Male Voice Over:

The UTS for climate podcast series is made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney, an audio production house funded by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research.

Erika Wagner:

This year, we faced one of the worst global crises in human history.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – World Health Organization declares coronavirus a pandemic

on ABC News

We have rang the alarm bell loud and clear. COVID-19 can be characterised as a pandemic.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – COVID-19: Jacinda Ardern details NZ lockdown, core services on RNZ

We now consider there is transmission within our communities. If that happens unchecked, tens of thousands of New Zealanders all die.

 

Michelle Obama – Michelle Obama blasts Trump for ‘division and chaos’ caused by racial injustice and COVID crisis on The Guardian

Today, more Americans have died from this virus than died in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Korea combined.

Erika Wagner:

Most countries have responded urgently to the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s not the only challenge we’re facing.

 

Phoebe Hosier – These waters off Tasmania’s east coast are warming four times faster than global average on ABC News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h4Lw531PlY

Tasmania’s east coast is warming at four times the global average.

 

Peni Hausia Havea –  Q&A Pacfic on ABC

https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2019-02-12/11730632

We in the Pacific are facing the prospect of becoming climate change refugees.

 

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s voice cracks during speech on climate change on The Guardian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whrwt5m9jHw

I speak to you as a human being, a woman whose dreams of motherhood now tastes bitter sweet because of what I know about our children’s future.

Erika Wagner:

I’m Erika Wagner, and today we’re hearing from someone who has thought deeply about our different responses to the COVID and climate emergencies. Professor Tim Flannery, one of Australia’s brightest minds on climate change. Tim says that if we don’t do anything about the carbon we’ve released into the world’s atmosphere, we are going to suffer serious consequences.

Professor Tim Flannery:

It will flood our cities. It will deprive us of food. It will cause all sorts of civil unrest.

Erika Wagner:

But there is an unlikely hero that could help deliver us from this dystopian future, and that hero is found washed up on our beaches and leaves deep in our oceans. And I have to say that as someone who studies marine science, this solution is pretty fascinating. It’s seaweed. Tim suggests if we do it right, seaweed could draw down the atmospheric carbon, and even better, we could see results quickly.

Professor Tim Flannery:

If we could cover 9% of the world’s ocean in seaweed farms, we could draw down the equivalent of all of the greenhouse gases we put up in any one year, more than 50 gigatons.

Erika Wagner:

Tim Flannery spoke about these big ideas with UTS Industry Professor and former New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

I want to start by homing in on the great challenge of our time. That is global warming in the era of pandemic. Tim, what do you see as the big link here? What do you think about the existential challenge about climate, the shift in climate at a time when we’re all focused on the immediate challenge, the drama of this pandemic?

Professor Tim Flannery:

There’s some really striking similarities between the pandemic and climate change. Both of them have to be dealt with in advance of the crisis manifesting at a large scale, and both of them present political problems, very difficult problems. They need to rely on expert advice and do hard things. So, there is broad similarities. With COVID, I think Australia’s been spectacularly successful, but for climate change, we are still the wooden spooners.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

I was struck talking to an investment banker who said to me, “COVID is a massive shock to the economy, but it will be gone at some point. Whereas when we’re dealing with climate, we’re dealing with a multi-decade and existential challenge.” I was then interested in how much was continuing to happen in the investor response to the imperative of de-carbonisation, even while the headlines have been about the crisis of the pandemic.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Look, something’s happened this year. There’s been small things, but now some of the majors are coming out, Rio Tinto, for example, with a big reorientation. We’ve just heard today, Anglo pulling out of many of their coal investments, and the insurers are really taking things very seriously. They’ve been arguing for years that we need to address climate change.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Allianz is so firm on this. They’re withdrawing insurance from even coal related infrastructure. So they won’t insure let alone partner with, as an investor, a coal related rail line or a port. Now, this has come even while the pandemic is raging, and the Shell decision as well, also in April this year, that feeds the notion that 2020 might be some kind of pivot.

Professor Tim Flannery:

I think. Look, you never know with a pivot to your past, and I guess we’ve seen emissions from CO2 decline dramatically. We’ve seen some important challenges to the fossil fuel business model, whether it be in coal, oil or gas, and we’ve seen renewables continue to grow. So yes, I think it is probably going to be a pivotal year, whether we’ll be able to make the deep cuts we need to, to get on a more sustainable pathway on what still is unclear, I think.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Yeah. Well, let’s focus on that. Basically, my question is how much time have we got?

