Welcome everyone to 100 Climate Conversations and thank you for joining us. I’d like to acknowledge Country, the traditional custodians of the ancestral homelands on which we meet today the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. We respect their Elders, past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Today is number 77 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, which is 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 into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus toward the innovations of the net zero revolution. My name is Paddy Manning. I’m a journalist of more than 25 years and author of a recent book on climate change called Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us. Chris Bowen is currently Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy. He grew up in Smithfield in Western Sydney and graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Economics. He also has a master’s degree in international relations and a diploma in modern languages. He joined the Labor Party in 1988 and was elected to Fairfield Council in 1995, serving as the mayor of Fairfield for 1998 and 1999. He also served as President of the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils from 2000 to 2002. Chris entered Parliament in 2004 and has held a wide range of portfolios, including serving as Treasurer, Minister for Human Services, Minister for Immigration and Minister for Small Business. We’re so thrilled to have him join us today. Please join me in welcoming the Minister. Chris, you grew up in the Western Sydney suburb of Smithfield, joined the ALP as a teenager and studied economics at Sydney University. Is it fair to say you were never a Greenie?

Yeah, that would be fair to say. I was never attracted to that political party. People sometimes asked me why I joined the Labour Party. I joined the Labour Party at age 15, famously went to my first meeting in my school uniform on a Monday night, and it’s pretty hard to explain what draws you to a political party at that age, because at age 15 my philosophy was not super refined. I’d started reading about politics and history and policy, but, you know, I was still– I was like 15 years old, but I was drawn there, I think, for two reasons. One, I was drawn to politics because I worked out in my view that basically things were wrong with society. My parents, we weren’t dirt poor, but we were far from comfortable — my dad worked midnight shift so he’d go to work at 11 o’clock at night, come home at 7 o’clock in the morning; my mum was a childcare worker so, you know, we never had much. And I went to school with a whole bunch of people who I knew were never going to go to university, but I knew were smart enough. Long way of saying I knew that there were things wrong in society. I also worked out that to change that you really needed your hands on the big levers to big changes. And politics is the way to do that. Lots of good work, noble work, important work in charities and not-for-profits. And, you know, I really respect that, but for me it was, that’s dealing with symptoms; politics could change causes. And then within that, from my point of view, the only group of people who seemed to get that, get me, get what that was all about was the Labor Party. That the only people who cared about people like me and my parents and changing society to make it fairer was Labor.

You rose quickly, you were briefly Treasurer in 2013 and were presumably expecting to retake that portfolio when you were Shadow Treasurer leading up to the 2019 election. After Labor lost that election you were Shadow Health Minister during the pandemic. Then in 2021 you got the shadow climate portfolio. Were you expecting it and did you want it?

I did come to want it, yes. It wasn’t an automatic or quick process. Yes, I thought I was going to be Treasurer in 2019. Like most people, I was never complacent but thought we’d win the 2019 election. History shows otherwise. Then I was ready for change. I’d done the treasury job for a long time, so I asked for health and got health post 2019. Found that satisfying. Shadow Health Minister during a pandemic, which I wasn’t expecting when I took the job. Partly, it was in many senses going to be a quieter job, not realising I was walking into a global pandemic. But then, long story short, Mark Butler and I had started to discuss a job swap for all sorts of reasons. Mark had been shadow Minister for Climate Change for eight years. That’s a very long stint in a very controversial job. He was ready for a change. I came into the view that I was ready for a change. I came to the view that the climate change debate needed to be reframed to win, that we needed strong climate action, but we had to argue it as an economic opportunity for our country that acting on climate change is a moral obligation to the next generation. It’s a moral obligation to the rest of the world. So we should do it for those reasons. But even if it wasn’t those things, it would be a good economic policy for Australia. And I have an economics background so that I was well placed therefore to make those arguments. And I came to the view over time, and it’s certainly my very strong view now, that it’s the most important job I’ve ever done, more important than being Treasurer, more important than any of the portfolios I’ve held. This is the main game for the country. The most controversial it’s incoming everywhere. Politically, there’s climate change denial to our right, arguments to our left, we’re not doing enough. That’s okay, I don’t mind that, but it is by far the biggest economic opportunity for a country. It is by far the biggest moral obligation on us to act. It has bedevilled our politics for 20 years. It has destroyed prime ministers. It is hard stuff and I didn’t come here to do easy things. So hence I love the job. You know, nobody will remember what deficits or surpluses I delivered when I was Treasurer. They will remember what we did on climate change. So this is by far the most important job I’ve ever done and it gets me up every single day.

You mention we’ve been debating it for 20 years. We’ve certainly had a lost decade on climate action since the carbon price established by the Rudd-Gillard governments was abolished by the Abbott government from 2014. What has gone wrong specifically in the last decade in our national politics on this issue?

