G’day everyone and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations which presents 100 visionary Australians taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. I’m Benjamin Law and today is number 18 of 100 conversations that will be happening every Friday at the Powerhouse museum. We’re so pleased and grateful to be having this conversation today on the unceded lands of the Gadigal. First Nations people on this continent have been sharing knowledge for tens of thousands of years. Together, these nations constitute the oldest continuing human civilisation the planet has ever seen. First Nations people are the world’s first scientists, engineers, agriculturalists and mathematicians. They mastered how to live sustainably on the planet’s driest continent, a feat that we are struggling with now.

So, we’re grateful to Elders past and present, that we can continue sharing important knowledge here on what is and what will always be Aboriginal land. And I’d like to extend that acknowledgment and my respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us here in person or watching and listening to this digitally. Our wonderful guest today, seated next to me, is a writer and researcher on social trends. Her eighth book, How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference, is a toolkit for understanding emotional responses to climate change and how we can have meaningful conversations across dividing lines. We’re so thrilled to have Dr Rebecca Huntley joining us here today. G’day, Rebecca.

You’re best known for your work as a social researcher and that involves you going out into the general community, getting the lay of the land, examining trends across demographics, societal shifts and then you really crunch and you analyse, ‘What does all of that conversation and data actually mean?’ So, you’re here today to give us that perspective as a social researcher, but it’s also focusing on how effective communication is an integral part of the solution to the climate crisis. So, before we go further into that, can you give us a bit of an understanding into what a social researcher actually does? So how do you go about doing the work that you do? What methods are you using? What are you looking for essentially?

Very broadly my industry, it’s called social market research. So, it’s everything from people who will work out what kind of beer you want to drink, to everybody who is going to work out how you’re going to vote in elections. Any topic really, we’re prepared to research it. Very broadly, it breaks into kind of two, quantitative research which is numbers, as you can imagine, so polls and surveys, and you can do that in lots of ways. And what we would describe as qualitative research. So, it could be interviews of different kinds or focus groups and they could also be done in lots of different ways.

I do a very kind of old fashioned, been around for a long time, getting people together in different ways and saying, ‘What do you reckon about X, Y and Z?’ We can do that in quite different ways. So, it can be everything from saying, ‘What have you been thinking about?’ Like really open-ended questions and seeing where people go. The other real extreme is where you present people with really clear scenarios, you actually give them lots of information and ask for their response. I’ve done that a lot in terms of saying, ‘Okay, if we don’t act on climate change, this is what the world’s going to look like in 20 years. How do you feel about this? Or if we did act on climate change, what would you be prepared to do?’ So, you put scenarios in front of people and get them to respond.

And when did you start looking into climate change as a part of your research, and why was it important?

The beginning of my social research career started with a book called The World According to Y, which is over 15, 16 years ago. I looked at Generation Y, young Australians, and it was lots and lots of interviews with young Australians around the country about what they felt about their lives in the future. And in that book, that’s 16 years old, I asked them every single one I talked to, ‘What do you think of the big issues facing your generation, political issues?’ And they said, ‘Mental health, housing affordability and climate change.’ Of course, we’ve managed to nail all those now, we’ve got, they’re totally worked out now, it’s a lot better. So it’s actually quite horrible going back and looking at that book and realising how we failed on those three issues.

I think we’ve obviously got more awareness around mental health, but we haven’t got kind of equivalent funding. And don’t get me started on mental health and climate. Anyway. So that was the beginning of my research career and it’s now coming up to 20 years. For most of my research career, I looked at a whole range of issues for all different kinds of organisations, governments, NGOs and corporates. And climate and environment was always part of it and I had an intellectual interest in it, but not really a personal, passionate interest. And that change, not necessarily for intellectual or academic or professional reasons, but for personal reasons and for the last three years it’s been my sole focus almost in the work that I do.

You mentioned mental health, you mentioned cost of living, you mentioned climate change. Over time, has that worry and anxiety about climate change increased in terms of people getting younger, becoming more and more worried?

