Welcome everyone to 100 Climate Conversations. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time: climate change. We’re 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 into the 1960s. If you look around the hall, unique industrial features remain, including the imposing chimneys you entered between and coal cart rail tracks that run underneath this stage. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus towards the innovations of the net zero revolution.

I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which the museum is situated, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. I would also like to welcome any First Nations people listening in or joining us today and pay my respect to their Elders from where you may be coming from.

My name is Yaara Bou Melham. We have a very special guest today. Sitting here next to me is Richie Merzian. He joined think tank The Australia Institute as its inaugural climate and energy program director in 2008. But prior to this role, he was Australia’s lead negotiator on adaptation to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and helped coordinate the UN-backed Green Climate Fund Board during Australia’s tenure as chair. He co-founded the Australian Youth Climate Coalition in 2006 and also previously worked for activist groups Climate Action Network and GetUp. Richie is an expert on Australian climate policy and most recently attended COP26 at Glasgow as a commentator. It’s my pleasure to speak with him today for this conversation.

Richie, your career in climate seems to track the twists and turns of climate action and inaction in this country. So I think it would be really interesting to look at the last 15 odd years through that prism, through your career. Let’s go back in time to when you first graduated, it was about 2007. Kevin Rudd has just been elected Prime Minister, and he calls climate change ‘the greatest moral challenge of our generation’. Talk to me about what the feeling was in respect to climate possibilities, what you were working on at that point and then what opportunities arose for you?

It certainly requires going back in time and it feels like… I actually, when I was going to uni, Sydney uni, I lived just a block away from the Powerhouse, just right here on Harris Street. So it does feel like going back to that special time, and we had a big party to celebrate Kevin Rudd’s election. That year, I’d been quite involved in youth activism around climate change. So with a number of other students set up the Australia’s Climate Coalition, which was an umbrella group to get all different youth orgs involved in climate. Al Gore had released his Inconvenient Truth. I managed to finagle my way into a training course that he was running to learn how to give his presentation out and then had lined up a job with an organisation to work on climate.

But the most exciting thing was flying to Bali and seeing firsthand Prime Minister Kevin Rudd only a week or two into the job. I think half the Labour government were in Bali, and they received a standing ovation from every country around the world because Australia was reversing about a decade of being a laggard on climate change. [Australia] said we will ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which was the predecessor to the Paris Agreement, the main UN agreement on climate, and we will do more going forward, we’re going to actually implement some sort of mechanism to reduce emissions, to make polluters reduce their emissions, and we’re going to be a constructive player on this global problem. And this is a top priority for new government. I saw that firsthand and said, ‘I want to be part of this and if this is what the government is doing, then I want to be part of the government in doing that’.

And how did you wrangle your way into getting to that Bali COP [Conference of the Parties]?

I lobbied the dean of the law school I was at and then I also managed to negotiate to get a government badge as a youth delegate. So I was actually able to be in the room where all the negotiators were behind their country flags and see for myself firsthand how it all came together.

So you’ve got a bit of a knack for negotiating.

Yeah, for getting myself in the room, I guess so yeah.

Since attending COP13 in Bali in 2007, you have been to, I believe, eight Conference of the Parties meetings. Is that correct?

About that, maybe even nine, I’ve lost count.

And these meetings are the International Decision Making Conference of the United Nations Framework for Climate Change, just want to make that clear. But for those who might not be familiar. Can you tell us what happens at these meetings? Why are they significant? What are they trying to achieve and how do they actually work?

All good questions, or how they don’t work. Basically, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change started in 1992 in Rio, and it was the coming together of every country around the world, around 195 countries, to say we’re going to take climate change seriously. We’re going to take actions to avoid dangerous climate change, and that means reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and they mainly come from digging up and burning fossil fuels. And so every year, all the countries come together in a different location and tease out the next set of rules and policies to help them undertake those actions.

Now, they didn’t agree on the rules of procedure in the early ’90s, and they still haven’t agreed on the rules of procedure, which means everything has to be done by consensus. So you imagine 195 countries coming together and every time agreeing on every little thing. It is slow going. It is incremental. There’s this grinding pace to it all. There’s lots of backroom deals and nothing’s agreed until everything is agreed. But if there’s enough pressure and enough goodwill, then you see these things come together. They usually go a day or two over time, so you’ll end up negotiating for 48, 70 odd hours until eventually everyone comes together and you get the next agreement, the next protocol, and we make progress. And that’s all we have like it’s failed in terms of a perfect system, but it gets you slowly further down the track.