A lot. But it started with, well, frankly, a few things: too much climate denial for too long, and bedevilling politics and dominating the conservative side of politics — that, for too long, we argued about whether climate change was real. Now, okay, you can contest, etc but the science has been established for a long time now. It’s now as certain that human activity is causing climate change as it is that tobacco causes cancer. So we shouldn’t be arguing about it, but we argued about it for too long. There’s still too much arguing about it today but that also, for too long, the business community wasn’t on board — resisting change when the government, the cabinet I was a member of, put a carbon price on. It was war with the business community. That’s very hard for a government to be at war with effectively the people who, you know, run business in Australia. That changed to one of the big changes over the last decade, is that business then realised that that was wrong and business then got out in front of the former government and that made the political task for us better, easier because we were engaging with business. I think those are two of the main things that went wrong in that period, that sort of, if you like, 2007 to 2022 period.

What about the media?

Yes, there are some in the media who propagated both of those elements, climate denial and that this comes at an economic cost. And that was part of the difficulty in Australia and it was part of the destructive nature of the climate debate.

Back to the 2022 election. It wasn’t dominated by climate policy, although you had taken the portfolio. We did see a landslide for the Teals in a bunch of Liberal seats and we saw a record Greens result in the Lower House. What mandate did the Albanese Government establish on climate action in 2022?

So let me gently push back on that a little bit because climate was a big issue in the election and a positive one for the Labor Party, which is a big change on the elections of 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019, a big change. It was important for us and I think an important part of our win. What mandate did we get? Well, as well as the Teals win and the Greens wins, which I acknowledge, the Teals wins in particular were very substantial and a factor in the previous government being thrown out because you can’t form a government if the Liberal Party, if you don’t hold Kooyong and Wentworth and Mackellar and the others. So that was big and a seismic moment for the country. But having said that, the Labor Party with our climate policies also won seats like Higgins, which for those who don’t know, is a very leafy, wealthy seat in Melbourne, which the Labor Party had never won before. This was a seat held by two Liberal prime ministers and one Liberal long-serving Treasurer, and we now hold it. Bennelong, John Howard’s seat. Reid and seats like that. So, they were Labor wins, not Teal or Green, where climate was a huge issue. But also at the same time we held seats like Hunter and Paterson where there are traditional energy and that was part of– that was the challenge for us is come up with a policy which is good for climate but which shows people you get the transition and that people need to be wrought with us. It’s all very well. You know this, oh, we should do more, we should do this or that. There are Australians with rights who are citizens, who are in jobs in coal mines and coal-fired power stations. Now, I’m not saying they should stay open forever or anything like that, but they have a stake at the table and deserve their voice to be heard. And our policy brought that together in a way which meant that I think it’s a better policy. But also, I meant, we could win Higgins and Hunter in a way which the Liberal Party failed to do because they lost those seats, where climate was a big issue, to the Teals and to a lesser extent to the Greens. So I’m not saying we were perfect or got everything right, but we formed a majority of the House of Representatives, which is no small feat in our own right without Teals or Greens and won some of those seats which nobody really just a few years ago– if you said to me or I said to you, I think the Labor Party’s going to win Higgins in 2016 or 2019, one of us would have told the other one we’re mad — and won on a climate agenda too. So that’s a big shift.

Have you ended the climate wars?

They’re in retreat. You can’t end the climate wars, this is not a cop-out or a buck-passing — it takes two to end the climate wars. The climate wars will be over when the Liberal Party says, ‘Actually that’s a good policy, we’ll back it’ and that has happened not once in climate since the election. But they are in retreat because we’ve managed to do a lot to pass all the legislation without the opposition, by building a broader coalition. And I mean, again, an unthinkable moment, Paddy, is when the Prime Minister and I sign the updated nationally determined contributions — the new targets, which we sent off to the Paris Accord — we had standing behind us Climate Council, Smart Energy Council, Clean Energy Council, the Australian Conservation Foundation, so the climate movement, and the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Energy Council of Australia. Unthinkable. That’s a very broad coalition. Unthinkable five years ago you could get those people backing a policy. So that shows me that actually the climate wars, while not over, are way in retreat compared to what they were a few years ago.

One of your first achievements was to legislate a 43% emissions reduction target for 2030 — higher than the 26%, I think it was, that the Coalition had in place. Arguably not as high as climate science would demand. I’ve seen estimates that it should be more like 70 something, if you’re going to achieve net zero by 2050. You’ve consistently said the target is a floor, not a ceiling. Can it be raised? Is there any internal pressure on you to do that?

