Welcome, everyone, to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you so much for joining us. This series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is climate change. We are broadcasting today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum, and before this was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899 and it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Yiradhumarang mudyi, Rae Johnston youwin nahdee, Wiradjuri yinhaa baladoo. Hello friends, my name is Rae Johnston. I am a Wiradjuri woman. I was born and raised on Darug and Gundungurra Country where I have responsibilities to community and Country. And it is an honour to be coming to you today from the unceded land of the Gadigal, and I wish to pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present and I wish to also extend that respect to any of my First Nations Aunties and Uncles and brothers and sisters that are listening or joining us today. Now, as we begin today’s conversation, it is important to remember and to acknowledge and to respect that the world’s first scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians, problem solvers are the First Nations peoples of this very continent from the world’s oldest continuing cultures, despite all attempts to erase them.

Our guest today is Tim Flannery, who is an acclaimed scientist, explorer and Chief Councillor of the Australian Climate Council. He was instrumental in forming Australian climate policy and served as Chief Commissioner in the Rudd government’s Climate Commission. Tim, welcome.

Now, you earned your PhD in palaeontology going back and that led to a very prominent and successful career in that field as well, full of achievements, including describing 17 new species throughout Melanesia. You did quite a lot in that field. What was it, initially, that led you to turn your attention to climate change?

Well, look Rae, I got a job as Curator of Mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney just down the road and it was just such a gift. You know, because they’d give you a salary and a desk and say go and raise your own money and work wherever you wanted. And I wanted to work in Melanesia, so I started in Papua New Guinea. And the privilege of studying at the feet of the great professors there in the villages, the great men and women, the older generation who knew everything there was to know about animals and the environment was just intoxicating for me. They’re the ones who gave me my education in a very real way and you realise when you were speaking with them that they weren’t just telling you about their experiences, their account of a species or whatever it was, would incorporate their father’s and mother’s experience, their grandfather’s, down through the generations. And, so, it was like opening an encyclopaedia, the book I hope to write about the mammals in New Guinea, it’s kind of like, it was all there. So that was – that’s how I got involved.

I also was very keen on studying the alpine faunas. So the high mountain faunas of New Guinea, which was some of the least explored because it’s so inaccessible and most interesting faunas. We were discovering metre long giant rats that were unknown to the outside world and tree kangaroos that no one had ever seen except, obviously, the local people before. So, that was that was a wonderful time. But I realised as I climbed those mountains that I saw evidence everywhere for the tree line rising and initially I thought maybe this is just some local thing. Maybe people are, burning patterns have changed or land use changed somehow in these areas. But I realised after climbing quite a few mountains that that wasn’t the case. There was some universal factor at work. I had read about climate change, I hadn’t really, because I was busy with other things, absorbed how serious it was. This was back in the late 80s, early 90s really. But, seeing that change, I realised there was an issue here and eventually it dawned on me, that if I didn’t change my career and move away from describing all these wonderful new species, they wouldn’t be there for future generations to enjoy. That I needed to engage with this climate activism to try to slow the rate of change, to give those species a chance at survival.

How does your knowledge as a palaeontologist help you understand what our future looks like?

Look, I think it’s so important to have the right time perspective when you’re looking at a problem like climate change. So, the Newcomen engine that James Watt kind of, you know, perfected, that was over 200 years ago. And that was the start of the Industrial Revolution and it’s taken us a long time to get to where we are today. So the appropriate timescales for thinking about climate change and its solutions are, sort of, they’re years and decades, probably decades or even centuries, rather than just days. And as a palaeontologist, of course, you can look back at the fossil record and see the last time that CO2 levels were sort of roughly where they are today and that was during the Pliocene period between about five and two and a half million years ago.

And I’ve studied fossils from all around Australia and the world at that stage and it wasn’t such a bad time, I mean, rainforests grew in Western Victoria where there’s now just grasslands during that period and tree kangaroos from New Guinea lived in Victoria, believe it or not, during that period. So it was different, but okay, but the thing that terrifies me, not the destination, it’s not returning to a Pliocene-like world, it’s the speed of the change. Throughout geological time, change has been gradual enough that many species have been able to survive. There are periods of mass extinction where you get abrupt change and things don’t have time to adapt to, and that’s what we seem to be going into now. So it’s not the destination, it’s the journey that worries me and I think that’s where we need to really start focussing.

Now, you are now the Chief Councillor of the Climate Council. What are the focuses of the Climate Council at the moment?