Oh absolutely. Absolutely. So, let’s take your generation, Generation Y, who are now having children and not buying houses or choosing between having a child and selling it to buy a house. Those kinds of you know.

Or buying a house or getting lettuce.

That’s right. Those legitimate lifestyle choices that you make. So, I think that what has happened when you look at the kind of robust and trusted research longitudinally is that concern around climate change is increased but a kind of deep anxiety that the institutions that are supposed to solve those kinds of problems or address them, haven’t. So, if you think about when I did that book 16 years ago, there was still a lot of environmental concern, climate was starting to be part of it, but there was still this sense that, ‘Okay, maybe governments will get together and solve it.’ And we’ve had, you know, decade plus of inaction and bipartisan mendacity on this issue. And that has not only affected the levels of anxiety of people 40 and under around climate, it’s affected their trust in democracy and their trust in leadership and their sense that the people who have the power and responsibility to solve a problem that isn’t just a future problem, but a now problem, they neither have the capacity nor the willingness. And that’s why we see, in a lot of the research, what you might describe as a trust in democracy, generational gap.

Okay.

That’s not to say that young Australians are, ‘Yay, fascism’, but there’s something fundamentally wrong at the heart of either our political class or our democratic institutions if we cannot solve this problem or we cannot seem to solve this problem.

So, generation and age is one of the factors that influences how we see, how we perceive, how we talk about climate change. What are the other variables here and factors that come into how we perceive and talk about climate change in general?

Australia and the United States are in some ways unified on this question, is where you are politically. And that is not because climate change only affects Labor and Green voters, it’s because climate change has been politicised in Australia for a very long time, very effectively. There was some of that under John Howard but in the end it didn’t necessarily entrench itself enough to be really problematic when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister. But really the beginning was Tony Abbott. He very effectively used climate change as a way to create a kind of political wedge and that has brought about, like I said, over a decade of political mendacity.

So that creates a quite blunt paradigm where if you are conservative or aligned to the conservative ideals, you would be against climate action and vice versa. We’re speaking in 2022 now, we’ve just had a federal election that has really changed the game, not just in terms of

Absolutely.

Leadership, but also in terms of what even constitutes parliamentarians in that building now. Has that changed the paradigm? Has it uplifted it?

It is, but there’s been some things that are happening quite rapidly leading up to that that have made that possible. And as I sit here, I see, out of the corner of my eye, Minister Matt Kean. One of the things that are quite extraordinary about him, when I heard him start talking about climate change a couple of years ago, is I was just struck by hearing that kind of language, bravely and kind of unabashedly coming from the mouth of a conservative. And I actually said this to him once, I said, as I was watching him speak, I had this kind of sense of unease and I was like, where is that unease coming from? And it’s that unease when, I’m old enough to remember a show called Funniest Home Videos where they would bring videos of fathers who would be playing with a bat and ball with their son and you’d just be like, he’s going to get hit in the nuts at some stage. I don’t know when, but it will happen. But there’s that tension of waiting for them-him to be hit in the nuts. And that’s what I thought was going to happen to Matt Kean. I thought, Keep talking, I wonder when the hard men of your political party are going to rush in and hit you in the nuts.

So to clarify, Matt Kean, who works in State Government in New South Wales, Liberal Conservative Party, was speaking out and criticising, especially his federal colleagues when it comes to climate action.

Yeah. And also speaking about what we had to gain from acting on climate change, not just the kind of the language around loss, but the opportunity, talking about it in ways that were enthusiastic. We all can be winners here if we actually get this right and the more that we wait, the worse it will be. And so, I think that we’ve seen figures like him and other figures on the conservative side come out. But also, what we’ve seen is, we’ve seen the money change. We’ve seen the capital market shift; we’ve seen renewable energy become more affordable. We’ve seen the technology move and we’ve seen the world move and we could see it in the focus groups as well.