We won’t raise the target, but we’d be very happy if we exceed it — that’s what floor not a ceiling means — but we are going to be flat-out meeting it. This is my point about achievability. It’s easy to say, the target should be x. With all due respect to everyone, that’s easy. I can say that. If I didn’t have the current job, I could say, ‘Oh, the target should be 50% or 70% or 80%. Pick a number’. That is not hard work. What is hard work is saying, this is the target and here’s how we’ll achieve it. That’s hard work. I talked before about the levers. The levers are important. I can say the target’s 80% and your next question is, ‘Okay, Chris, how?’ and if I don’t have an answer, that’s not good. So, it’s okay for commentators and people in minor parties and independents to say that, but as the minister responsible I’ve got to explain how. So, 43 is going top speed doing pushing every lever we can find and we’ll get there because we have to but it’s not going to be easy. It’s now the flavour of the month in some newspapers to say, it’s not going to be met, because underpinning the 43% target is an 82% target, getting renewables to 82%, which is currently 35. So, renewable energy is currently 35% of our energy system. We’re going to lift it to 82 by 2030. That’s 77 months. That’s not long. I said it’s hard work, but this is all a long of saying it’s actually ambitious because it is hard work. Now, if we’d started earlier, sure — it’s a bit like walking out at a cricket match in the 15th over of a 50-over match saying, ‘Right, now we’re going to start scoring runs’. You’ve wasted the first 15 overs, right? Which means you’ve got to work extra hard for the remaining overs. We wasted the last 10 years. We got to work real hard for seven to catch up. That’s what we’re doing. But my point is, 43% emissions reduction in 77 months is actually very ambitious. So, yes, I hear you about people who say the targets could be higher. I don’t actually agree that it’s necessary to be higher to get to net zero by 2050 because 43% is actually the linear path to net zero by 2050. But some people say we should do more. I announced this morning we’ve begun the process of our 2035 targets. But my point is targets are easier said than met. We can all say it, you know. I can go out and write a placard, ‘I demand 70% emissions reduction’. Okay, how? That’s the heart of it.

The government has embraced the net zero by 2050 commitment and legislated that. Similar targets have increasingly been adopted by jurisdictions and corporations, but according to some recent analysis in Nature magazine, in many cases it’s not backed by the concrete strategies or actions that will get them there. The Prime Minister’s department has recently established a net zero economy agency. What will that do and how does it help to to get to the target?

So perhaps the name is a little confusing for some people, but the net zero authority has the task of helping and managing those communities at the forefront of the change through it. Because we’re sitting here in Sydney where I live and you live and it’s wonderful. But the renewable energy of the future, apart from what’s on our rooves, will be made in the regions, but also the energy of the past will be less and less made, but the regions depend on it. So coal-fired power stations in the Hunter Valley, in central Queensland, in the Latrobe Valley create a lot of jobs and all the associated mining. You know, I’m here, to be honest with you, those coal-fired power stations are going to close. There will be no new ones built, so hence we’ve got to create new jobs. The good news is, as I said before, that renewable energy will be created in those regions because they’ve got the space, they got the skills, they’ve got the grid. Actually, you know, the grid is not the same everywhere. The power lines are stronger in some areas than others. They’re strong there. So it’s good but it takes management. It’s just not going to happen if government says ‘Okay, open to the market’ communities will miss out. We will we run the risk if we don’t get it right — and I stress if we don’t get it right, and we will get it right — but the risk is you create societies and communities like you’ve seen in Britain, famously with the coal mine closures of the ’80s, which were done not for climate change reasons, but for economic reasons. But you have people who had lived in vibrant communities in Wales and in the north of England, where places like Sheffield and other famous English cities became terrible, terrible wastelands because the jobs were destroyed and nothing came forward to create. We’re not going to let that happen. So, the net zero authority’s about, ‘Okay, there’s great opportunities for Australia. We want this big renewable energy investment. We want to make, not just renewable energy in Australia, we want to make the things that make renewable energy in Australia. We put 60 million solar panels on our rooves in the last 10 years, 1% of them were made in our country, 1%. We have to fix that and they’ll be made in places like Hunter Valley, in Queensland and regional Australia. But you need a government agency to help that happen. To say to the investors, ‘Right, why don’t you come and open this up in the Hunter Valley? Or you want to open the Hunter Valley, but you say you’ve found these obstacles, We can help you get rid of these obstacles. We’ll go and talk to Chris Bowen. We’ll go and talk to Ed Husic, we’ll go and talk to Chris Minns and knock those barriers down. That’s what the authority’s for.

You’ve also overhauled the Climate Change Authority. So what’s the overarching role? Is that an attempt to de-politicise?