You are working in this newly formed Department of Climate Change and you’re representing Australia at various COP meetings, and it seems that, well, maybe if you can’t make a difference at home, perhaps you could do it abroad.

Yes, that’s right.

But then 2013 rolls around and a Liberal government under Tony Abbott gets elected. Talk to us about what shifts in this country and then what Australia does on the international stage, because that’s where you were working at the time.

Yeah, that’s right. I put my hand up to move into the international area and soon got a role as a negotiator and travelling to these UN Climate Conferences. And I was given an issue and I got to sit behind the flag and say, on behalf of Australia, we think this or we think that or we want to see more climate action here. And it was great. It was really empowering to feel like you could represent 25 million people to help make solutions happen on climate change and did some good work there. [I] managed to co-chair a few of the negotiations as well – so asked by my peers to lead work on shaping an adaptation framework to help the most developed the least developed countries deal with the unavoidable impacts.

But then in 2013, the Tony Abbott government decided that climate change was not a priority, that we wouldn’t send a minister to the UN Climate Conference, which is very unusual because they usually get political, they require big decisions. You need a political representative. But one wasn’t sent, and so I was amongst 20 diplomats sitting in Warsaw, where the Climate Conference was in the middle of winter, without a politician coming to provide political cover and without a clear mandate for what we were to negotiate. But all this drama that was flowing out of Australia into the negotiations and we were told, ‘Well, look, just use the lines that Prime Minister Abbott is giving on his interviews and see how that goes’.

So you’re sitting there with all these countries around the room just shooting out these ridiculous lines like, ‘This conference, is environmentalism masquerading as socialism, and we’re not going to have a part of it’. You’d see the faces of these counterparts who you’d built really strong relationships with just lose it, all this respect and goodwill that you had just flushed down the toilet.

And you had to say that?

I didn’t say that line, I couldn’t stomach saying that line, but my colleague did, which didn’t go down well. We end up getting a fossil of the day, which are like these awards for who did the worst at the climate negotiations. It just went downhill. And then even when they found out that there were 20 negotiators – which is not a big team for these negotiations, there’s about 50 different streams of negotiations happening at any one time – but when they found out, there were 20 people there they said, ‘That’s too many, start sending people back’ in the middle of the negotiations. So it’s just like every day there’s a sacrifice of sending one negotiator back to Australia as things were getting more and more intense.

And then what did you decide to do while you’re at that conference because of all of the goodwill that seemed to have been lost?

It really came to a head for me when I was negotiating on a really critical issue called loss and damage. So what are you going to do for the countries where the unavoidable impacts of climate change are an existential threat? You can just think… It’s not even that far away, like you think of our Pacific neighbours. Coral atolls, not that high up off the ground, where with sea level rise and desalination, everything and salination, they won’t be able to have a habitable island or a habitable country. What do you do? And so we were negotiating this issue. I couldn’t move on the issues I had. I had a hard line. And so I basically had to hold up negotiations, I don’t have a mandate to go further than this, this is as far as we can go so this is as much progress as we can make. And we’ve been negotiating from about 10pm to 4am. So we stopped.

I went home to get a few hours’ sleep and I wake up and find out that the developing countries, about 144 countries, said they walked out of the room. There was a walkout because of how Australia was acting. They said apparently Australia was giggling and munching on snacks and rocked up to the negotiations in their pyjamas and was being really, really, really out of line. And so I’m getting all these questions like, ‘Did you go to the negotiations in your pyjamas?’. So it just shows you how tense and how terrible things had turned out. And I wasn’t wearing pyjamas. For the record, I wasn’t wearing pyjamas. I was dressed more casually than this because we started 10pm. But no pyjamas were involved.

So years of international leadership and progress seems to crumble overnight. What do you do next?

The Department of Climate Change was dissolved after that, and I ended up being moved into foreign affairs and I decided I couldn’t work on climate change under the Abbott government. When Malcolm Turnbull came to power, though, climate change stop being a dirty word within government and there was a bit more breathing space and a senior person in Department of Foreign Affairs was asked to lead a team to basically turn a UN fund for climate change around. It was a US$10 billion fund, and so a small task force was being pulled together and I was invited to be part of that and as soon as I could, I thought, well, I miss being part of climate change. This was right after the Paris Agreement, and it seemed like the right time to get back into it.