Well, we have worked for nearly a decade now trying to take basic science, climate science and make it understandable to the average Australian. What we’re really trying to do is just shift that dial of concern to allow people to understand how serious this problem is, what some of the solutions are, and what we need to do to enact them and I think we’ve been reasonably successful at that. You know, when the Climate Council was established way back in 2013, was something like 50 or 60 per cent of Australians were sort of concerned about climate change. Today that figure is way out, closer to 90 per cent and you start seeing, political action in following once you get enough citizens sufficiently concerned to vote the right way. So, I think we have been successful in that initial stage. Of course, there’s a vast amount of work to do in coming decades.

So prior to the Climate Council, you headed up the Federal Climate Commission before it was abolished by the Abbott Liberal government in 2013 and less than a week after the Commission was abolished, you and Amanda McKenzie announced the launch of the independent, not for profit, Climate Council. Now I’ve spoken to Lesley Hughes as a part of this series and she detailed that incredible time of transition between the Commission and the Council. What was that experience like for you?

Look, it was terrifying. But could I say first, that we worked as a Climate Commission under the Gillard government, reporting to Greg Combet as our Minister and I gained a great deal of respect for hardworking, diligent politicians like Gillard and Combet. They were the best people, in some ways, I’d worked with, and they knew that it was a difficult job we were doing. So, we had threats of various sorts, you know, issued against members of the commission and some pretty difficult times and Greg Combet was always there at the end of the phone if I needed to speak to anyone, he’s a real gentleman in that regard.

When we saw the end coming, we saw that Abbott’s lies about the carbon tax were really getting some cut through. Could I just say as well, just incidentally, that one of the great regrets of my life is that when we saw the truly despicable campaign waged against Julia Gillard, the ‘ditch the witch’ stuff that I didn’t stand up, there was, I don’t know why. I ask myself today why I wasn’t there in those things disrupting these foul campaigns. But for whatever reason, we didn’t do that. But the writing was on the wall for the Climate Commission. It was Amanda – I said, ‘They’re going to sack us all, Amanda, you know, that’s the first thing they’re going to do.’ And she said, ‘Well, why would you accept being sacked?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea. Tell me more.’ And she said, she said, ‘Well, there’s this thing called crowdfunding, you see where we could get some money to…’ And of course, being of a different generation, crowdfunding – I knew very little about it, but I had enormous faith in Amanda McKenzie. So, I said, ‘Well, Amanda, if we could do that, I’ll talk to the other Commissioners and see if we can continue doing our work.’ And of course, we did, and we were successful. But my heart was totally in my mouth. I’d had no experience of this. And I thought, if we fail at this, we will set back the cause of climate change years, if not decades, in this country.

You believe that?

Yeah, because it’ll demonstrate no one cares. If we don’t raise the funds and we’re sacked and we failed at this after making a public announcement, we try it. It could have been really tough. So, I was deeply worried taking – felt I was taking a big risk not just with me, but with the whole cause. And, you know, thank heavens. I mean, it was about 3 seconds after midnight we announced the campaign, someone from Western Australia threw in $15 and by the end of the week we had $1,000,000 and obviously we were headed towards success.

That’s amazing. How have you found the differences between working federally for the Climate Commission versus heading up the Independent Climate Council?

I think anyone who works for government will know that it’s – people are very precautionary. So, there’s a lot of risks you can’t take. And the reason for that, of course, is you can embarrass your Minister. And that’s a fair thing in politics. But I’ve found that in the Climate Council situation, we’re much freer and we can be more effective, actually, with the money we have. So, probably a dollar put into the federal – by the federal government, into the Climate Commission was buying, kind of, only $0.20 worth of activity that we run today, if you know what I mean? Because we can take a few risks and we can be much more proactive than we could have under the federal government. So, in the end, Tony Abbott did us a favour. So, thank you, Tony. You’ve done a good thing for climate change.

That is a phrase I never thought I’d hear you say, but thank you. Now, your recent book, The Climate Cure, that explored solving the climate emergency in the era of COVID-19. What are some of the parallels we can draw from the response to COVID-19 to take meaningful and decisive action on climate change?