Yes. So the Climate Change Authority is more what you were talking about before. That is we’ve put it back to the centre, so it’ll advise me on the 2035 targets and other things associated. That advice will be public.

Is it independent?

Yes. It’s independent. If I don’t accept its advice, I would say why. So I make a decision, the cabinet makes a decision, the Parliament makes a decision, but particularly myself and the cabinet, if we don’t accept advice, we’ll have to say why.

In a statement to Parliament.

In a statement to Parliament, etc. It’s all in the Climate Change Act. That’s good. That provides a rigour. There might be good reasons to decline climate change advice, but if I’ve got good reasons, I should explain what they are. So yes, we’ve brought the Climate Change Authority back to the centre. I’ve made some appointments, some good appointments to the Climate Change Authority, climate change experts, three very accomplished female Australians I’ve added to the Climate Change Authority. It should have a mix of views. It should have a range of experience. We need, frankly, without going to individuals — climate change has been a very tribal debate: you used to do this or you used to do that, so you shouldn’t have a view. I don’t share that. We’re going to need everyone. This massive economic transformation that’s under way. We need to be all-in. We need people who used to work in fossil fuels. We need people who still work in fossil fuels, who understand it and know how to make the transition. We don’t have the luxury saying, ‘Well, you’ve made money off coal in the past so you don’t get a say’. We don’t have that luxury because we need all the talents, we need all the passion because we will fail unless we get everybody on board, because this is too big a job for one person, one government, one government department, all-in. And the Climate Change Authority does have a range of views on it and it’s a good thing. And they’ll get a synthesis. And then they’ll advise government.

Every time your cabinet colleague, Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, approves a new coal or gas project, there’s an outcry from people worried about the climate impact. Even the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that new fossil fuel developments are incompatible with net zero by 2050. Can approving new fossil fuel projects be justified any longer?

So, the IEA’s position is actually more complicated than that, but I don’t want to go through the ins and outs of the IEA’s views. The IEA’s a good agency, good authority. I have a lot to do with them, and it’s more complicated than it sometimes gets represented. But let me say this, Tanya Plibersek is also the first Environment Minister in Australian history to reject a coal mine application, so they basically were all automatically approved. She has approved some. Metallurgical coal mainly not thermal coal, and metallurgical coal is necessary to make steel. We need a lot of steel for the transition, the transmission wires, etc. We need a lot of steel and green steel will come. It’s not here yet. She’s got a law to comply with and she complies with that law. But I have a broader point, too, and I see it in a more positive frame. We will be a renewable energy superpower in this country under our watch, under this government. I really believe it. We will make so much renewable energy, we will not know what to do with it, but we will know what to do with it — we’ll you use it and we’ll export what we don’t use, right? And that’s how we’ll make our biggest contribution to decarbonisation [globally]. As important as our own emission reductions are–

One per cent.

They’re 1%, right, but I still think 1% is important. We were 1% of the troops in World War II. That was important. And if you said anybody who’s 1% or less doesn’t have to worry, that’s most of the countries in the world, right? That’s a cop out to say we’re only 1%. But more positively, we can make a much bigger contribution than 1% by providing the world with renewable energy and exporting it. But to do that, my point is you need to be a reliable supplier of energy. If I go to Japan or Korea, as I’m going to next week, to say I want to sell you renewable energy, if they say, ‘Ah, yeah, but you weren’t very reliable on the old energy that you sold us because we tried to get more of it and you said, no’, that’s a problem. So, I completely understand the argument and the points, but you got to look at it holistically, in my view, and through a prism of, okay, what’s our biggest contribution? What’s the best role we can play? There used to be a renewable energy superpower, powerhouse electricity factory of Asia, Saudi Arabia, renewable energy, whatever it is your preferred term, we can be it. But there’s a transition under way which needs careful management to get there to be it and simply coming in and saying, ‘All right, we’re not going to do this or that anymore’ is not the way. Now, I’ve also been very honest to say the world is changing and investors will need to be very careful. If they invest in fossil fuels, they may find themselves an Australia asset. Right. But again, there’s a way of managing that and it’s managing that transition. So I focus much, much more on the positive, on the opportunities, on what we’re doing to get that renewable energy, because it doesn’t happen automatically, not easily just because more sunlight hits our country than any other country in the world doesn’t mean we’re automatically a renewable energy superpower. It is true that more sunlight hits our country than any other country in the world, but doesn’t mean that automatically gets harvested and harnessed and exported. That takes policy. And until we’ve got all that under way, which we’re getting there, but it’s a big process, then you’ve also got to manage the old as well as the new.