There’s nothing like having listened to these conversations for 20 years. For a long time in my career, most Australians in the focus groups I would do, would say, ‘Look, we’ve got a beautiful environment, we’re probably not the best in the world at protecting our environment and climate, but we’re not the worst.’ But something happened in the last couple of years where most Australians realised actually, we are the worst, we are outside smoking cigarettes with Brazil and Saudi Arabia and everybody else is inside in the party enjoying it and we’re going to be left behind and the door is going to be closed. And there was some anxiety around that. And then when you have different kinds of figures, talk about climate change, everybody from Andrew Forrest to Mike Cannon-Brookes to people in the conservative parties as well as the climate movement and other kinds of people talk about climate and its relevance to us. That landscape shift, as well as a whole range of other things, brought about the kind of change we saw in the last election, which is really quite extraordinary, complex, welcome and transformative.

Let’s talk about, more about how you talk to and examine Australians based on their attitudes to climate change. You’re involved with The Sunrise Project through Climate Compass, and that really, really opens up that conversation further. What is The Sunrise Project? What is Climate Compass?

So The Sunrise Project is a philanthropic organisation that funds a lot of community organisations that are trying to bring about an orderly and just transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy, so addressing the climate crisis. They fund something called Climate Compass, which is really an Australian version of a study that’s been going for over ten years in the United States coming out of Yale, George Mason universities called Six Americas. So, it kind of divides the community in terms of their attitudes to climate.

When I was researching the book, I came across the work, I thought it was really interesting, went to Yale, spent some time with those people, came back and thought, Australia needs a version of this. That was after 2019, which was supposed to be the climate election and wasn’t. And everybody’s like, ‘Eh’, a bit of a disappointment. And it was at that stage that I thought, we need more sophisticated tools to understand not just whether people believe the climate science or whether they like solar panels or anything. We need to understand, what are the values and mindsets that exist in the community around climate and not just do you think that climate change is happening and do you think the government should do something about it, something far more targeted and far more focused on not just how you feel about climate, but how you feel about a range of things to equip the climate movement to be more effective advocates, communicators and campaigners. They’re pretty good. That work divides the community into seven groups.

What are those groups?

So it goes from the ‘alarmed’, where you and I might be alarmed about climate change.

Yes, we’re alarmists. Is that what we are?

No, we’re alarmed. We’re really worried. We know that climate is something that isn’t just a, will happen sometime in the future. We feel it affects us personally, it guides many of our decisions. We’re doing lots of actions and making lots of decisions based on our concerns.

So people closely invested in this conversation.

Exactly. And it’s about 24 per cent of the population, so pretty good.

Which is not insignificant at all.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have a group that are nine per cent called the ‘dismissive’. Denialists would probably be a very small part of that. It’s important to know that. If you watch a lot of Sky News, you’d think that there are more of these people out there, but there are not.

But close to one in ten of a broader category called ‘dismissive’ is also not insignificant either.

No, exactly. And the thing about dismissives and about denialists within that dismissives category, is they’re very vocal. There are a range of different segments between the alarmed and the dismissive that are somewhere along the spectrum of how much they think it’s an issue, where they put it, rank it with other issues that matter to them. The important thing is to know is about 91 per cent of the community either think climate change is happening and we’ve got to do something about it or are really enthusiastic about the solutions to climate change. But how you communicate to all those different groups about what to do and what they’re prepared to do, where they live, how they vote is very different.

And I want to talk more about how to communicate to different subsections of the community really, really soon. But before we do, I do want to hear more about these demographics specifically as well. For instance, I introduce you as Dr Rebecca Huntley because you have your PhD in gender studies, I believe. Is there a gender line in terms of how much people are invested in this conversation and also how people approach it?

There is, I think it’s an important one. I wouldn’t want to overstate it. And it’s complex and that’s the other interesting thing.

Lots of caveats.

You get in the compass as opposed to the kind of generic surveys. If you did a generic survey about, ‘Is climate change important? And do I worry about it?’ And all the rest of it. You’d find that overall, more women agree that it’s a problem, want things to happen and place it up there on their list of priorities than men do. There’s been an enormous amount of work done around the extent to which women in social research like I’ve done, have always cared about the environment around nature, they were central to things like the anti-nuclear movement, peace movements throughout the world. They have at least been the ones organising, they haven’t always been the ones leading, but they have increasingly been that. So, there’s a bit of a gender skew there.