And so this is about 2015 that you come back into the diplomatic fold to work on climate policy. Tell us about that $10 billion fund and what that is about.

So if you think about climate change historically, developed countries, industrialised countries – it makes sense that we’re here in this industrial relic – industrialised countries have benefited from decades of using fossil fuels to build up their wealth and their way of life. And so there’s a trade-off between those who have developed and those who are developing. And so the compact in the international space is that those who were developed and wealthy like Australia should provide additional financial support to developing countries to help them on their journey to reduce emissions, but also deal with the unavoidable impacts.

The main way to do that is through this Green Climate Fund that was created under the UN process. Every country chipped in. Australia chipped in $200 million and it raised about $10 billion. It had 40 board members – 20 developing, 20 developed – and it had to be consensus-based. And so we came in and we managed to get the board to work. We managed to get a new CEO in who knew how to make things happen, and we just started spending billions of dollars on climate change. And so from Canberra, we were able to run this thing and make it work, and it was an amazingly empowering two years back on climate diplomacy and [we] built up all this really goodwill for Australia again, because we were there as the Australian team making this thing happen. We got a disproportionate amount of money to flow to the Pacific so that our Pacific neighbours were feeling like we were finally doing better on climate change. We got more private sector involved so more money was flowing, not just government money.

There’s a bit of dissonance there between what you were doing in that climate fund and then what was happening out domestically. But then Scott Morrison topples Malcolm Turnbull and leads the Liberal government. What was his approach to the fund?

Within a month or 2 months of Scott Morrison toppling Malcolm Turnbull and taking over, he went on to an Alan Jones interview on 2GB and he was told, ‘Oh, why doesn’t Australia pull out of the Paris Agreement’ and the UN climate space is like, ‘Oh, we can’t do that. That would frustrate our Pacific neighbours too much’. But then, he said as the next best thing, ‘But we’ll stop giving money to all those UN climate things’. And that was it. Then suddenly DFAT [Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade] – Foreign Affairs – pulled Australia out of that fund. So Australia was no longer going to be contributing to the Green Climate Fund, wouldn’t renew its board position and that was the end of our involvement in that body. So now Australia is the only developed country, the only wealthy country not involved and not contributing to this key fund that is essential. It’s like the glue that brings the UN space together because it’s the goodwill between those who have benefited and those who haven’t, to take action on climate change and Australia’s there on the margins.

So here we have this other turning point with the current Scott Morrison-led government and we’ve seen on the international stage that Australia has gone back to being an obstructionist actor on international climate policy. Last November, you went and travelled to Glasgow for COP26, this time as part of your role with The Australia Institute. What was it like going back in your new capacity? Unshackled, as it were, from a diplomatic role.

It’s liberating to be able to just say what you think and to call things out as they are. I went officially as an observer, and my role as I saw it was to translate what was happening, what was the Australian government doing and what did it actually mean? Translating those little things so that people understand what Australia’s actually up to, not just for the Australian public here, but also for international counterparts as well. I really, really enjoy it because you can call it as you see it. And [with] the Morrison government at COP26, which the UK was presiding over and the US had [attended] as the first COP after rejoining the Paris Agreement, you had this amazing wave of momentum from developed countries. And you know, and these are Australia’s forever friends, right?

But Australia was completely on the margins when it came to climate. And so you could actually call it as you saw it and clarify that Australia wasn’t going to get the kind of applause that it wanted because it really wasn’t being a goodwill actor. And Australia is a big emitter. This is the thing, like the federal government would say, Australia is only 1.3 per cent of global emissions. But that still puts Australia in the top 10 per cent of global emitters around the world. And then if you look at what Australia exports to the world, it’s fossil fuels, according to Australia Institute research, Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world after Russia and Saudi Arabia. That’s the company Australia keeps now and so you could call that out.

The one problem with the UN system when it comes to climate change is it doesn’t go after the dealers, it doesn’t go after the supply, that is the problem, which is weird, right? You’re talking about narcotics. We’re talking about weapons or even tobacco. You go after suppliers as much as you go after users, but not when it comes to climate change. But Glasgow was different because it was such a big push to do something more. The UK said, ‘We want to consign coal to history’, and Australia was forced to actually confront that.

You said some really entertaining lines at the conference, but you said it in a pavilion that was sponsored by a company that is mostly fossil fuel-based. Tell us about that.