Well, the message I took away from the federal government’s reaction to COVID, was that in moments of emergency, government can do great things. So, I remember speaking to our Chief Health Officer in the January just before COVID broke out in Australia – he was deeply concerned and was clearly speaking with the federal government, with the Prime Minister. And two weeks before the WHO declared the COVID situation an emergency – a pandemic – the Australian federal government declared it a pandemic. So, we were two weeks ahead of the world with that. You know, we’d stopped flights from China earlier, which had a big economic impact. So, what I saw was, here was a government that could be proactive. It could take economically adverse decisions, it could listen to science in an effort to get on top of the – of the problems of the pandemic presented. So, I thought if they can do that with the pandemic, why can’t we do it with climate change? We’ve got the scientists telling the government what they need to do. We know we have to take some actions that will have an economic impact. We need to make investments, obviously, and spend some money to deal with the problem. Why aren’t we doing it? And it came down to pure ideology, I think. I find it incredible that anyone would take an issue as serious as climate change and filter it through an ideological lens. But some people do.

Now, in 2005, you wrote The Weather Makers, which was a hugely popular book that went on to be translated in 20 languages and that explored climate change. And in the wake of its success, you were awarded the 2007 Australian of the Year for your contribution to action on climate change. How do you reflect on that achievement 15 years later?

Looking in retrospect, I suppose we could all think of things we could have done better or differently. And, when an issue was as serious as our children’s future, climate change really is about our children’s future. You do think, maybe I could have done this or that differently. But all I can say is that I gave it my best effort, I really did. And it was incredibly hard work. Being Australian of the Year was – there was three years where I basically had no private life because the demand for engagement by public and industry and government is just so great. I think I’m glad I was given the opportunity, put it that way, to try to highlight the issue, as I did.

You sound like you feel like you failed.

Well, you know, look at where we are today. So, since I was Australian of the Year to today, our species has emitted between 25 and 30 per cent of all of the greenhouse gases that it has ever emitted over a million years of history. So, is that a success or was that a failure? We’re not on a good trajectory at the moment globally and I feel that very deeply. And you know, I was more optimistic, I think, when I was Australian of the Year, that the solution seemed so simple and we were getting buy in from people around the world with the book, but subsequently we haven’t got to where we need to get to.

But today I think we can start to see the trajectory bend. You know, for the first time, I can see a real decoupling between economic growth and emissions growth. And that’s because the amount of renewables now has become quite substantial. You know, just looking at the trajectory for electric cars, back in 2011, Tesla had made 500 cars to that point. Right? Not a lot. This year, there was over 7.6 million electric vehicles sold worldwide and that’s still less than a 10th of the total fleet sales, but we are building scale.

So I want to talk to you about one of your key focuses at the moment, which is drawdown. Could you explain the concept of drawdown please?

We’ve known since about 2009 with the failure of the Copenhagen meeting, that we would need some degree of drawdown, of getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, if we were to meet our targets of keeping warming below two degrees. That’s because the emissions growth was so great that none of the projections for renewable energy, the transition, were going to be sufficient to make it.

So, drawdown can take a whole lot of different forms, planting trees is a form of drawdown because a tree is basically congealed CO2. You know, it’s one way of looking at it, you can see by how big a tree is, how much carbon it’s drawn down over its life if you imagine its roots as well. You can store carbon, CO2, in soils, you can store it in the deep ocean, you can store it in rocks. There’s a whole lot of ways of dealing with excess CO2 in the atmosphere and drawing it down. I guess when you look across those varieties of ways of doing it, you realise some of them are a bit short term. So, a tree draws down CO2, but when it dies it doesn’t just lay there forever, it rots away, yeah? And what happens when a tree rots away? It’s just the CO2 going back to the atmosphere, right? So as long as the tree is alive, the CO2’s sequestered. But something like putting the CO2 into the rocks, that’s a more permanent solution. It’s a complex area, but there are various options.

Which option excites you the most?

There’s a couple that excite me. One is using seaweed, because we have the oceans, they’re huge and seaweed grows incredibly fast and it sequesters lots of carbon. The trouble is, you’ve got to then move that seaweed into the deep ocean in order to sequester it permanently. We think we can see ways of doing that, so there’s a lot of opportunities there. The other way is by using silicate rocks and that excites me a lot because silicate rocks, they form at the mid-ocean ridge. As they weather away, they take CO2 out of the atmosphere, basically. So, I don’t know whether you know olivine, it’s a lovely green crystal that you see sometimes – you’ll see it in a museum. But around volcanic rocks – it’s very abundant the mantle and you find it sometimes in volcanic rocks. Well, if you take a kilogram of olivine and break it up and expose it to the air, it will sequester 1.25 kilograms of CO2 and will do it quite quickly.

Oh wow.