Okay, let’s come to the safeguard mechanism. It’s an important bit of legislation that you’ve passed after a deal with the Greens, meaning the top 215 polluters in Australia have to reduce emissions by 5% a year from this July that just passed. Will that mechanism prove fit for purpose long term, or is it a sort of overhang of our climate wars and a poor excuse, if you like, for a carbon price? That is, the legislation we had in 2014.

Well it’s not a poor excuse for anything, but to a certain degree it is an overhang of previous debates, I guess, because it’s an old system. But I took the view that rather than ripping up and starting again, might as well take the architecture that the previous government had in place. They just didn’t want it to work. But the actual architecture itself was worthy, so it made more sense to keep that architecture up, make it work. Now, I don’t mind telling you I’ve taken it on some reasonably hard tasks in Parliament. Getting the safeguards reforms in with sensible policy was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I could have got the Greens support if I did things that would have resulted in steel closing down, which the Greens, to be fair to them, didn’t want either. But it would have been the result if we didn’t get it right. And we don’t want steel closed down in Australia or nobody sensible does. This is a very important part of our economy and you know, we want to make steel Australia, we want it decarbonising, but we want to make steel in Australia. So that was really hard, mainly because the Liberal Party had ruled themselves out of any sensible conversation by just saying we were against it. But it is good– it’s an ambitious policy. Really, I mean requiring 5% emissions reduction a year, year on year every year is a big deal. By the first 5% you might be able to do easily enough if you’re a steelworks or something. Aluminium works, bauxite, the airlines, take your pick. The first 5% emissions reduction is probably going to be hard but doable. The second one means 10% — that’s getting hard. So, it’s cumulative. So, it is hard work. So, as a result, maybe to pre-empt your question or maybe what you’re trying to get at is in my view, as a result, because you’re requiring a lot, you therefore have to allow flexibility to them as to how they do that, because the 215 biggest emitters in Australia are all different. You know, like 100-year-old cement works in Tasmania — which I was there a couple of weeks ago, which is one of our biggest emitters — is very different to a new mine or even a bauxite facility or an airline, for example, are very different with very different technologies available to them. Cement will be very hard to decarbonise, but we don’t really have the technology today. But we need a lot of cement. Did you know? I didn’t know. Here’s a confession. Did you know there’s more cement in a wind farm than there is steel or aluminium? It turns out those big turbines need to be held pretty firmly in the ground. So there’s a lot of cement under the ground. So we need a lot of cement for this transition. And I want that to be Australian cement. But it’s very hard. But I want them decarbonising. But the technology hasn’t come forward yet to decarbonise cement because cement is, you know, has a very high carbon content. So my point is, again, a long way of saying we need to provide the flexibility to these firms. But when you’ve got a government law saying you must reduce emissions by 5% a year, you can do so through offsets, which is, you know, various programs. Boards are going to say, and chief executives are going to say pretty quickly, why are we spending all this money on offsets? Shouldn’t we be investing this money to try and get our own emissions down so we don’t have to buy these offsets? That increasingly will become the decisions of boards and chief executives will make, which is exactly what I want to happen. Them investing in what we call onsite abatement. So, yes, it is a good policy. It will work, but it has been hard. But we’ve done it and it will make a big difference.

Nobody in the Albanese government is shedding a tear for the emissions trading scheme and the market solution to least cost abatement.

You know, politics is, they say, the art of the achievable. I was a member of the cabinet which did that, the Gillard cabinet, and we went to war and it was no small part, wasn’t the only reason we lost office, but it was a relatively big reason we lost office. But also then we became the only country in the world to have ever put a carbon price on and to have then taken it off again. Other countries either haven’t put it on in the first place or haven’t taken it off. We are the only mugs who did it and then reversed it. And having done that, you’re not going to go back and have another go, right? You find a better way. So hence, our approach is to say, okay, here’s our targets and here’s the different ways in different sectors. I announced today sectoral plans. That’s a better way in my view, in 2023 than a one-size-fits-all economy-wide carbon price.

In the wake of the AUKUS nuclear subs deal, there are more calls for Australia to embrace nuclear power generation. And I just recently was at a talk where the former PM Tony Abbott was making this case. Do you see a role for nuclear energy in Australia?

Australians are entitled to ask what does Tony Abbott think? And we have a pretty clear indication that they should do the opposite because he is just wrong repeatedly on every key issue ever facing the country. But let’s go to the substance of nuclear quickly. It just strikes me as amazing that people who seek to be regarded as economically rational support the most expensive form of energy available. There’s a new report out today from the CSIRO and AEMO, who run the energy grid, very smart people who every year look at the cost of energy. What have they found today? The same as they found last year, the same as they found the year before — the cheapest energy is solar, then wind, then gas, then coal, then nuclear. Nuclear is by far about five times more expensive than renewable energy. So why you do nuclear when you have a form of energy which is five times cheaper? I don’t see how anybody sensible economically could support that. Then you’ve got– it’s very slow. It takes years to build a nuclear power plant. Government could make a decision to do it today, you would not get one open before 2040.