The Australian government decided last minute that it would pay to put on a pavilion. And so the Australian government decided to pay for a pavilion in the trade show part of the negotiations, which it hasn’t done in the entire time I’ve been involved in the climate space. And it decided that the number one thing it wanted to show off was its cooperation with fossil fuel companies. On one of the first days, it invited Santos, a major local gas producer in Australia, to build a diorama of their gas facility in South Australia, launch this new initiative that they were doing with Santos – the Australian government was doing with Santos – where it was going to give them carbon credits for burying some of their emissions from their new gas fields. So Santos would expand their gas and bury a little bit and then get carbon credits, which you can then sell on to other companies or individuals to offset their emissions.

And just to be clear, is that a proven technology yet?

No, carbon capture and storage is a colossal failure. It’s never worked successfully. We only have one carbon capture and storage facility in Australia, and it’s for a gas field out in WA [Western Australia]. It was supposed to start burying emissions in 2016. It only started burying emissions in 2019, and it’s still not fully operational now. And if you think about what happened when it failed by not burying emissions, it released 10 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. What is 10 million tonnes? Every single flight taken by an Australian in a year. So the failure for them to bury emissions like they promised under the development application is the same as just doubling our aviation emissions for a year. Carbon capture has had $4 billion of Australian government money. State and federal committed to it, and there isn’t a single successful thing you can show for it. And around the world, the only time CCS [Carbon Capture and Sequestration/Storage] actually works is when they use it for enhanced oil recovery. That’s where the technology started, to push down CO2, and it pushes up more oil. The whole thing is a giant joke.

So now you’re with The Australia Institute. What do you do as part of your role and what work does The Australia Institute do?

So The Australia Institute is a think tank that tries to be as much ‘tank’ as ‘think’. What that means is it does research that will hopefully make an impact – whereas an academic institution can progress knowledge for knowledge sake, a think tank is there to influence public policy for the better. My role is to do that on climate change and so I’m lucky enough to have a team of fantastic researchers who work specifically on climate and more broadly with some economists. What you do is research things that you want to see happen and find ways to either kick that debate off or change that debate if it’s already happening. We’re based in Canberra. I’m a big ‘Canbassador’, I really love Canberra, and that’s because that’s where policies are formed. That’s where the federal government sits. That’s where all the bureaucrats sit. That’s where the diplomats sit, that’s where things happen. So we’re just down the road from Parliament House because you need to be involved in the political process. If you’re not involved, it will happen to you. And climate change better for better or worse is politicised.

And is it political or is it just science?

It is science, but the application of that science is policy and policy is political. It always is. And in some places, it’s bipartisan. In the UK, [it’s] fantastic, that you have a conservative government that was the host of COP26 in Glasgow. It was Margaret Thatcher who was one of the first ones to sound the alarm on climate change. So that’s fortunate for the UK, unfortunately for us, it doesn’t operate like that. I think that’s for a whole variety of reasons, but that doesn’t mean that you should shy away from it.

So while perhaps federal policy isn’t really changing, we’re in this sort of stalemate situation over the last few years, nothing much has progressed in terms of executing change on the ground. But Australian attitudes, The Australia Institute has found, [are] changing. Every year since 2007, The Australia Institute has released the Climate of the Nation report detailing how people across the country feel about, what they understand about climate change. Tell me about some of the key highlights and how attitudes towards climate change have changed over time?

It is fortunate that we’ve had this long running survey, the longest running survey on attitudes to climate. What is clear is the concern for climate change continues to grow year on year. So just last year in 2021, I think 82 per cent of Australians are concerned that climate change will cause more bushfires. 78 per cent are concerned it will cause more floods. I’m sure when we do it this year, it’ll be even higher for floods. But the most interesting thing I found is within that you’re seeing those who are extremely concerned increase and those who are saying that the impacts are happening now.

Now the majority of Australians believe that climate change is causing impacts right now. This is not a future generation problem, and you can see why. In the last three years, with the Black Summer bushfires, with the most recent floods, these are all super charged. These are exacerbated by climate change. We know that we’ll have more frequent and harsher disasters, and we’re seeing and feeling it. You know, here in Sydney, you’ve seen summer double in length. So now if you look at where summer started and ended in terms of the temperatures you had in Sydney in the 1950s and ’60s, it’s now starting much earlier and ending much later.

And people are feeling this. They’re recognising this. Also, there’s a stronger appetite for solutions and that’s good because the economics are changing now. No longer is climate change seen solely as a burden. The economics around renewable energy have changed, around transportation, electric vehicles, around a whole variety of solutions have changed as well, and so the appetite to actually explore this space is changing too.