There’s a lot of interesting work done around the influence of gender on whether it’s okay to care about the environment and whether caring about the environment, it seems to be something that’s so-called feminine rather than masculine. That occasionally comes out in research. One of my favorite focus groups ever was all these young men, I was doing something on whether you should buy environmental products and talking about climate change with all these young men, and one of them said, ‘Yeah, no, we’re probably headed for some kind of, you know, climate based apocalyptic world.’ And he said, ‘You know, I reckon I’ll do okay with that. I’m like really strong, I’ve got a big car’. He kind of thought that, actually if we had an apocalyptic world, him and his mates would come out on top.

It’s suddenly a video game.

Well its suddenly Mad Max and he’s doing a lot better than all the girls who do well in maths in his class. It was just really interesting to realise, oh, actually that world that we’re painting, that apocalyptic world, is slightly attractive to them. They realise that they’d actually be quite well suited to that world. And to kind of say I’m really worried about the environment and how we care may not necessarily be part of their gender identity. So anyway, so there’s a lot of stuff around gender.

Certainly, what we do know is that and we’ve seen it in the extraordinary women who’ve stepped up to be community Independents and the support that they’ve had at the electoral level. We’ve seen it in the extraordinary leadership of the school strike for climate. Many of the organisers and most powerful spokespeople for that movement are women. And there is some really interesting research to show that actually young women are some of the best persuaders, particularly of their conservative male fathers around climate. So, there is something about that combination of gender and leadership that is playing out in the climate movement and of course, in the very extensive First Nations community and the work that they’re doing at the community and national level around climate, whether it be around social license for renewable energy or however that’s playing out for First Nations communities, women are some of the most impressive leaders as well.

And so let’s talk about emotions because you argue that conversations about climate require a focus on feelings as well as facts. How did you reach that conclusion?

Lots of things led me to that. I think the first thing was that realising that the people who are excellent at stopping action on climate change can’t rely on the facts, so they rely on emotion. They’ll say, ‘Well, if we go to electric cars, it’s the end of the weekend.’

Yes, we’ve heard that.

And if we do something about climate, you’ll have to eat tofu burgers for the rest of your life. They’re very, very good at that because the facts aren’t on their side, so they have mobilised emotion around fear, anxiety. But even in really, they’ll say, ‘Look, a world where we act on climate change is a joyless world. A world of wearing a hessian sack and shivering in a cave, eating a tofu burger’, which might be your idea of –

Oh, look, I think I’ve been at that festival.

So, they’re very, very good at it. And so, we have to realise why they are good at it. And they’re good at it because for many reasons, most people and by most people, I mean almost everybody – I’ve lived and breathed the climate movement and there’s a lot about the technical nature of the energy market and all the other things that are beyond me, and that’s somebody who’s paid to understand it. For most people who are just trying to live their lives in an increasingly complex world, it does seem really scary and so change seems scary. So, until that’s enabled in a real way and all of our leaders are singing from the same song sheet about the opportunities of acting on climate, then it is very easy to be swayed by emotion.

There were two other things that led me to realise that emotion was important, and the first thing was, in a sense, a recognition of my own blindness in my way that I approach things. So, I did a law degree and a degree in politics, and I’m trained in what you would describe as systems thinking. I think, Okay, well, this is the thing that law does for you. You’re like, well where’s all the evidence crunch it, crunch it, crunch it down and here is the logical conclusion. I didn’t do psychology at university but as a social researcher for 20 years, I had instinctively understood the importance of people’s emotional response to the economy, to a leader, as a way for them to filter the information that they get.