Not the new generation of small modular reactors.

It’s all nonsense. There are two small modular reactors existing in the world today. If you listen to Peter Dutton you’d think they’re everywhere — there’s two. One’s floating around on a barge in Russia and one’s a small demonstration plant in China. No other country has even built one. So why do you bank your energy policy on this unproven technology? So it’s a lot of waste — nuclear waste lasts a long time, no secret there. Small modular reactors actually generate more of it. There’s been studies to show, of course, you’d lose the economy to scale — that can generate more than 30 times the amount of waste proportionally than a large nuclear reactor. And finally, this is a sort of insider’s argument, sort of for energy nerds, but it’s an important one. Nuclear power stations are quite similar to the coal power stations in a way. When you turn them on, you’re not turning it off again. Once you press go, it’s staying on. You can’t turn it on and off. Unlike gas, which gas is not perfect, but to its credit, you can turn it off. And that’s really important in a renewable economy because you need to be able to turn the power stations off when you don’t need them. We have so much solar during the day, we don’t need gas-fired power stations a lot of the time — we have negative prices. The reason we have negative prices is because the coal-fired power stations can’t turn off. So gas actually becomes handy for what we call peaking and firming, i.e. the sun’s gone down, it’s not very windy, we need some support, turn the gas-fired power station on. You can do that. These days with technology, you can turn a gas-fired power station on with two minutes’ notice. We need more power. Get that gas-fired power station working, two minutes later, bang. But you need about 40 years’ notice to build a nuclear power station. But once you’ve built it, you can’t turn it off. It’s useless for what we call peaking and firming. Just like coal’s not good for picking and firming. So nuclear is just a really, really bad idea for Australia. I’m not here to say the other countries that have nuclear are doing the wrong thing. My objection isn’t moral, but Australia has no nuclear industry. We have one tiny nuclear reactor for medical purposes which we need for X-rays and what have you, but that is not a nuclear industry.

Another legacy of the previous government Snowy 2.0. It’s already blown out. It’s delayed. Is it threatening to become a white elephant or do we need it?

We need it. It’s taken longer than I’d like for all sorts of reasons, and it will get first power 2028, 2029. You know, we were meant to have it much earlier than that. In one sense, Paddy, to be fair, almost every large project takes longer than people think. Most famously, the Sydney Opera House was meant to be finished in the ’60s, and it didn’t open until I was born in 1973. And the Snowy two scheme is one of the most complicated, if not the most complicated, engineering project under way at the moment in the world. And in some senses they’ve made good progress. I’ve been there, I’ve walked through the tunnels. There have been many kilometres of tunnels dug and all basically finished, but there’s one tunnel that hasn’t made progress and it’s a key tunnel we need. But look, the virtue of pumped hydro, which is what the Snowy 2.0 scheme is, is what we’re talking about before. It’s responsive to needs. You can turn it on, ‘Oh, we need pumped hydro turn on the Snowy scheme’. A lot of power comes out. Two gigawatts, that’s a lot of power.

And it can be sustained.

And it can be sustained. As long as you got water, which most of the time you have it there, that’s renewable. So it’s what we call ultra-long duration storage. You need storage. People say, ‘Oh, you know, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow’. Yeah, okay. Congratulations, you’ve noticed. But the rain doesn’t always fall either. But we store it, so we drink water in dams. But you need long-term duration. Batteries are great. We’re going to need many more of them, but they’re short-term duration, aren’t they? But they work at the moment, up to 8 hours. We’re going to need days of storage and pumped hydro, Snowy 2.0, gets you that. So yes, it is a vital scheme.

And we’re persevering with it.

Absolutely, we need to.

The Government’s also, in its first year, invested $20 billion to rewire the nation. And this was in a pre-election commitment. A project led by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation designed to put Australia’s transition to renewables back on track. How is that going? Has that also been slower than expected?

Well, in terms of the actual policy, it’s going fine. So it’s a $20 billion commitment, which is not a small amount of money, in anyone’s language. And we’ve signed funding agreements with New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Tasmania’s important, more important than you might think, because the Marinus Link.

Battery of the nation.