And form a carbonate, yeah. And so, people are looking at these kinds of rocks. It’s not just olivine, it’s many kinds that can sequester CO2 as they decompose. And there seem to be some really significant co-benefits to this, because if you take silicate rocks, grind them up, throw them on an agricultural field, for example, not only will they sequester CO2, but they enhance crop growth because they’re full of minerals that plants need. So, the early trials done in the US have shown that if you use certain silicate rocks on corn, for example, you can get a 10 or 20 per cent enhancement in growth rate of the corn and yield of the corn, as a result of that.

That’s incredible.

It’s fantastic and Australia is rich in silicate rocks. And the one thing about this country, we know how to mine, right, we do know how to mine.

To our detriment, yes.

Exactly. But if we could ever have mining here that was emissions free – and we’re seeing moves towards that already – and transport that’s emissions free, we could use silicate rocks at some scale in this country to draw down CO2. And some of the greatest minds in climate science, like James Hansen, have published studies showing that using these rocks, we could draw down between 30 and 300 parts per million of CO2 by the end of the century. And that’s massive. You know, it’s only 480 parts per million in the atmosphere. So, there’s a lot of potential in these areas.

I do want to go back to seaweed for a little bit because I’m incredibly interested in seaweed, you’re incredibly interested in seaweed, let’s talk about seaweed. And you have written that farming at sea is necessary for our future. But I’d love to hear from you why it is so vital and how do we get to a point where we are farming at scale?

Well, the good news is we’ve just started. So, the very first ocean going seaweed farm, growing kelp, giant kelp, has just been set off – up off the coast of Namibia. And I’m on the advisory board for the foundation of that entity that’s looking at all of the science around how the seaweed might sequester carbon. But, you know, it’s looking quite promising that enterprise, it’s called Kelp Blue, kelp forests. And the idea there is we’ll be growing the thousands and thousands of tons of seaweed for use in a whole lot of industrial processes. But, as we grow the seaweed, some of it will drift off on the Benguela Current off that African coast and get into deep water and therefore sequester large volumes of CO2. So, the enterprise has already started. It’s like Tesla was back in 2008, probably, when it only made 50 cars. It’s very early days, but we can see that there’s some promise in it.

Now, we are hearing more about the possibilities of carbon capture technologies like direct air capture, and sometimes they can seem like a little bit of a band aid solution; just keep pumping greenhouse gas out and slap a filter on it. Is there merit in these technologies, do you think?

I do think there is. Anything you go into of this nature can be a double edged sword. So, you’re quite right in saying that if the fossil fuel companies feel that there’s a cost effective way of getting gas out of the air, that that will be a license for them to continue to pollute. That’s true. And I worry about that. But on the other side, if you don’t develop these industries, we won’t have a hope of getting in under two degrees. So, it’s a risk – it’s a balanced risk. All I can say is that in the real world, things are looking a bit different from what you might predict from that model of risk analysis.

So, a good example of that is Carbon Engineering, who are a Canadian based company that have developed a direct air capture technology, which is quite cost effective. They are taking advantage of some Californian laws, which pay $260 a tonne for captured carbon that is sequestered permanently. And they’re doing that, they’re capturing carbon and putting it into the rocks. But they are also using that captured carbon, along with hydrogen from hydrolysis, using clean energy to make jet fuel, clean jet fuel that’s carbon neutral because it’s made from atmospheric CO2 plus hydrogen. And, that jet fuel is better quality than the stuff we put in our planes today cause it’s got no contaminants in it, right – as well as being carbon neutral. The only problem at the moment is it’s expensive and you can’t source it at scale, but you couldn’t source Tesla’s at scale a decade ago. So, I’m sort of hopeful that these technologies will actually be direct competition for fossil fuels. And we shall see.

Now, your work has also explored some of the lesser known renewable technologies. Could you talk to us a little bit about concentrated solar thermal technology? And is this something that you could see contributing to the renewable energy system in Australia?

Well, look, the concentrator solar thermal technologies are fascinating. They all involve using heat energy to generate electricity. So, through a turbine – they’re kind of like a hybrid between solar and conventional energy in that sense. But they can be very large scale and they can provide you with, more or less, 24/7 electricity. So, one of the most interesting of these technologies was developed by a little Italian company called Magaldi Solar in Salerno, Italy. And they have a little unit 80 metres by 80 metres –

Just a little one.

Yeah. This concentrated solar thermal, it’s tiny. Some of these things are a thousand hectares, you know, they’re gigantic. And the key to the Magaldi thing is that the heat is transferred into sand and sand is used to store the heat. Now, why sand? Because, if you blow air up through sand and create a sort of an air bed, sand becomes a tremendously efficient conductor of heat. If you take the air out and just let it sit, sand is a tremendous insulator and won’t lose its heat for a long time. So, it’s an ideal battery, right? And just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen a giant sand battery developed in Finland – hundreds of tons of sand that provides a week’s worth of energy, right. Australia, we have a lot of sand.

