it’s two turbines, two cute, really cute turbines painted by a local artist fully owned by the communities. Everybody has a share and they and the electricity that they sell and they get money from, the money flows back into the community. As proof that you could do this and it actually works, it was really, really significant because a whole bunch of other projects have come up since then. Often what you get is this partnership between a developer and a community, either investing in some way or actually just having a benefit scheme. Your electricity bills are $0 because you live next to a wind farm or something like that. There’s a range of them, and they’ve worked really, really well over the next five to ten – five to eight years. We are going to have to develop a lot of renewable energy to replace coal-fired power stations closing down. And it’s going to have to be developed in the right way.

Wind turbine syndrome is still being rebutted by scientists. You use the wonderful phrase, quote ‘Pulling their punches in excruciating, slow motion.’ Yet the pseudo-scientists have moved on and so has the debate. Solar syndrome looks like it’s next. How do we can’t counter these disinformation campaigns and anticipate or forestall them?

Well, you’ve got the energy justice element that I just talked about, but it’s actually a really interesting and important question when it comes to once it’s already happened, right? Because you need some way to deal with it once it actually happens. And we are slowly starting to learn how to deal with disinformation in the age that we are now, which is so hard because social media and traditional media act in combination to create this force for disinformation that is really, really difficult to counter. I think that’s really important to point out that like there’s a sort of symbiosis sometimes between more conservative media outlets and social media. They’re not kind of at opposite ends, they’re acting together.

And what you need to do is come up with ways to pre-bunk disinformation, right? So you sort of arm people with information, with the correct information before it ever happens. Disinformation is really predictable. I think that it’s actually really not all that hard to figure out the direction that it’s going to take and the type of mythologies that are going to form around these things. And so you can kind of get scientists and experts along. But the most important thing is that you get them there first, not that they’re responding because once it sets in, you’re kind of lost. People develop obsessions and it’s just so hard to rescue people once they’ve really sunk into the deep of a conspiracy theory or something like that, you know, it’s really – it can be quite tragic in some cases. So you need to stop it from happening, you need to take a preventative approach.

Why are you worried about climate ‘doomism’?

It really, really worries me because I think it’s more powerful than climate change denial. So just to clarify what that is. First of all, climate change denial emerged as an intentional thing, right? This was a plan. In the early 2000s a lot of people with interest in fossil fuels were like, ‘Cool, what do we have in our toolbox?’ You know? And they kind of looked back at the tobacco industry and the way that they mucked with the science and they were like, ‘Cool, let’s also muck with the science.’

The merchants of doubt.

The merchants of doubt. It took a lot of money for that to happen. You know, it actually wasn’t easy for those PR companies and those lobbyists and misinformers and media misinformers to actually make that happen. They had to pour a lot of time and money into it to make it happen. There was no natural sense of denial from the public. People actually have an instinct generally to trust scientists when they hear that sort of thing. As we saw with COVID, you know, there’s really not all that much COVID denial to the extent where it’s influencing policies all that much. Climate doomism is feeling like the moment has passed.

The moment for action has sailed by and there is really not much we can do anymore to stop the worst impacts of climate change, right? That is incorrect. Climate change is a problem that is completely linear. Completely linear, right? The IPCC report that came out last August has this amazing chart that I just couldn’t get out of my head for like weeks and weeks. I couldn’t stop thinking about this line. And it’s a line that is drawn between how much emissions we release and how much the planet heats, right? And it’s just like every tonne you save, you avoid, puts you a little bit further down that line and reduces global heating by a linear and predictable amount. That is a very, very good thing.

What we’re seeing more and more is that the instinct to feel like there is nothing we can do is getting stronger and stronger. This is really human and it’s really real and it’s something that unfortunately, we’re actually seeing more and more in young people. You know, obviously there’s the youth climate movement and things like that, that is an expression of rage that is related to fatalism because they are feeling not like we’re totally doomed and there’s nothing that can be done. But actually that they don’t have connection to the halls of power. They don’t have any connection to change and power. And really, if you want to help young people, help them get connected to power, help them have an influence and that will cure, that will help ease the pain that they’re suffering from this sort of sense of doomism that’s spreading.

You write quite beautifully that, quote, ‘Climate action has to be a warm hug from a friend, not a stern dressing down from a science teacher.’ What do you mean?

I think that people very much already have the feeling or the instinct to, if not help themselves, then help the people around them. Both of those things are elements of acting on climate change. There’s a selfish element and there’s a community element. That’s most people covered, right? If you like yourself or if you like other people, there aren’t that many people who don’t like either. Right. So that sentiment, that feeling is already there. The challenge lies in making climate action such that people come to it themselves as opposed to sort of being pushed into it. Right? This is really, really difficult. So the balance is really, really tricky to meet and it’s completely different for every different sector.

So we talked about wind turbines and community ownership, right? But when it comes to the exact moment of development, the very, very early days, there’s two different things that happen. One is that a developer will walk into a community and say, ‘Hello, I’m a developer. I would like to build a wind turbine in your in your town. It’s going to happen so you’d better come along for the ride. And some of you will get some stuff and some of you will get nothing.’ The other thing that can happen is that communities can hear about the benefits of renewables and go, ‘Hey, I want that in my town. I want a solar farm. I want a wind farm. How come this other community is getting all this – all these people who live around this wind farm are getting so much, I want that too.’ That has a very different result on a generalised scale.

Of course, right down at the level of like individual projects and stuff like that, you’re going to find many different things happening. But on the generalised scale, if people can like basically come to it themselves, that’s a really, really different thing. Right? However, for that to happen, you need major structural, political and systemic changes, right? That is something that you need to pressure and force and push through, making the world such that people can come to climate action themselves. And so it’s this dual thing, right? When I talk about the warm hug, I think that people need to be welcomed. Everyone, no matter who they are, they absolutely will find something to do, something to contribute, some part in this fight that they can help with. But behind the scenes, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of structural and political change to enable this, right?

And so, solar in Australia is actually another really good example of this. Solar got cheap by itself, but without policy helping the deployment, it actually wouldn’t have gotten as cheap as fast as it did because manufacturers are like, ‘Oh my God, like all this, all was being built to figure out ways to make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper,’ as they built more and more and more and more and more people deployed it. Thanks to government subsidies, I was one of many people who had to fight to defend those during the Tony Abbott years. He wanted to get rid of that whole thing. We would have lost it, you know, we would have lost that scheme. And Australia would not have record like world record breaking levels of solar deployment had we not fought for it.

Like this really scrappy, horrible political fight just to give people this blank space on their roof that they can fill with their own decisions around climate action, right? And now they are a generator, they’re a generator that is outperforming coal power, gas power, not in volume of energy, but certainly in just the characteristics of it being clean and cheap and accessible. I would argue solar needs to be more accessible than it currently is in Australia because renters and apartment dwellers don’t really have much access to it at all. But that change, that’s a warm hug that sort of had like this big, scrappy fight behind it. So, you know, in climate circles, you get these really passionate debates about whether it’s better to have action on the individual level or the systemic level. And it’s a ridiculous dichotomy. It’s a spread, right? Like it’s a completely interconnected web between all of those things that the IPCC report on Monday goes into great detail on. But that’s not a bad thing. You know, it’s actually a really, really good thing. It’s actually a really positive thing that it’s all interconnected.

Thank you, Ketan Joshi. Please join me in a round of applause. To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and [to] visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording if you wish, 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.