Professor Tim Flannery:

Bob, we’re out of time. If you think about our response to the pandemic, the number of victims was doubling every four days. We didn’t have more than a week before we really needed to act. With climate change, we’re now in a position where, on the balance of probabilities, we’re committed to between 1.5 and two degrees of warming. We need to act in a three-fold way. We need to cut those emissions. We need to protect our assets, and we’re seeing some movement with geoengineering to protect the barrier reef, for example, to do that. But we also need to develop the equivalent of a vaccine, and that involves drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale. Now all of those three responses have their own timeframes, and they’re very different, but we need to do all three and we need to start doing all three today.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Is Drawdown a radical concept? Is that really being taken seriously in your view, in the international negotiations? Or is that way out there beyond the immediate horizon?

Professor Tim Flannery:

Until the Paris agreement and indeed for a few years afterwards, a Drawdown seen as a radical thing, and wasn’t really part of the global discussions. Now, the reason for that I think, was that there was a political imperative to focus on cutting emissions. And people felt that perhaps talking about Drawdown might offer a get out of jail free card to polluters. The whole kind of orientation now, of our responses changed to such a degree that we’re starting to see Drawdown now being much more an integrated path of the human response. Having said that, I’ve looked through probably 10,000 Drawdown options over the last decade or so.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

10,000.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yeah. With the Virgin of Challenge, we had 10,000 entries and there were just so many, but I came down at the end of the day to realising there’s only three or four options that are likely to be scalable.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

You deal with one of them in a very big way in this book, Sunlight and Seaweed, which is very futuristic, but you’re giving attention to the concept of mid-ocean kelp farming, and I’m being quite deliberate in choosing the terminology you use because a colleague of mine at UTS, Professor Peter Ralph, is an advocate of an algal bio activity. He would say an algal bio economy.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yes.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Yours goes even further than that of course, to something in the deep ocean. What’s the idiot’s guide? Something appropriate for my level of scientific literacy about this concept of deep ocean farming of kelp?

Professor Tim Flannery:

Sure. The reason I ended up settling on that as one of the two or three most likely pathways through to large scale sequestration is essentially that issue of scale, and where we are in terms of current technologies. Right? So if you think about what Drawdown involves, it involves a capture mechanism that has to be very big. And just to give you a sense of scale, we put 55 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere a year as a species. If we wanted to take out one eleventh of that, Bob, so just five gigatons by planting trees, which everyone understands, we’d need to cover Australia in actively growing forest. And over a century or so, we might get at one 11th.

Professor Tim Flannery:

So you need a big space. The only place where that sort of space exists in uncontested forms is the mid-ocean. And by great, good fortune, in the mid-ocean, we have not only the space to capture the CO2, but we have a repository for storing that CO2 long-term. And that repository is the deep ocean below a thousand meters. So if you grow seaweed, and you cut it off, sinking into the ocean deep, the nature of oceanic circulation is such that that CO2 in that seaweed is likely to remain out of the coupled ocean atmosphere system, upper ocean atmosphere system.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

A storage of carbon.

Professor Tim Flannery:

That’s right.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

To you use the Shakespearean language, in the deep bosom of the ocean, buried.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Indeed. Yes, so that’s the concept. There are a number of caveats and uncertainties.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Yeah. Where do you seed the kelp? Is it adjacent to land, and then transported to the middle of the ocean? Or do you grow it? Do you cultivate it in that deep ocean?

Professor Tim Flannery:

Kelp organisms have a complex lifestyle with two phases. There’s a sexual phase and an asexual phase. So the kelp we see is the asexual phase, but there is a smaller sexual phase in reproduction. Thankfully, kelp farming is a long-standing business and people now understand how to grow, seed, and mature kelp. So, that can occur anywhere. The bigger issue for ocean farming is where do you get the nutrients to feed that kelp? Because the mid-oceans are a biological desert. That’s why they’re empty. There’s nothing there. The answer is that if you go down 300 meters in the ocean, you get into a lightless zone, where the water is very cold, and where there are abundant nutrients. So we can use wave energy, solar energy, wind energy, whatever you want to pump up that nutrient rich water. It doesn’t take a lot of energy. It’s about two meters of head pressure from the engineers among us to do that. And you can then irrigate your crop with that nutrient rich cooler water, and allow for optimum growth

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

What stage is the scientific work on this? Definitely it sounds science fiction, but is there a serious exploration of this, as opposed for example, to the work that Peter Ralph’s doing at UTS, which is about using algae to produce substitutes for plastic, for example?