We have a lot of sand.

As you know.

We have a lot of room; we have a lot of sand.

Exactly. So, we got a great battery just sitting there waiting to be used and you can store it up to 800, 900,000 degrees C in these sand batteries. That’s, you know, that’s a massive, very, very high-density energy source. So, we shall see how all of that develops. But I think that those technologies need to be looked at seriously. Because you think sand compared with lithium ion – all you need to do is sieve the sand to get the right grain size and throw it in and it works for years. You just need to top it up a little bit as some of the sand breaks down.

So, do they exist anywhere in Australia at the moment?

No, we’re well behind. I mean, here we are with all this sand, with a crying need for renewable energy. And Finland, of all places, does it. You know, the Magaldi Solar in Salerno is very fortunate because the University of Naples has the greatest expertise anywhere globally on heat transfer technologies and they’ve really piggybacked on that university expertise. But here in Australia, we’ve got a great solar expertise, but we need more focus on storage – cheap and efficient storage.

So, you do see this being as something that has a greater uptake in the future, even though that we’ve got tried and tested technologies that we could maybe be focussing on as well?

Well, look, I do, look, concentrator solar had a bit of a setback five or six years ago when these gigantic sol – concentrator solar farms were built in the US. One was called Ivanpah. I think it’s like a thousand megawatts, it’s gigantic. You can – so I’ve flown over it and you can see it. The head of the thing glows with the heat and energy all deflected.

Wow.

You know, and the trouble with that is you’ve got all these mirrors focussing on this central point and the air gets very hot around it. And migrating birds fly through that beam of light and they’re cooked on the way through. So, they come out kind of as KFC at the other end. Even endangered species like peregrine falcons and things. So that sort of approach has been a setback, but the general principle that you can use concentrated sunlight to create sufficient heat to then set up a storage unit and run a turbine is what’s so exciting. So, I think that there’s been some dead ends with the technology, but there are still extremely valuable lessons to be learnt from it.

So, you have been described many times by the media as ‘a national treasure’, but also by some climate denialists, you’ve been described as ‘a guru who gets it wrong.’ How do you navigate being on the forefront of climate change activism? How do you deal with the critics?

Oh, look, that’s a great question. And for me personally, I think I can manage it. And that’s because, if you look back to even Rachel Carson, Silent Spring in 1962, she was a very brave woman who warned against the dangers of pesticides. But the pesticide companies employed someone to shadow her and give a talk at every one of her talks, the next day, putting the opposing case, that pesticides were harmless, right? And they spent a lot of money trying to discredit her. And it’s been the same ever since, whether it’s been tobacco, big oil and fossil fuels, whatever, you know, there is a cost of being proactive in these areas.

I’m quite happy to live with that, the stress of dealing with that. But it’s quite different when it comes to your family. I remember when I was Climate Commissioner, my children were much younger than they are today and, you’d walk down the street and someone say, ‘Oh, there goes, Mr f-ing carbon tax’ and you just could not escape it. It was just this constant pushback, even though I wasn’t responsible for the carbon tax, you know. So that was hard, I won’t deny that. But what are you going to do? Are you going to give up and just say, ‘Oh no, it’s all too, you know, too much?’ I don’t think so. Not when the stakes are so high.

You never thought about giving up?

No. I did escape into a sort of a little world I created, though I – the only work of fiction I’ve ever written was written over that time and it was just so that it would give me a place I could go and get away from it. And so, when you create a world of fictions in your head and you can go back and build on it and stuff. So that was, that was my escape. But no you realise that there is just a cost and that cost has to be borne, you know.

Do you have any advice for people who are combating denialists in their own life?

Look, the first thing that I learnt is you have to treat everyone with respect. And if you treat people with respect, they start to listen a little bit. And could I just tell you a story? Right, so last year I went out to Young, a regional town in Australia to talk about climate change and the threats to climate change. And there’s quite a group out there who are interested in this, who came to a meeting with some councillors. Now the Mayor of Young, at that stage, was a retired sheep shearer, didn’t know a lot about climate change. You know, the kind of people, right – talking about? But he at least had us there. And a couple of councillors came, including one old guy in his seventies, came in a suit and tie very formally dressed up, even though it was an early morning meeting and I was much less well dressed. And he stood up and harangued us for about 10 minutes about how climate change was absolute rubbish and all the rest.