What have you found about perceptions of how big the fossil fuel sector is to our economy, to jobs? What sort of alarming figures do you have from that?

The mining and the fossil fuel industry in particular have been very successful over the last few decades to convince Australians that they’re essential, essential for the life that we have here today, that they provide a lot of revenue to the government and they provide a lot of jobs to the community. And it’s so successful in their campaign that when we ask Australians, how many people do you think work in the coal industry, they get it wrong by a factor of 20. And when we ask them about the gas industry, they get it wrong by a factor of 40.

So how much money you actually think the federal government makes from coal or makes from gas, given Australia is arguably the largest coal exporter and the largest liquefied natural gas exporter in the world? And they’ll equally get it wrong by a factor of 25 and 45 almost, for both coal and gas. That just shows you, the Australian government makes about a billion dollars from the gas industry, and people think it’s more, closer to 50 billion. It just shows you how successful they’ve been in telling you how essential they are, when really they’re not. And if you think about jobs as well, I mean, there’s more people who work at McDonald’s than work in the coal and gas industry in Australia. And that’s not a knock on McDonald’s jobs, nor is it a knock on mining and gas jobs. But they’re going to go because Australia exports most of its gas and it exports most of its coal. And we know that the three – almost all the coal, gas and oil that Australia exports – goes to three destinations: China, Republic of Korea and Japan, and all three are going to get to net zero in the next couple of decades. So those jobs are going to eventually need transitioning. And the more we pretend like they’re not, the more we’re putting those communities in harm’s way.

The terrible fires, the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and ’20, seem like a distant memory right now, as it’s somewhat been overridden by the pandemic. There’s been a lot of talk about a green recovery in some parts of the world, but in Australia, the rhetoric has been devastatingly about a gas-led recovery. What did you think when you heard about the gas-led recovery?

Any problem the Australian government has? Gas is the solution. There’s a war in the Ukraine: gas is the solution. There’s a pandemic? Well, we need more gas. That’ll create more jobs and more economic [opportunity]. Everything: gas fits into every hole. And if you look at how the Prime Minister went about doing that… When in the middle of a pandemic, he appoints a special COVID-19 Coordination Committee and he appoints a gas executive to head it up and they come back with a gas plan. It kind of blows you away, and at the end of the day, the only solution is phasing out fossil fuels completely.

The federal government has committed to a net zero by 2050 target without really having a plan to do it, but in any case, it’s committed to one. What sort of practical approaches do Australians want the government to take in order to tackle climate change? And what have you been hearing in your Climate of the Nation reports and research?

The federal government at the last federal election said electric vehicles will kill the weekend because you can’t tow, you know, your trailer or your boat to the coast. The Prime Minister brandished a lump of coal in parliament, said ‘Don’t be afraid’. So the federal government having a pamphlet around net zero by 2050 doesn’t necessarily cut it, especially when we know that there’s 116 new fossil fuel projects in the pipeline right now. Over 70 new coal mines, over 40 new gas projects. On top of that there’s over $10 billion in fossil fuel subsidies.

The federal government gives more money to subsidise fossil fuels than it spends on the Australian Army. But if it wants it to be taken seriously, it needs to have a plan to phase out a coal fired power stations. The UN secretary general is clear he wants to see coal power phased out by 2030 in developed countries. We need a plan to do that because right now it’s happening organically and it’s not happening in a clearly coordinated way. We need a plan to phase out eventually, firstly, to stop new gas and coal mines and eventually to phase out the existing ones.

Let’s talk about those solutions because you seem to have a very simple three step solution to climate change.

Look climate change, as for a technological fix, is pretty straightforward. Get to 100 per cent renewable electricity, then make more electricity than you need. Just go further 200, 300, 400, 500. Just keep making as much electricity as you can until it becomes super cheap. Then electrify everything, electrify your cars, your buses, your industry, your homes, get off gas for your water and your heating and your cooking. And then let’s stop cutting down trees and plant more trees. That’s it. You solved climate change. It’s that simple. It’s an ABC to solving climate change. And we’re doing alright, despite the federal government. We’re doing alright because there’s enough momentum right now that you’ll see the country get to 100 per cent renewable energy. The energy market operator is operating to see that happen in short bursts in the next few years, and you’ve got state governments committed to that, regardless of which political party. Now we need to electrify transport, you need to electrify industry and we need to deal with our agriculture and forestry.