Battery of the nation. So, Tasmania is already 100% renewables. Every bit of energy in Tasmania comes from renewables, but they can get to 200%, and no point getting 200% unless you can send it somewhere. So, the Marinus Link is vital for them to get to 200% so that they can export it to the mainland and on– export it back when they need it, which is rare, but when you need it, you need it. So, that’s gone well, and we did the deal with New South Wales under the previous government — so it’s not a political thing under the previous state Liberal government. So it’s been absolutely vital. There’s no transition without transmission, but we need more transmission because renewable energy is different. The one virtue of coal and gas plants is they’re all in the same place, you know, they’re all in clusters. So you build a transmission grid around that cluster, whereas renewables are everywhere. So you need to get the energy around. So you need the new transmission lines. Yes, some of the projects have– there’s cost blow-outs like around the world at the moment because of supply chain constraints and, you know, overhang from the Ukraine war, overhang from COVID, etc. And there’s legitimate social– what we call social licence, which is probably not a great term. It’s what we we mean community support. If you’re building a transmission line through a community.

They’re ugly. People don’t want them.

They’re not popular in many instances, but we’re getting there. For example. HumeLink, which is the one to plug in Snowy. One of my criticisms of the previous government is, they said they built Snowy, but they forgot to plug it in. It’s like buying a, you know, a vacuum or something, but not having the cord. But they’ve reached agreements with 45% of the landholders. That’s not 100%, it’s more than you might think with the landholders where it’s got to go. And I’ve asked and said we’ve got to do better with these communities because fair enough, we’re coming through and making a big difference to their community. We need it, the country needs it, but they also deserve a say in where it gets built within that community, how it gets built, what community benefit we negotiate, etc. And in my experience, these communities aren’t anti-renewables, aren’t actually anti-transmission. Some are, some people are. But the bulk of people say, yes, I get why this has got to happen, but it’s got to happen in a way which we’ve got a say, and I think that’s fair enough.

All of this investment has got an implication for power bills — they’re already spiking. And I think we said we saw the ACCC just come out in the last week flagging that it’s going to review power price increases. And that’s despite record installation in Australia of rooftop solar. Does all that threaten to undermine public support for the transition to renewables? How do you manage that?

I mean, the risk is that of course people blame renewables, by people I mean the Liberal Party blame renewables for energy price rises which have nothing to do with renewables. You know, the IEA, you talked about before me, I’ll tell you something else the IEA said, 90% of price rises around the world over the last year — and there have been lots of them, you know, every country in the world is going through this — 90% of the price rises in energy have been caused by the Ukraine war. You might say, how could a war in a relatively small country like Ukraine impact on our power prices? Well, because Russia was the biggest supplier of gas, they withdrew that as part of the war. Therefore, when the price of gas goes up around the world, the price of everything goes up, including coal. So it has ripple effects. But, you know, again, it’s a talking point of the Liberal Party who say, oh, well, if renewables were so cheap, if renewables are really the cheapest form of energy, how come our power bills are going up? Well, I’ll tell you why. Of course, renewables are 35% of our energy. If they’re 100% of our energy, they wouldn’t be going up. If they’re 82% of our energy, they wouldn’t be going up by anywhere near as much. It’s because when you’ve got, at this point still the majority of your power coming from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are the most expensive, then yes, your power prices are going to go up. So the challenge–

It’s an argument to hasten the transition.

Absolutely. So, we get on with it as fast as we can.

Can we ask about electric vehicles?

Great things. Wonderful.

How do we speed the uptake of electric? In fact, Australia’s vehicle fleet seems to be going the other way towards these massive American-style utes and trucks.

Well, I wouldn’t dismiss what progress, with respect, we have made in the last year. When we came to office, electric vehicle sales were 2%, which is the worst in the world, lowest in the world. Not really surprising because the previous government said they’re going to ruin the weekend, so it’s not really a great attraction going by them. Right? We brought down what we call the electric vehicle tax cut or tax discount, which cut the tax very substantially for electric vehicles, particularly for companies, for fleets. As a result, today, electric vehicle sales are 9%. That’s not bad in a year, it’s not. I’d like better and more, obviously, but if you’d said before we won the election, you’ll lift EV sales from 2% to 9% in roughly a year, you’d go, Oh, that’s pretty good, I’ll take that. Now we’ve got more to do. Now, to your question about what more we can do, we have committed to and will bring down what are called fuel efficiency standards. Fancy way for saying we will make the manufacturers send us more no- and low-emissions vehicles. When you go to buy EV at the moment, in many instances you’ve got to wait 12 months. Why? I go to manufacturers, I say to them, why won’t you send Australia more electric vehicles? And they say, Minister, because you don’t make us. Because Australia and Russia are the only two major economies in the world that don’t have rules about how many EVs to send. So they don’t send them here because they send them to the countries that require them to be sent to them as a matter of law. So, hence again, you get the argument, people say EVs aren’t cheap enough. True. That in no small part is a result of policy because we don’t make car manufacturers send us cheaper electric vehicles. You go to the United Kingdom, you’ll find multiple models of EVs that are quite affordable by comparison. Increasingly, just like any technology when you start, yes, they’re more expensive. They’re coming down. By 2025, there’ll probably a crossover point when they’re as cheap as internal combustion engines.

