Welcome, everyone to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. My name is Pat Abboud and I am delighted to be back here for 100 Climate Conversations in this incredible building, the Powerhouse museum. Today’s number 48 of 100 conversations. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change.

Before we go any further, I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon 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.

We are recording live, and I am very excited to introduce you to today’s guest. Ross Harding is a creative consultant and principal at Finding Infinity with a background in engineering and finance. Founded in 2011, his firm harnesses creativity to hasten the world’s transition to more sustainable practices. Harding advises on a broad range of projects from residential to citywide masterplans. In 2021, Harding published A New Normal: Transforming Greater Melbourne from a Consumer to a Producer by 2030. Welcome, Ross.

You said something once which has really stuck, and I kind of want to start there, you said in a roomful of creatives you’ve seen as an engineer and in a roomful of engineers as a creative. First, let’s unpack that. What do you mean?

Yes, I guess growing up for me, my two favourite subjects at school were probably art and maths actually, and I can quite clearly remember the time just picking to go with maths as a career choice. And so, I got into engineering that was always quite creative. Maybe it was my experience, maybe it’s quite common, but I feel that professionally you’re quite often put into a box of you are this kind of personality type. And so, I always used to try and use creativity through engineering, but I never really felt like I was given license to do that. So, over the years I guess I just kind of experimented in that space, creatively just doing a range of different things from throwing parties to making films, to kind of doing all kinds of different unusual projects and sort of over time I built a little bit of confidence around it to be able to kind of do both engineering and creative stuff at the same time.

It’d be great to understand how that pull between the two worlds actually drives your work. As a point of difference, which is a benefit rather than something that works against you, as you say. Now, you’ve finally landed at a place where those two parts of your brain actually help the work that you’re doing.

Totally. Well, maybe going back one step quickly, just how I got there in a sense was like doing numbers and proving numbers and writing reports very much on this environmental topic, sort of energy water waste stuff, calculations, reporting. That information, you would think that that would be really effective on all kinds of projects that you could just kind of write a technical financial report, solve the problem, hand it to someone and they would pick up that information, and be like, ‘Oh, we should do this. We’ve been advised by an expert to do this.’ But I find that reports like that are often, you do them for the sake of it, but they’re quite often ignored. And so, it’s the creative side of things to me is interesting in terms of communication. It’s sort of one thing is finding a solution. And then the other thing is basically how do you actually engage people in that solution? How do you get them excited about it? How do you make it desirable for people beyond just the pragmatics?

That’s a really interesting way to describe it. I think for people that perhaps haven’t come into the engineering world or the world of architecture or even the world of sustainability broadly and how those sort of two things come together to create more sustainable practices, you know, to affect change on climate, which is what we are here to talk about. In a nutshell, what is it that you actually do? How would you explain it to me if we sat down for a drink in a bar and you were getting to know me for the first time? In sort of the simplest of terms.

So, in effect, these days, there’s always some sort of minimum environmental requirements on projects, whether it’s a house or an office building or a hotel or a masterplan. It’s usually a council requirement or some sort of government requirement, building code requirement. These minimum standards are around. Now, they’re not very ambitious, They’re not very exciting. That’s typically called ESD consulting and sort of in the construction industry.

What does ESD stand for?

Environmentally sustainable design. And it was an exciting scene once upon a time, but over time it’s basically these people are advising developers on how to do as little as possible. It’s basically like, how can I help you build the worst possible thing to meet the requirements? So, a lot of people working in that space are very frustrated because they’re in effect, opposing what they’re in it for.

We come at it in a really ambitious, rebellious, unusual way. And we say to people, ‘We’ll work with you, but we will do it as maximum performance. We’ll help you do as much as you possibly can, but we’ll find a commercially viable way of achieving that.’ So, that’s sort of the bridge between minimum and maximum. One thing is finding that solution. The other thing is actually trying to deliver it, basically. And that’s where my team these days, are basically engineers, architects and even one of the team is an artist. We’ve got a really unusual mix of people to bring a different flavour of things to that process to plug into projects on all kinds of different layers. We get involved in market research, we get involved in branding, we will get involved in design, we get involved in the engineering, the financials. It’s quite all-encompassing now.

As you’ve been explaining, you’ve worked for, you know, more than a decade now in the sustainability space, designing, measuring sustainable outcomes for buildings. What are some of the key takeaways from these experiences that have shaped your approach to sustainability?

I think probably the craziest thing that is sort of front and centre for me every single day is that we are at this amazing point in time in history where you can either transform existing buildings or masterplans or even cities or create new projects that have no negative environmental impact or even have a positive environmental impact. And you can do that in a financially viable way. So, that to me is so interesting that there are no technical or financial barriers.