So, I don’t trust that leader, so it doesn’t matter I don’t like him, like instinctually I don’t like him for whatever reason. The things that he says because I don’t really like him, I’m going to disagree with them and so we filter in that way. So, I realised I had to get my head around people’s emotional response to climate because the evidence was just so obvious. The facts were so obvious, the scientific consensus was so obvious, the scientists were screaming till they were blue in the face that it was happening.

Australians actually have a really high regard for experts and scientists. It’s not that people didn’t really believe them; they didn’t want to believe them. Why? Not because they don’t trust science, but because to believe them would require a really emotionally disturbing thing to happen and they didn’t want to. So, I was lucky that I was able to draw on a growing but already pretty well-established body of work being done by psychologists about how people respond to climate change and that combination of how emotion drives political decision making.

I drew on that work for the book and suddenly things really started to make sense to me and that’s the frame that I’ve used. And it’s not that we should be communicating about climate in a way that ignores facts or is post-truth or any of that Trumpian stuff. It’s how do we find a way to combine feelings and facts effectively to persuade people when we know how they feel about an issue? So, understanding where they’re coming from and what are all the things that influence their views is a really important way. And then you calibrate fact and emotion for that audience.

So it’s not about dismissing facts because facts are the equipment that we need to use to even have this conversation in the first place. At the same time, the conventions of science require the conversation to remove emotion from it. This is about evidence; this is about hard data. And scientists don’t inject emotions and feelings into research, that’s not the place for them. So, do you think that’s been in some ways a hindrance for the science community and the climate movement who are trying to galvanise action on climate change?

Yeah. I mean, look, God love climate scientists, they’re fantastic. But I mean, we need to understand that most of the time they didn’t decide to become climate scientists or do PhDs in physics and chemistry so they could go on Q&A and argue with Barnaby Joyce. Nobody does anything in life to go on Q&A –

It’s a cruel and unusual punishment Rebecca.

I’ve done it once, I don’t know how I got there. So, we don’t blame them, that’s not why they study what they study, but suddenly they found themselves in a politically very difficult situation. Now, what they are is, they are finding ways to adapt to that and doing well. And the other person I can kind of see just above Matt Kean is Professor Lesley Hughes. She’s been a climate scientist for a long time and done all the things you’re supposed to do as a climate scientist but now her time is working out, we do work together, how you can talk about the science in a way that is structured by how people’s emotional response to that. So, it’s fact based and she kind of takes them to some basics and then she talks about the risks and then the opportunities, and she kind of ends on a high note.

The other thing she does, which I absolutely love, is she has this kind of modeling trajectory about what’s going to happen with global heating. Once you understand the difference between 1.5 and 2, which isn’t just a little bit hotter tea, it’s like it’s the difference between barely living and unlivable. She marks positions of where her children were born and where her grandchildren were born and all those other kinds of things. So, she overlays an emotional and personal response onto the data and makes it personal. It’s largely a piece of well calibrated climate science with an understanding that there’s an audience there that needs an emotional and personal kind of anchor to that.

I think one of the things about how our future has been imagined and projected by everybody, including scientists, but by all spokespeople and leaders, is that it’s been two extremes, one of which is that we can just kind of keep going the way we’re going and maybe somebody will invent some kind of CO2 sucking hat we’ll all walk around in. So, this kind of ridiculous faith, that we can keep doing what we’re doing and technology will save us. The other extreme is the Mad Max extreme world where we’re all drinking each other’s urine and that kind of thing. And both of those worlds are highly problematic, and both of those worlds are a barrier to action. Even the optimistic world that technology is going to save us is a kind of fantasy.

We have to change, we have to change quickly, there is going to be pain. In Australia, the concern that I have is the people with the least amount of power will suffer the most and there is evidence that that could happen. So those two extremes of those worlds, neither of them are helpful. One of the things that the best climate communicators do, whether their background is in science, politics, regardless, is project a livable world where we, which is somewhere in the middle, where we are acting, but also having to deal with the damage that’s already been done. We have to be realistic about what has been lost and what will be lost given our inaction. But we can also imagine a joyous world where we are changing and where we are all having access to the kinds of technologies and the kinds of strategies that allow us to live. And that collaboration, that visualisation of a livable world that is somewhere between the CO2 sucking hat and the Mad Max world is one that we all have a responsibility to paint. And I suppose for me, the best communicators say, ‘This is what we can do now to step towards this middle livable world.’

