INTERVIEW

“ Try to convince your clients to build small”

HAMISH MACDONALD SPEAKS TO ENVIRONMENTALIST, CONSERVATIONIST, EXPLORER, PUBLIC SCIENTIST AND FORMER AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR, TIM FLANNERY.

HAMISH MACDONALD: Where are we now with climate change?

TIM FLANNERY: We are in the early stages of the really detectable impacts. We’ve seen an increase in heat waves, in the average length of heat waves, in the average temperature experienced in the heat waves, and in the length of the heatwave season. We’re still in the early stages and the projections are we’ll see much more severe impacts in the next twenty years or so. Fires have obviously gone through a sort of phase-shift.

Prior to the Black Summer fires of late 2019/early 2020 the maximum area during the fire season was about two per cent of the temporate broadleaf forests. That year it was 21 percent. That kind of quantum leap into a new fire regime is also being seen overseas in places like California, Southern Europe and Siberia. That’s a different phenomenon: we’re not just seeing a gradual increase but a leap into a new system. Those fire conditions are obviously affected by the overall climate.

Then the warming trend and the drying trend in South-Eastern Australia is now quite advanced. In 2018-19 it was the driest year ever in South-Eastern Australia, and the driest year ever in the Murray-Darling Basin. Those conditions are starting to deepen as well, so we’re starting to see water stress. Eighteen months ago, regional towns in NSW were running out of water, part of this ongoing trend of drying and heat. And that is going to affect cropping and the Murray-Darling scheme and all sorts of communities in many ways.

And we are seeing an increase in the energetics of the climate system. Hurricanes, cyclones and storms getting stronger. And we’re getting an increase in rainfall intensity: the amount of rain that falls over a given period of time. It’s a global phenomenon that’s felt in Australia as well. What it means is the drainpipes and drainage systems we have built in Australia for a previous climate now are not capable of taking the volumes of water that we are increasingly seeing flow during these periods of increased rainfall intensity. So, it’s an engineering problem, left from an earlier time.

HM: What about sea level rises?

TF: It’s one of those hidden, creeping problems. If you travel around coastal Australia and keep your eyes open, you’ll see these coastal erosions almost everywhere. In some places like Stockton, on the north side of Newcastle, there’s quite severe coastal erosion which is affecting infrastructure and has seen the abandonment of several buildings. And in parts of Port Phillip Bay, Torres Strait, Southwest WA, and the coast of metropolitan Sydney. Sea level rise is going to continue for many decades and the various problems are going to be exacerbated. HM: What can be done at this point?

TF: We’re still in the early stage: The overall take-home message for those four problems is that the trend is now set, so that nothing we do now will affect outcomes over the next twenty years. Those problems are going to get substantially worse over the next twenty years, regardless of what we do. If we act very soon, if we act hard and fast, twenty years from now we may see those problems start to mitigate, to get less worse from their peak, about 2040. But if we don’t act hard and fast, they’ll continue to grow. And we may trigger tipping points in global climate systems that drive the warming regardless of what we do.

HM: The Paris Agreement target keeping warming from pre-industrial levels to preferably 1.5 degrees. What does that mean?

TF: That would be the safest level, but sadly it looks like we’ve lost that opportunity already. This isn’t widely acknowledged politically, as it’s quite unpalatable. But the best projections suggest we can top out at 1.7-1.8 degree warming then by drawing down CO2 in the atmosphere to get back down to 1.5 degrees. It’s relatively safe though there’s still substantial impacts. At two degrees warming you start to see a whole lot of undesirable outcomes.

HM: Largely for your work on climate change, you were voted Australian of the Year in 2007. How has the world gone since then?

TF: Since 2007 between a quarter and a third of all the greenhouse gas that’s ever been admitted that has ever been emitted by our species over our entire history has been released into the atmosphere. Over that brief period, 15 years, the problem has grown enormously. We haven’t made the difference we needed to.

HM: What can we do with our habitats? How do sea changes and tree changes need to be modified? Can some kinds of dwelling be sustained if they can’t be insured?

TF: There is an issue around defending some dwellings, depending on how things develop in the future. You are looking at a triage situation. These issues are going to become very front-ofmind for governments over the next decade or so, because the impacts are just going to be ever more severe.

There’s only a limited pool of funding that a government has, so a decision has to be made about what we do in particular circumstances. Coastal erosion is one: do you defend buildings that are facing ever-greater flood risk every year? Do you stay and defend, and bear the cost of that? Or do you see evacuations and abandon some of those so you have enough finances to defend other properties that are more defensible? There are some tough decisions coming up in that area.

HM: As part of the effort to decarbonise Australia, what can the person building a house do to help? Use green steel instead of brick, concrete and timber for example?