2025?

That’s a rough average. Yes. Now, the problem is we don’t make car manufacturers send us the cheap models. So you’ve got young people, first car buyers, people working, you know, tradespeople who don’t have a huge amount of money to spend on a car on average, and EVs not currently a realistic option for them because we haven’t required those cars we send here. So, we will do that. It’s very detailed work, got to get the details right. So, we’re still working on it, but we’re going to do it. And that’s the next big step.

You announced today, Minister, that you’ve written to the Climate Change Authority to develop six sectoral decarbonisation plants. Now, without getting too wonky, what’s that about? It does seem that the energy debate often takes over the climate debate, but there’s a broader emissions reduction challenge beyond the energy industries.

Of course, energy is about a third of our emissions, which is a lot. It’s our biggest sector, but we could move to 100% renewable energy. We’re not doing the job unless we’re doing it all. And electricity is currently our biggest emitter. But as we get those emissions down by moving to 82% renewables well then next industry becomes our biggest emitter. But as we get those emissions down by doing safeguard reforms, then transport becomes our biggest emitter. And as we get those emissions down by moving to electric vehicles, then agriculture becomes our biggest emitter. So it’s a bit like a game of Whac-A-Mole. You know, you get this one down and then another one comes up. So the best way to do it is to have a plan for all of it, in every sector all at once, because we won’t get to 43 or our 2035 target when I set it, or net zero, unless we have all sectors working — agriculture and strategy’s important, not as important as in New Zealand where it’s 50% of emissions, but still big. So, you need a plan for each sector. And so that’s what I’ve announced today is to say, to inform our 2035 target and our 2050 target, which is zero, we need a plan which sort of explains what the government’s view is about how this decarbonisation is going to work. And one of the things that I took on board and listened to is investors saying to me more than I probably realised, we need these plans, we need to know what you think. And I said, ‘Well, why do you care what I think? Because you’re making billions of dollars in investment’. They said, ‘No, no, we need to know what you think because that will steer where we put our money’. So if you have a sector plan that will help us decide where we spend our billions.

So, they’re not seeing it as heavy handed government intervention for–

Absolutely. They’re asking for it. They’re requesting us to do it. That’s a big part of the reason why we are doing it.

Do you worry about the future for your own kids, Minister? What kind of planet they’re going to live on, and their kids?

Of course. And so do they but I don’t really like to think about it in that way because, you know, I happen to have kids, but if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. It’d still be a big problem, right? So, it’s about future generations, all of them, more than it is about my own children — as much as I care about their future, which I do a lot — it’s about everything. It’s about every kid, not just mine.

And what gives you hope that we can tackle this climate change beast? After 20 years of debate and so many prime ministers axed and fallen victim to the whole.

What I think gives me the most hope is just how much innovation there is in the Australian economy and business community. You know, I go to businesses all the time, who are doing amazing things. I was in Newcastle the other day, visiting a university, Newcastle University, but which is partnering with businesses on all this amazing investment and technology for decarbonisation. You know, carbon capture, use and storage is controversial, but you know, they are working with a company to capture carbon and put it in the cement, which makes the cement stronger. So, some people object to putting it back in the ground. Okay, that’s a debate which we don’t need to get into necessarily, but this actually captures the carbon, if we get it right, and puts it to use. You know, similarly, another company in the Hunter Valley, in Cessnock, is called MGA Thermal. They’ve come up, they’ve invented a new technology, which basically is a way of storing energy. You heat up these briquettes and you draw the heat out when you need them. It’s very complicated. I’m explaining it perhaps badly, but it has the potential to play a very big role in energy storage, which we need, all in a little factory in Cessnock. There’s a company called 5B, which I’m doing some work with, but they have come up with the technology–

I interviewed Chris McGrath.

But they roll out, as you know, solar panels on fields at a much faster rate than, than just– they’re like a concertina — you get up and you let it go and all these solar panels come out. Again, you know, potentially a very big innovation to the way we roll out renewable energy. All these are Australian companies. Get the policy settings right, get a government that cares, get the investment framework going. We’ve got it, we’ve got this, we’ve got the technology, the innovation, the know-how, the passion to do more. It’s not easy. None of it’s easy. But as I think I said at the outset, didn’t come here to do easy things. That’s not what politics is about for me, doing easy things. Anybody can do that. It’s about tackling tough things.

So, that’s a great note to end on. If you could please join me in a round of applause for Chris Bowen, the Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister. 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.