I don’t want to spend too much on the denialists and the dismissive people that you mentioned before.

But they’re so much fun.

And you also mentioned that because they’re roughly nine per cent of the population, statistically, mathematically it bears out that we all deal with them, that we probably have a loved one who is within that camp. You write in your book that not all kinds of denial are equal. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think at one point when I was thinking about denial, I thought I live with denial about the reality of climate change every day. I, we all have to, or we just wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be able to –

Get on with your day.

I wouldn’t be able to argue with my kids for 40 minutes this morning about who is going to wear a jumpsuit. You know what I mean? I’d be like, ‘We’re all going to die!’ We’re not all going to die but you know what I mean. In order just to enjoy life and to be able to function, there is a level of denial that we have to entertain and actually, in order to be productive in climate change you actually have, you can’t constantly be at a higher stage of state of alert and anxiety or you just actually won’t move forward because somebody’s screaming, ‘The end of the world is nigh’ in your face all the time is a problem. So, there is a level of denial that we all live with. If somebody is a denialist and all they really do is bore their family at Christmas about it, after they’ve had a couple of drinks, my view in those kinds of scenarios is just to smile and talk about Netflix.

Because you don’t think they’ll be able to be persuaded?

Well, it depends. I think that they won’t be able to be persuaded. I think about, I have a limited amount of energy and where do I direct my energy? If I want to sit down and have a really difficult conversation with somebody about climate, it’s somebody whose mind is at least a bit open. Perhaps somebody who’s like, ‘Well, we probably need coal and gas for another 50 years.’ I’m happy to step through a conversation, why do you feel that? What do you think? Did you know? A kind of an open conversation and that is quite tiring. And that’s not one conversation, that’s a series of conversations. I would rather spend my time doing that than talking to that other kind of person. If that person then decides to run for parliament, then we throw everything at them because their views will become amplified. And what we know from all the research is that even people who think climate change is happening and think it’s real and want something about it, they imagine that nine per cent is actually 20 per cent. So, the moment those people get a platform people go, ‘Oh well 30 per cent of people don’t think climate change is happening. They deserve all of this time and space in our public forums and their views deserve to be validated.’ They do not.

We are going to wrap up soon. But before we do, I want to ask you a few more questions about your writing. You write about the importance of objects of care, which is a phrase that I like when it comes to galvanising action on climate change. What are objects of care and why are they important?

It’s a term used by a bunch of psychologists, Australian psychologists actually, academics coming out of the CSIRO and Western Australia about how we can start the climate conversation, not with the science or not with the politics or not with the solar panel. I think an object of care is the thing that you value most in your life. And it can be anything. I mean, the obvious thing is a is a child, if you’ve got a child or, but it can be as simple as a value that you, or a place or a profession.

After, I had the opportunity to do the climate reality training with Al Gore in Brisbane, as I was writing the book. I met his team and got on well with him and they rang me a couple of weeks after the training and they said, ‘So the Vice President has an interview with Italian Vogue about climate, and he just doesn’t know anything about fashion. And he doesn’t really know what to say.’ And I’d just been reading the stuff about objects of care and so I briefed them. And I said, ‘Well, the thing is, I mean, think about the audience of Italian Vogue, the thing that they love is fashion. Imagine how horrible fashion’s going to be in a world that is something that, a world that is devoid of nature, that is burning, where people are anxious. It’s going to be a lot of black and geometric patterns.

Like think about what these people value, which is beauty and art, and nature is one of the original inspirations of art. Think about the things that matter to them and think about the extraordinary growth, and it growing more and more, about the ethical and sustainable nature of fashion’. So, say to them, start with that conversation, I had to kind of articulate that, and then scale up to why acting on climate change protects the things, the objects of care that they love, the beautiful, basically the extraordinary creativity of the fashion world, which would not be fun in a world destroyed by climate.