Professor Tim Flannery:

The science of using algae to produce products is far more advanced than the science to use seaweed, to sequester, to draw, capture, and sequester carbon. And the reason for that in part is that you need a market to drive innovation. In the absence of a global carbon price, who is going to pay for ocean going seaweed farming? This is the question. So, we don’t have a market mechanism to drive innovation as yet. There is not a single oceangoing seaweed farm in the world today.

Professor Tim Flannery:

We have some prototypes. We have some demonstrations of how this might work. We also have some good science emerging now around some of the consequences of doing this. So the very first study, for example, of the natural transport of kelp into the deep ocean was completed just two years ago, but we’re at a very basic stage, Bob, in terms of this. My argument is that we shouldn’t be building the farms now, but we need to position ourselves to be able to do it in future because I can’t see a better option for drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale. And the one thing I’m sure of is that by 2050, the world is going to be in such a state that we will be crying out for options.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

So it’s about Drawdown. It’s about geo engineering to achieve that Drawdown.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yes.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Based on the imperative, we’ve got to get the waste out of the atmosphere.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Exactly. It’s very much like the pandemic argument for the development of a vaccine. We can all see this crisis won’t be over until we develop the vaccine. The scientists of the world are telling us … Some of them say it may not be possible to develop a vaccine. Others are saying it might take a decade. Others are more optimistic, but we know we’re not going to have a vaccine tomorrow. It will cost many billions of dollars in coming years to develop that vaccine. And yet we are embarked upon that journey. The same argument holds for Drawdown, that we need to develop Drawdown capacity at the gigaton scale, if we’re to avoid a catastrophe in decades to come.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

So in lending your name to this notion, are you taking a risk that people point at Tim Flannery and say, “This is wild. This is impractical. This is science fiction.”

Professor Tim Flannery:

Of course you’re taking a risk. But for those who would say that, I’d say, “What’s the alternative?”

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

You’re opening up the agenda about Drawdown.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yes.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

What else do you do? What are the competing ideas on Drawdown? Just to divert you into that territory? What else is on the checklist?

Professor Tim Flannery:

There’s a number of possibilities. One involves a direct air capture of carbon dioxide, which is actually happening in the here and now as part of a business model, for example, for the development of E-fuels for aviation, or for capturing CO2 for greenhouse fertilisation. So, that sort of stuff is real. The problem with that is scalability. And then, where do we put the CO2? As some people are talking about geological sequestration. It may be possible, but we have to demonstrate that. Another option is that of a use of silicon rocks. And again, this is an area of Australia could be really leading in. We have enormous capacity to understand mining and how it’s done efficiently in this country. Australia is also rich in silica rocks. If we mine and distribute silica rocks on beaches, for example, as they decay, they draw CO2 out of the atmosphere. And that’s another scalable option. Maybe the built environment, carbon negative concretes and building materials may be a fourth. But beyond that, you quickly start running out of scalable options for Drawdown.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Your other big ideas in this compelling little book, Sunlight and Seaweed, your other big idea is concentrated solar thermal. So for the non-scientist, just draw the distinction between solar power, as we understand it, and this big new idea.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Well with solar panels, you have adhesive silica that moves electrons about in a special way that generates an electrical current. So, you just put that electrical current straight into the system. With concentrated solar, thermal technologies, you’re dealing with heat, and you can use that heat for any purpose. You can use it to drive a turbine, to generate electricity, or you use it directly in industrial processes. If you can generate sufficient heat cleanly, you become an Alchemist because you can break apart molecules. You can do anything. And so, it seems to me that there’s an a priori case that concentrated solar thermal technology will be a very important part of their future, particularly for industrial applications, very efficiently. You don’t have to make specialised solar panels. You just have mirrors that reflect the sun to a central point, and heater fluid.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

And where’s the world taking place on this? I’d like to be able to be told that Australia has got a chance of being a world leader at this.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Well, we have the resources. We have one of the best solar resources on the planet.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Yeah, the argument that’s always made. Australia should be leading in every aspect of solar.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yeah. Sadly, the key work is being done elsewhere. So the most advanced thinking, in terms of heat transfer, is coming out of the University of Naples, surprisingly, in Italy. Spain was a very early developer of concentrated solar thermal technologies. This was taken up in the US, which had, I guess in some ways, a bit of a false start because we’re dealing with very, very large scale technologies at a rather immature level. At the moment, the field is much more open. And I think it’s yet to be determined who will power the next generation. There’s some very interesting technologies coming out of both Israel and Italy at the moment, which are modular. So these are scalable, ideal for Australian mining circumstances, for example, for that reason. But we shall see where this leads.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

And a rough sense of how far off this might be?