At the end of it, I just stood up and said, ‘Look, thank you for coming because you know, just being here is important to us. We want to engage with the community regardless of what their views are.’ And at morning tea I sought the guy out and just started talking to him and said, ‘What do you do for a living here in town?’ And he said, ‘Oh I play in a band.’ And I said, ‘What do you play?’ He said, ‘The piano accordion.’ And I said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t believe it. I took my first played – piano accordion lesson about three weeks ago and he said, ‘Oh, what do – ‘ And at that moment, we had this bonding over this piano accordion, and he said, ‘You must come back. Please come back into town and give us another talk and we want to get a bigger group here and have the whole council present.’ And it was this moment where you, kind of, reaching out to someone as a fellow human across that divide. And I realised that he’d probably got used to being the cranky old uncle figure, you know, stirring up the young people in town and kind of playing this role that perhaps he wasn’t as wedded to as you might think. So, if you’re dealing with someone who’s a climate denialist, I can only suggest you try to build that bridge somehow and touch ’em as a fellow human being and not just see the climate denialists there.

I’d love to hear more about the local climate initiatives that you’re involved in at the moment.

Well, my goodness, look, I’m still involved with quite a lot in Melanesia. So, I’ve been involved with an initiative in northern New Guinea, which has been running for 23 years now, which conserves some tree kangaroos that I described way back in the 1980s. And we’re working with the community there to protect forests and sequester carbon and protect biodiversity in exchange for development, in exchange for solar panels, alternative sources of protein, water tanks, just – and it’s amazing the difference that it makes. When we put water tanks in these villages, the incidents of diarrhoeal diseases dropped 80 per cent overnight and all of a sudden kids could go to school. Women weren’t spending 3 hours a day carrying water from the local creek a long way away. And people are so passionate now about their biodiversity and about protecting their forests there, it’s wonderful.

We started another project in the Solomon Islands, the same sort of thing where people were having their forest stolen from them by, basically, illegal loggers. We helped that community set up a community conservation alliance that could receive funding and protect their forests. And we engaged scientists to go up there and have a dialogue with people. And that’s another tremendously successful project that’s now six years old.

Closer to home, though, you’re even involved in initiatives in your hometown. Can you tell me about those?

Oh, yeah, I am. Look, Saul Griffith is a wonderful neighbour of ours there and Saul and I have been talking about the idea of getting the Austinmer community together to try to become a sort of standalone part of the grid to control our own energy futures. So that – it’s very early days for any of this. We’re still at the discussion stage, but I think there’s some real prospects that that might get done. So, you’ve got to be active where you can – where you can be effective. And for me, it’s my local communities and all those people who brought me up, in a way, in Melanesia.

As individuals wondering where we can be of most use, what general advice do you have? I understand that it would be specific to circumstances, but there’s a lot of people that want to help take action on climate change.

Yeah.

But don’t know what the best path forward is.

Wow, there’s so many ways to answer that. Addressing climate change is part of a bigger societal shift that we’re seeing. You know, the era of fossil fuels was an era where very few people controlled the means of production and became enormously wealthy and all of us were the customers. So, the modern world we’re moving into is one where each of us has some more power over our energy destinies and our energy generation.

It’s a world of more equal opportunity. I think this trend towards getting rid of sexism is incredibly important – and sexual discrimination of all sorts is incredibly important because it empowers the individual. And this is all about – isn’t it? It’s about individuals and our autonomy in the world. So, that, as much as that sounds left field for me, it’s sort of central to the whole thing. And that’s why I wanted to promote people like Amanda and other young women to give them the voice that’s necessary to make this shift a more holistic shift. You know, so that’s important. I think the whole kind of dealing with everyone fairly, even on an international level, is incredibly important. We have to look and listen and value each other as individuals rather than as some kind of groups that we tend to classify people into as a way of, in some ways of discounting their importance.

So, if you’ve got young people in your life, my advice would be listen to them, engage with them, you know, make them part of the solution. Realise that we are part of this whole, this bigger thing than just us. We need a bit of humility, you know, it’s not all just about us. Yes, we’re important, but it’s about this bigger whole we’re creating. And the clean energy revolution is all part of that. So, I think that there’s hope in all of this. We are changing in good ways.

Tim Flannery, thank you very much for your time today.

Thank you.

Please join me in thanking Tim. To follow the programme online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100 Climate Conversations dot com. Thank you.

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.