Thank you for connecting the dots between ecological crimes and fashion crimes, Rebecca. I mean, when we’re talking about objects of care, I wonder whether that’s a central kind of idea when it comes to Australian Parents for Climate Change, the group for which you’re the advisory group chair.

Yeah. No, it’s absolutely the case and it’s interesting, I love working with that group, they did a lot of work in the election. They’re a nonpartisan group, they have a fantastic campaign called Solar Our Schools. They only meet at times when, we’re in family friendly times and we tend to Zoom with lots of children in the background, so it’s great. I think the thing that people in that organisation say most to me, which I always say is that I want to feel like when my kids are older, that I said to them, I tried to do something. I acted to create a livable world for you, which was as important as saying, cutting up your grapes and saying, ‘Would you brush your goddamn teeth and do your maths homework?’ It’s part of that for me. I just really desperately want them to grow up in a world where there is joy, where they have the luxury of thinking about fashion crimes and all the rest of it, and reading Italian Vogue.

I think one of the useful things about this idea of objects of care is reminding us of the stakes of the conversation, right? And so, when we think of all of our objects of care, whether they’re people or anything else, given those stakes, what are the top key principles you’d like us to keep in mind when we go into our own conversations regarding climate change and wanting to make a difference?

The fundamental principle of communication is actually listening and understanding. For our parents and grandparents’ generation, there was a view about fossil fuels and mining in Australia as being important and being significant. There might be antipathy to the climate movement because it’s not something that they’ve ever experienced or they think it’s about a whole lot of people, chaining themselves to trees, all the rest of it. So, understanding the baggage they take to the conversation, by baggage I don’t mean that – we all take baggage, I don’t mean that in a derogatory way.

What I do is I kind of understand where they’re coming from, and I also want to get through our series of open questions where they get their information. So, people might say, ‘Oh, well, you know, renewable energy doesn’t really work.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, why do you think that, is a reason why you think that?’ And we have a conversation around that, I want to be able to understand that. I think the second thing that I always do after the listening and understanding and probing a bit is, I always find it’s very difficult when you tell your own climate story and for somebody to completely dismiss it. So, for me, my climate story is that I watched the climate strikers, I saw in them the faces of my children and I realised they’ve got to be really worried to be all together making these handmade signs and not doing dances on Tik Tok or whatever they do, whatever young people do.

And it just felt so urgent. It felt at that moment it was like they actually were speaking to me to say, do something. And I connected that with the need to protect my children and play a role in creating a world that their generation can grow up in, in a way that is livable, joyous and all the rest of it. And then I often say is, ‘And getting involved and learning more about it, I’m just amazed about what we actually can do. We have all the tools in Australia, in fact, we are best placed almost in the world, to do things about this in a way that can benefit everybody.’ So, I try and inject a bit of optimism, a little bit of nationalism in a way, not in too much, not too much of draping myself in the flag, a la Pauline Hanson. But you know what I mean, a little bit of nationalism helps.

And then I try and get a bit enthusiastic about it and use a lot of examples and that can often break things apart and you start to have a conversation that you can inform and persuade at the same time. So, it is a progressive conversation, but there’s two parts of it. Part of it is understanding where they’re coming from and what’s shaping it, what’s informing it. Part of it is talking about your own climate story, which is very difficult to dismiss because it’s personal. And then from those two things there’s a basis to go forward, which is again, a mixture of facts and feelings. And then of course, I often have a whole series of resources, whether that be people to follow on Instagram or links or stories, really again calibrated to who the person is, that I just send off at different times. So, it is time consuming, but it’s worth it.

Could you please all join me in thanking our wonderful guest today, Dr Rebecca Huntley. Thank you so much for joining us here today, whether you’re here in person or via video or podcast. To follow the program online and to listen or watch conversations with climate leaders, including MP Zali Steggall, author Ketan Joshi, New South Wales Treasurer Matt Kean, innovator, businessman and shareholder activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit 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.