Professor Tim Flannery:

Well, this is a … It’s a fairly simple technology. It’s scalable. One thing you do need though, is a driver to allow it, to compete with the very, very efficient wind and solar technologies that are already out there. So if there was a government subsidy, or some sort of incentive to clean up our industrial sector here in Australia, you may well find you have that driver to get you some scalability and start building these more specialist plants that’ll be very useful for say, minerals processing.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

So this is the next frontier of solar.

Professor Tim Flannery:

I think so. Yeah, I really do. I think that the electricity market is very much tied down now with wind and solar. We can see the hydrogen economy developing, but there will always be an opening I think, in terms of industrial processes for very high heat applications that are inexpensive.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

It’s a few years since Sunlight and Seaweed came out, and an enormous amount has happened since then, apart from the accumulating evidence of the reality of climate change. The big thing is the fall in the price of renewables. It’s as if everything we were hoping might happen back in 2017 on this front has come about.

Professor Tim Flannery:

It’s astonishing. I was just reading recently that Abu Dhabi has announced a price of 1.30 cents a kilowatt hour for their new solar, which if you’d have said that 12 months ago, people would have laughed at you.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Even 12 months ago.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yeah, no. It’s crazy low price. So, I mean, there’s no doubt that people in most of the world will not be building any more coal plants. There might be a few gas peaking plants built, but the future is wind and solar, and probably batteries pumped hydro, smart grids, and inter connectors.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

So in the piece I’ve just written, there was a raft of evidence only in April this year that insurers wouldn’t back coal-fired power, investors wouldn’t put their money into it, no one would be signing up to a new coal-fired power plant in Australia. The government says it’s still under examination. They’re being very kind to the thermal coal lobby, but even in the Hunter Valley, I understand the community doesn’t think it’s got a future. They want to fight for coal to be used in generating steel plants, but no one imagines that coal fired power has got a long life.

Professor Tim Flannery:

That’s right. It’s interesting. You talked about metallurgical coal there for steel use. Even that is now under threat from renewables. So one of the world’s great steel manufacturers, thyssenkrupp, has announced a breakthrough where they’re using hydrogen for steel-making now. It’s actually happening right now. And from 2022 onwards, be making steel using hydrogen exclusively in some of their plants. So, this is happening. So, when I look at Australia, and the one thing I see Bob, and you may … I don’t know how you feel about it, but we need to move together. So Germany has developed a coal compromise, whereby they’re paying compensation to coal companies. They’re ensuring that not a single job is lost as the transition to clean energy happens, and not a single job lost out of the coal sector. And this is what we need to do. We need to invest as a community in my view, to have a just transition, and the transition will advantage us in future because we have the assets. We could be a world leader in concentrated solar thermal.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Last year, I had the honor of interviewing Ross Garnaut and his book, which was bursting with ideas about new sectors. What do you  think when you have our leading climate economists come out and point us in these directions? Hydrogen was a big part of his book, for example.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yeah. Look, it’s so common sense to me. We’re one of the world’s greatest producers of iron ore. And yet, we shipped the stuff off and refined. And yet, there we have the potential in the Pilbara to be doing the first part of the refining process using clean energy. Why wouldn’t you do it? We produce 40% of the world’s bauxite, and 40% of the aluminum. Again, an energy intensive product. We have the sunlight to be able to do that very, very cheaply. The number of opportunities I think is endless for us. And it’s just a matter of grasping that opportunity. Letting go with the old, because we can’t do this without building a clean energy base. So, we have to let go of the old and grasp the new.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Is there a challenge in picking winners? Because I remember, I’m guessing maybe 10 years ago, when thermal had a few advocates. They were saying we could get all our energy by going underground and reaching hot rocks. Now, years passed by, and you look around, and no one’s investing in it. No scientist is advocating it. When you and Ross Garneau point us in the direction of these very promising new technologies, have you got to be conscious that some of them will fall over? They just won’t pass take off?