So, just going off what you said earlier, that big developers, big development projects can no longer say, ‘Oh, we can’t make this building sustainable because it’s too expensive.’

It’s a myth. Yes. You sometimes have to be a little bit creative financially as well, it’s not always about just simply saying, ‘That thing’s more expensive than that.’ In essence, I think that a lot of people like to say the technology’s not there, or it’s too expensive still. That’s not the challenge. To me and from my experience over time it’s always the humans, you know? There’s always a group of humans making decisions. There’s risk associated with it. There’s trying to be nervous about whether or not the target market wants it and all these sorts of things.

But what’s also kind of exciting in that space as far as I’m concerned, is I think a lot of people think you have to really come up with big crazy ideas to do something exciting in this space. But we’ve found over the years the construction industry really doesn’t like innovation. It likes talking about innovation. But actually, it’s logical, if you empathise with developers, they are trying to make a safe investment on a project, so they don’t want to take too many risks. The really exciting thing though is that we’ve become really close with a lot of developers and it’s funny because environmentally we were always like the bottom of the barrel. We were like the sub consultant of the sub consultant of the building services engineer of the architect who was then advising the developer. These days we work directly with developers, and we do all these numbers upfront with them and most developers want to do great things.

Your work is based on the concept of transforming cities, right? From consumers to producers. How do cities traditionally operate as consumers, and what is that impact on the climate?

Yes, good question. Melbourne, for example, has power plants out at Latrobe Valley that power the whole thing basically on brown coal, which is some of the dirtiest power plants in the world. 90 per cent of the homes in Melbourne have got gas connections, so they’re all burning fossil fuels for domestic hot water and heating. They use coal for electricity. There’s a whole bunch of dams across the outskirts of the city that feed water to the city. And then all of that, only probably 5 per cent of that is actually sewer and about 90 per cent of the water that’s consumed in the city is actually grey water. But all of that water goes into sewer and all of that gets treated and then sent out to the sea. But in the meantime the city’s running out of water. And then at the same time you’ve got huge amounts of materials that are getting consumed from all over the world and then they’re basically just getting dumped in landfills.

It’s a very linear process at the moment of just taking materials, consuming them to live and then dumping them. Cities are a huge part of the problem. So, I think right now it’s 50 per cent of humans live in cities. And I think by 2050, it’s about two thirds of the world will live in cities. And there’s estimates of impact of carbon emissions from cities is potentially up to 70 per cent of global carbon emissions as a result of cities. So, if you look at that as, yes, that’s potentially a big part of the problem. Maybe the majority of the problem. But to me that’s exciting. As a real optimist, that’s the solution, you know? So actually, when you look at it and you actually start to look at the problem, actually the solution becomes a lot more tangible.

So, it’s looking at our building practices, looking at infrastructure, all the things that your work focuses on.

Well, that after spending, it’s now probably 15 years of working on buildings. When you look at a city it’s actually – Melbourne is about 1 million buildings. So, actually if you look at each individual building, as you start to look at it as a collective, a city becomes in some ways like one building basically. But the transformation of that becomes far more interesting when you look at it at that scale, because normally if you’re trying to transform a building or a city block, for example, you’re limited by some of that infrastructure. It was always a dream of mine since I was probably about 20 to do a citywide strategy. I basically spent years trying to convince different people at councils to let me do it. I did a few free opportunities and never got anywhere, and then one day we just decided to do it without getting paid for it.

Ross, in collaboration with 15 different architecture firms, Finding Infinity released A New Normal in 2021. It’s a proposal for Greater Melbourne to indeed transform it from a consumer to a producer. Can you tell me about A New Normal and how it came about?

We’re now an eight-person team. At the time it was two of us. For a two-person team to spend 50 per cent of their working hours for two years on an unpaid city-wide project was professional suicide.

So, it’s called A New Normal And we realised at some point in time over the years, looking at buildings – I think we did, in the order of 100 projects that we’d done these buildings and we’d looked at what does it cost to go 100 per cent renewable on site? What does it cost to go water neutral on site? What does it cost to go zero waste on site? What are the payback periods? What are the operational costs? Things like this. And we found across the board, we worked out that on average it was like 8 per cent extra and they would pay back within eight years. So, the numbers looked good, but we looked across the board at those hundred projects and probably 95 per cent of them just got us to write these reports that they put in their top drawer and they never did anything with it.