TF: The first steel ever made with hydrogen has just been made in Sweden, a tiny bit to be used by Volvo in some of their prototypes. So, in years to come people might be able to use green steel, but at the moment it’s not available. If you’re in Queensland there are a couple of companies that offer carbon-neutral concrete, which is a big saving. If you’ve got a builder willing to countenance it, it’s worthwhile looking at carbonneutral concrete. They’ve got a fantastic record so far: they’re stronger than conventional concretes. They’re about three per cent more expensive but they’re ideal for acid soils for example or salty sub-surface. They last very well. The thing really is to build a bit smaller. You look at houses now, often more than 300sqm, that’s just a massive waste of space for most families. So, building smaller would be the single biggest contribution you could make.

HM: The NSW government has moved against the black roof seen in many new housing estates – how useful is that? TF: It’s quite important. We have a sort of heat-sink effect in some suburbs. You go to a ski field with black gloves on – it’s quite cold around you but the black gloves are quite warm, because sunlight is being degraded into heat energy when it hits that black surface, creating local heat. That’s exactly what black roofs do in a suburb. A whole suburb of black roofs has this massive heat effect. There are some really great paints you can use that are highly reflective, that send most of that sunlight back into space. We should be looking at similar things for roads, and other surfaces as well. The new heat waves are already the greatest killer of all the climate phenomena in Australia, and are set to get worse, so why wouldn’t we do all we can to minimise that local risk? That’s a pretty cheap solution, painting your roof.

HM: Overall, how is Australia doing in moving towards net-zero?

TF: For individuals we are doing incredibly well. We have the highest rate of solar PV on rooftops. It’s partly due to government schemes but it’s also something Australians have adopted wholesale. State governments are varied in their approach, but increasingly there’s a trend towards carbon-neutrality in new industries. The states are responsible for the bulk of the energy sector so that’s been a good thing. At the federal level there’s been a lack of leadership in a whole lot of areas. One of them is the interconnectivity of the grid. If we had a holistic Australian approach to this, we could be so much more cost-effective and so much faster in transitioning to clean energy sources. When it comes to the electrification of transport, the Federal Government’s got a massively important role, and they’re just sitting on their hands. They’re pushing gas, and we should be moving away from gas as early as we can.

HM: What about converting the big emitting industries, like the steelworks at Whyalla and Port Kembla?

TF: Again, you really need a Federal Government push for that to happen. You need large dollars. With primary steel production you have blast furnaces costing some $700 million and they need to be rebuilt or relined every few decades. Port Kembla’s just at that point now. What they are saying is maybe we can convert one or two of the nozzles that take the coal to the blast furnaces to hydrogen.

But that’s a very slow uptake of these new technologies. If they had really strong government support – I’d suggest building a whole new steel plant that’s going to run on hydrogen. We’ve got great demand for steel at the moment and we could certainly do with a second plant. And over time they run the existing blast furnace into the ground, and by the time the new one is finished HM: Do you think that as part of their net-zero package the current government might try to edge us into nuclear power generation?

TF: It’s impossible to say. Nuclear power is singularly unsuited to Australia. They are extremely large plants. To be economic they’ve got to be about 2,000 MW. They take an enormous amount of water. And with 2000 MW and above, maybe 4000 MW, where are you going to put that in Australia? Somewhere between our two largest population centres, somewhere on the coast – where I imagine it will be disputed by every community in that region. Even if the government said tomorrow, we’re going to mandate the building of this thing, my guess is we would still not see a nuclear power station for 15 or 20 years. They’re like the submarines. You’ve got to buy special crucibles and the last time I looked the Chinese manufacturers had a waiting list of 18 months before they even start. So, the whole thing is just way too late. And people talk about these small, modular nuclear reactors, but the truth is there’s not one small nuclear reactor in any electricity grid in the planet. It’s hypothetical, and I don’t think any government is going to take those risks when you’ve got wind and solar getting cheaper by the day. What you need is remediation of the poles and wires, and storage.

HM: What would you say to people like the Nationals minister Bridget McKenzie who say that it won’t be the people in Vaucluse or Toorak who suffer from moving to net-zero but the regional centres?

TF: I would say it’s Senator McKenzie’s job to make sure that nobody suffers through the transition. There’s no need for anybody to suffer: there’s going to be masses of new economic opportunity. If the government gets on the front foot early, there’s no need for anyone to suffer. If we leave it late, and industries collapse and there’s unemployment because of poor planning by government we will have people suffering.

HM: If you had a message to architects and builders in Australia now, what would you be saying?

TF: I would say: Try to convince your clients to build small. Smaller is generally better. And there are lots of low hanging fruit in building – it’s quite important to be informed about those and to take those opportunities. They are inexpensive and no-regrets type of things. The roof colour is a good example. So be prepared to a change of building for a very different future.