Professor Tim Flannery:

Well, I think that’s absolutely true, Bob. You do have to be very careful. And therefore, I think what Ross and I are doing is suggesting we look at sectors, not at specific technology, but looking at the overall cost structure of clean energy. So, we don’t know which one is going to be the winner. Will it be wind? Will it be solar? Will it be concentrated solar thermal? We don’t know, but we can see the potential there. We can see the way the world’s changing, and that we need to make that shift from fossil fuels into clean energy. As you say, in a way that doesn’t necessarily back winners, but this is the sort of thing that the clean energy finance corporation, ARENA are very good at doing. They are the experts who look into these, and encourage experimentation or encourage production.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

All would have been easier, of course, if we’d made the decision over a decade ago to put a simple price on carbon, one that had an incremental effect on the price of household heating and at the same time, send a message to investors that fossil fuels were a losing proposition. You had to get into the new areas. The political deadlock in Australia prevented us settling on what I would call the elegant simplicity of a tax on carbon, that saw consumers, and above all investors, shift to the new opportunities.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Well, Bob, you were in the middle of that. And I mean, I was involved tangentially. I was chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council at the Copenhagen meeting. And I remember walking away from that meeting as depressed as I can ever remember myself being, because I knew at that stage, that that failure meant that Drawdown was inevitable. We’d have to develop a whole new approach because at that point, we could have actually made progress just by cutting our emissions. And as you say, putting a price on carbon, developing a new industry, I guess there’s no single personal group at fault, but my goodness, you look back and you think, “What a lost opportunity that decade was.”

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

A missed decade, a missed decade. The prospect of young people, say 20 years from now, when we’re living with the wreckage of our failure to do precisely this, cut carbon when we could have is something we’ve got to consider. I mean, young people in the 2030s would be entitled to be very angry with their forebears for dumping it all on them.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. You look into the future, and just the bush fires that we saw in Australia this year, we know that climate change is driving up the probability that we’ll see fires on that scale, sea level rise and the costs it will impose. Biodiversity loss, extreme weather events, storms, and so forth, and the damage that will impose. You can see how this will cripple our economy into the future, when it didn’t have to be that way.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Imagine if those fires had coincided with the advent of the pandemic.

Professor Tim Flannery:

It was good luck. I look back on January. There we were wearing masks in Australia, little thinking that people in Wuhan were wearing masks for a very different reason. So, I think that the pandemic has taught us something. Now for climate, that’s getting a bit late, but we have to start acting soon because otherwise, the opportunity will slipped through our fingers.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Tim, thanks for those thoughts. Thanks for pressing the urgency of them. Can I ask you what are you writing now? Because it’s impossible to think of you without contemplating a book that you’re working on, because you’re always producing a book. I think there’s about 30 of them.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Look, I’m working on a short book at the moment called The Climate Cure, which lays out, in light of the experience we’ve had with the pandemic, what the pathway is for Australia in terms of policy and so forth to get a prompt resolution of this problem. Looking at the costs and whatever else. And you can see it’s all so doable, Bob. This is what’s frustrating. It’s all so doable and common sense. And yet, we haven’t mustered the will to act.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Tim, final question. Do you get feedback? Because my impression is the electorate is acutely interested in this, and you can have a conversation anywhere about gas, or nuclear, the promise of solar, extreme climate events that our country has got, unlike America, I would say, a high civic IQ. And it can easily be engaged with climate.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Absolutely. You go, particularly in regional Australia, which astonishes me. Farmers are very much aware of this now because they’re living with the consequences in a way that people in the city don’t.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Soil, rainfall, all of that. All that agenda.

Professor Tim Flannery:

People are engaged with the issue. We look at the Murray-Darling system. Half the amount of water that we had a decade ago now, as a result of climate change, The impacts of that alone are massive.

Professor the Hon. Bob Carr:

Tim Flannery, thank you very much. Great advocate for science at a time when we need science on both fronts, the pandemic and the multi-decade challenge of fixing our climate. Tim Flannery, thank you.

Professor Tim Flannery:

Thank you.

Erika Wagner:

That was climate scientist, writer and conservationists, Professor Tim Flannery, speaking to Bob Carr on May the eighth, this year. This is the final episode of UTS 4 Climate, but we know the work doesn’t stop here. To continue the discussion about climate change and to see some of the inspiring projects UTS researchers I’m working on, go to the UTS For Climate website, just head to UTS4climate.uts.edu.au. ‘m Erika Wagner. I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast series. Thanks for listening.

Male Voice Over:

UTS 4 Climate was created in response to the 2019 students strike for climate. It is a statement of the university’s commitment to addressing the global problem of climate change through our research, our curriculum and operations. The UTS 4 Climate podcast is made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney, in collaboration with the Institute for Sustainable Futures. At Impact Studios, we combine academic research with audio storytelling for real-world impact. The production team live on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose lands were never ceded.