So, it was partially through optimism, partially through frustration. We just were like screw it, let’s just have a crack at the city. And so, we spent two years just basically doing calculations trying to work out what would it cost to do that same thing for the whole city, all 31 councils combined, 5 million people. Instead of us coming up with a big idea or trying to invent new technology or something like this, going back to knowing the construction industry, we were like, let’s not try and be innovative about this because that’s not going to fly. The construction industry it loves talking about innovation, but it’s really risk averse. And so, what we learnt along the way was if you just add up the sum total of really boring initiatives that are all cost effective and tried and proven. Individually, like none of them are actually all that exciting. People always go like, ‘Tell me something exciting.’ It’s like, no, no, it’s all the boring things that are really exciting. So, if you sum total all the boring things on that are super cost effective, you can create this plus energy, water neutral, zero waste projects.

So, we took that same thinking towards the city, and we just said, let’s not make this our idea or our opinion. Let’s just do an investigation. And we looked into examples around the world of cities that were doing all kinds of different initiatives. We almost tried to picture that we were a computer, in a sense, and we asked the computer the question, if you copied and pasted all of the most cost effective, financially viable solutions from around the world and you basically applied them to Melbourne, how much would it cost? What would the outcome be? How much space would we need? And how many years would it take to pay for itself?

Okay, I’m really going to push your creative brain now and ask you to, I suppose, paint a picture of what a self-sufficient city actually looks like.

One simple way of describing it is like the only thing that enters, and leaves is people. So, it’s a city that kind of has no inputs and outputs in a sense, a circular city. A city where you have an endless supply of energy, an infinite supply of energy that requires no mining or no resources to do that. A city that has an unlimited supply of water that you don’t need to tap into water reserves or groundwater, and you also don’t need to dump waste into the ocean. And a city that is completely circular in terms of materials. So, basically [a] fully closed loop. So, everything that is consumed is going back around in a circle and reused infinitely.

But is that viable? Because I think some people assume, I think, great idea, it’s really innovative, but isn’t that slightly idealistic given the state of the climate right now?

Totally. And that was our concern as well, what would that cost? Is that really expensive?

Well, how do you shut those naysayers down, is what I’m asking you, in order to effect the change that you want to see?

We worked it out. We basically worked out how many solar panels you need. We worked out how many gas boilers we would need to replace. We calculated how many cars we’d need to reduce to and how many cars we need to convert to electric. We worked out how many buildings we’d need to retrofit. We worked out how many water treatment plants we would need to install across the city. We worked out how much food waste there was and how many sort of organic waste to energy anaerobic digesters we would need to install across the city. That’s kind of what we do on buildings and masterplans. So, we sort of just took that same approach to the city and we broke it down into 10 initiatives.

The outcome was that it would cost $100 billion. This is what we worked out, which sounds like a big number. And this was all pre-Covid. And so, cruising around town saying we need $100 billion to transform the city, we seemed pretty insane. But it’s a logical investment. It would pay for itself in seven years or less, and that would create 100 per cent renewable water neutral, zero waste city. Now, just as we were about to launch, Covid hit, and we were all disappointed. So, we sort of didn’t know what to do. And then we actually went back and decided to start to calculate the number of jobs that would come from it. So, we worked out to be 80,000 jobs in construction and 40,000 ongoing jobs from there. So, that was part of the interesting traction of the project was it was actually kind of like an economic multiplier that everyone was looking for.

The technical side, it’s achievable. We’ve got the technology. It’s not overly complex. What is complex is the humans and the system. Like there’s a lot of complexity there and that’s where we kind of talk about it as if you’re asking the question of why you need to do something like this, I think you’re having the wrong conversation and you shouldn’t have that conversation. If you’re asking the question, what needs to happen? I think you can probably jam 10 experts in a room, and they would pretty much agree within a couple of hours. But I think if you’re talking about how it needs to happen, I think that’s where it’s really like things get really interesting.

You’ve mentioned what a city could or would look like, but what about the impact of this new normal that you’re describing?

We tried to break it down into 10 things to keep it simple, because realistically, there’s probably, you know, like 10,000 things that need to happen really when you think about it. But we basically hit up 10 items that we felt were kind of missing in policy that we could find and create projects around. And we identified those things as sort of things that are not already happening.

So, the first one was to electrify the entire transport sector, and we were mainly focusing on individual transport because that’s not happening fast enough at the moment. Energy storage across the city, which is actually kind of linked with cars, electrifying all buildings. So, getting all buildings off gas. Energy efficiency and water efficiency retrofits, but pretty hardcore retrofits like turning all existing buildings into high performance buildings. Solar on buildings. Solar and wind grid scale. Water treatment. So, water treatment and reuse organic waste to energy. Ending landfill. And those first nine actually have nothing to do with new buildings, so they’re all just transforming existing city and infrastructure. And then the last one is basically a net zero code for all new buildings. So, anything new that gets built can’t add to the problem. If anything, it kind of needs to be there to help.