And so what are the technological hurdles in order to shift to a renewable energy economy? And do these technologies already exist?

Yes, the technologies exist. The hurdles are the upfront cost. It is a bit more expensive to get an electric vehicle. It’s a bit more expensive to get a heat pump, and that will be especially hard on those who don’t have the upfront cost. So the way to do that is you make sure that you can carry everyone with you. Governments have a role to play in providing incentives or interest-free loans so that those who most benefit from having cheaper power bills can actually afford the tools to do that and emissions get saved along the way. Look, if every household in New South Wales switched to electric, got off gas completely, got an electric vehicle, got solar panels on their house, they’d save $5000 a year in their bills.

That’s the opportunity. If you look at petrol prices now pushing past two dollars, this is the time to try and make that switch. The solutions are there and governments have a role to play to make sure that those who can’t afford to do it now can benefit from it. Because if you take electric vehicles, for example, they’re cheaper to maintain, they’re cheaper to fuel and if we can find incentives to make them affordable and attract the most affordable ones here, then the average punter can benefit from it. Instead, we have the most inefficient cars in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development] because we don’t have standards – fuel efficiency standards – on our on our entire fleet.

So that’s a simple fix to transition into renewable technologies. But what about adapting to the threats of climate change? Australia doesn’t have a national risk assessment or adaptation plan, even though I think you’ve previously pointed out we help fund these plans abroad. What would go into a plan and how are we actually planning for the future without one?

We’re not. It’s kind of incredible to think that Australia doesn’t know how at risk it is to climate disasters. We’ve never actually taken the time to do a risk assessment, when you think about getting even just your car insured and you need to declare whether you park it in the street or you park it in your driveway – we haven’t done that as a nation to say how vulnerable we are [to climate change]. And so you keep having these natural disasters and people going, ‘Wow, where did that come from? This is unheard of or unprecedented’.

But if we did the time to do [risk assessment], we’d know what the impacts look like. You can add up what the potential cost would be and suddenly the cost of inaction becomes clear and it compels you to take more action. And obviously, that means reducing emissions and convincing other people to reduce emissions – other countries – but also building your own resilience. Make sure we don’t build in floodplains, making sure that we don’t just maladapt, as we say, in the climate lingo. That requires some hard decisions. It requires, maybe, some people to have to move. But that’s what we might have to do as a country to make sure that we’re protected because we know what’s coming. We know we’re going to hit 1.5 degrees of global warming, regardless of how successful the world is at reducing emissions in the next 10-20 years. So we need to be ready for it.

Directly after this conversation. You have to run off and brief some international diplomats about Australia’s position on climate change. Can you tell us about your meeting and how frank you may be?

The Australian Institute benefits from being in Canberra, we’ve got a good relationship with many diplomatic missions there, and so we provide regular briefings to the diplomatic corps around Australia’s positions on climate, on the economy, on international and security affairs. There’ll probably be a number of diplomats on this call and I’ll give them the same frank and fearless advice, which is that Australia is really failing when it comes to doing its fair share on climate. Not only is net zero a fraud if fossil fuels expand, net zero is a fraud if we invest in false solutions like clean hydrogen, like carbon capture and storage, like dodgy carbon market credits. Hopefully these messages go back to their capitals and then they can convey their dismay because many other countries are doing the right thing. They’re doing the right thing, like the UK was in hosting the COP, like Germany is highly reliant on Russian gas and oil but it’s still looking at phasing out fossil fuels even in this hard time.

So at the moment, your approach is the only way to really get some sort of action from this current government is international pressure.

It’s a sandwich, is how I think of it. So you’ve got a good amount of international pressure from the top and then you’ve got the domestic pressure from the bottom. That’s the grassroots pressure, that’s from individuals and organisations and state governments. And you’re seeing this now with the state government here, which is a Liberal-National coalition which actually has a plan to phase out a number of coal-fired power stations early to build renewable energy zones. It has some of the best incentives for electric vehicles. So it’s not about a political party, it’s about the ideas that they push and whether they’re right or wrong when it comes to climate. I’m hopeful because there is more pressure from the bottom and more pressure from the top. And hopefully that makes for a tasty climate solution.

Thanks, Richie. Please join me in giving a round of applause for the chat today. To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or to join us for a live recording, go to 100ClimateConversations.com. This is a significant new project for the museum, and records of the conversation 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.

This is a significant new project for the museum and records of the 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.