Where things got really interesting in the project from there is just not writing another report. Because writing a report is sort of – I’m used to writing reports that people ignore. But we basically grabbed that information and then we invited 15 of Melbourne’s best architects over to my home for dinner and we asked them all to cook up a project. I just sort of got up and poured my heart out to my friends. These are all our friends and just said, ‘Hey guys, will you help us cook up a render for each of the projects to help us visualise what the future of the city could look like.’ But actually the pitch to them was not to do some boring solar power plant or a water treatment plant or take a gas boiler out of the building. Do you know what I mean? That’s not really engaging for people. That’s not really exciting.

So, we actually pitched the idea of poetry. We said – and it was a bit abstract, but everyone was on board. And this to me is what’s so exciting about architecture is that actually I was pretty jaded by architecture before this point in time. I was like, architects don’t listen, architects they’re not really trying. They just want to do beautiful buildings to sort of blow the budget on facades and finishes to take nice pictures to win awards.

To sit on the coffee table.

Exactly. And I was like, architecture is an amazing vehicle for transformation. And so, we said to everyone, hey, we want you to find a poetic connection between technology and the people. So, using some form of culture. And look I use that broadly, you know, one definition of culture is the sum total of ways of living passed down from one generation to the next. I think that to me is where the ‘how’ becomes interesting. And I think this is where what conversation we’re having with who. And to me it was it was just an idea that we had about this. But I think this has been pivotal in trying to help to create these projects because, and I’ll briefly summarise, but in effect we launched with renders, we then made videos, social media campaign, we ended up doing an exhibition and we created these physical installations of these example projects, but they were kind of diversions. They’re not didactic communication, they’re really kind of abstract diversions. And what that created was – we actually launched in Melbourne for Design Week. We got a lot of press because we had a beautiful selection of photos, and it was these amazing architects that all put their name on it. Some of the world’s best architects are involved in this thing. And we got international press, we launched the whole thing. So, we launched a $100 billion strategy, and the pitch was we’re translating a $100 billion strategy into 15 tangible projects that we’re going to find sites and funds for across the city. And we ended up getting eight of them funded already. So, we’ve got like $200 mil worth of projects –

That’s extraordinary, well done.

That we’re actively cruising around the city. We’ve got sites and funds for all of these projects. Two of them are already in construction. The rest of them have been submitted for planning. So, they’re close. But it’s sort of – that is our way of taking this report and trying to realise that.

Let’s talk about some of the projects that you’re really excited about.

I’d say we’re probably working on about 50 projects at the moment and they’re all pretty exciting, but eight of them are specifically linked with A New Normal. I guess the main reason I say that is they are tangible projects that are linked with gaps in policy. We’re basically working with developers, some of them are council projects and some of them are developers, they’ve got some funds and they’ve got science. And they’ve come to us and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a project, how would you like to work with us on this?’ We’ve found a key initiative and we’re basically creating these sort of pilot projects, they are demonstration projects, they are example projects. They’re profitable in their own right. So, that works well for the developer anyway. The general public are already quite excited about some of them before they’ve been formally launched.

But to me, what’s the next step in the process is actually, so you built – for example, one of them is a plus energy retrofit of 15 studio apartments and it’s like, yes, okay, it’s just one building, though. How is that going to transform a city? Well through that one project we then now – actually it’s a funny story, but we’ve become friends with the unions, the CFMEU have come to us and said, hey, we’ve seen all the jobs that are coming from – because of the $100 billion strategy, $55 billion of that was in solar on buildings, removing gas from existing buildings and retrofit of existing buildings. So, basically transforming existing buildings. I think it’s about 50,000 jobs would come from that process. So, they’ve seen those numbers and they’ve said, ‘Hey, how can we help work with you to create example projects to then lobby government?’

What we’re learning through lots of trial and error and lots of failure of trying to put effort into all kinds of places, is it going to be effective or not? If you can create a physical example of what policy could be. This is basically what state government told me to do. We presented A New Normal to state government early on. And they’re like, it’s a bit too radical for us. You should go build that stuff with the private sector, then come back to us when you’ve got some example projects. So, like I said, we’ve got eight of them going now. The idea is once they’re ready to roll and we’ve done all the hard work to prove it, then it makes it much easier for a politician – it de-risks it from them from a public perception perspective, because we already know the public like these things and the developers already know they do otherwise they wouldn’t do it. It de-risks it from opposition from developers and the private sector saying, ‘Hey, it’s going to cost too much money and it’s a problem,’ because they can already see it’s profitable for them. That to me is the key, is empathise with the politician who wants to keep their job basically. One of the projects that we’re working on is a plus energy retrofit of the Plumbers and Gas Fitters Union building. To be able to have a politician come in and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to electrify the whole city,’ is something we’re trying to gear up towards.

Thank you so much Ross Harding for joining us on 100 Climate Conversations. 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.