 Thank you, Colin. So, ladies and gentlemen, my job is to introduce our two esteemed guests this evening, but let me just set the scene a little bit. We live in a consumptogenic world. Excess human consumption of Earth's resources has led to the degradation of the world's natural environmental systems, of course including the climate system. I'm very concerned about that because these systems are essential for human life, which is fundamental for our health and our well-being. I'm interested in human health. So, as the temperature of the planet rises, we're experiencing many more severe floods, droughts, storms and heat waves. These cause real harm to both our physical and our mental health and well-being. And it's very much upon us. In the next 15 years, there's going to be 38,000 additional deaths due to heat exposure among the elderly, 48 additional deaths due to diarrhea, 60,000, I should say, not just 48,000, 60,000 deaths due to malaria and then 95,000 additional deaths due to childhood under nutrition. But all of that doesn't actually happen equally around the world. We will all be affected, everywhere will be affected, but it is the poorest and the most disadvantaged regions and populations throughout the world that are affected most and that are generally affected earliest, including here in Australia. So what must be done to address all of that? Climate change, adaptation and mitigation requires action across a whole number of policy domains. Energy, of course. Infrastructure, agriculture, labour, social policy are all required and interestingly, these are all issues that really matter for human health and well-being. So let's not just think about climate change as a technical issue or as an economic issue. It's very much a people issue and it relates to our health. But of course the challenge as we're going to hear is how do you pursue all of these issues in a place where politics and differing interests come together often in a very conflictual way. Understanding how to make action happen requires understanding the political economy of climate change. Shifting the political and the public desire for action means that we have to get very clever as to how we think about climate change, how we frame the discourse about climate change and of course governing climate change for the public good whether it's health or social outcomes requires building coalitions of civil society, of enlightened businesses and concerned governments and politicians which brings me to our speakers this evening. Mark Butler has been the Labour member for Port Adelaide in the federal parliament since 2007 and tonight of course we're going to hear about his new book, Climate Wars. In July 2016, Mark was appointed Shadow Minister for Climate Change Energy and Energy. But Mark's also, he was the Minister for Aging and was Australia's first Minister for Mental Health in the then Gillard Government. And he's received the Alzheimer's Disease International Award for Outstanding Global Contribution to Fighting Against Dementia and he's also held Ministries of Housing, Homelessness, Social Inclusion, Climate Change, Water and Energy. So Mark understands fine well the challenges but also the opportunities for how to build coherent public policy across a number of domains many of which are highly contested. And I met Mark earlier this year when the ALP held a National Health Summit and when he told me about his book I thought well here's a lovely opportunity for us to come together to break down this sort of often compartmentalised attitude to thinking about some of our big societal challenges such as health and environmental issues so that we can actually think about the big consumptogenic drivers of climate change and health which are so so similar. It's a win win but we've actually got to get our finger out of thinking about it so no pressure Mark. The conversation is going to be facilitated by another Mark, Professor Mark Howden who's the director of the AMU's Climate Change Institute sits across the whole of the university that's how important we consider this issue to be it's a university wide issue. Mark is also the vice-chair of the IPCC and a member of the Australian National Climate Science Advisory Committee isn't it fantastic that we've still actually got to such a committee within the country. So please join me in welcoming Mark Butler and Mark Howden over to you Mark. Thanks very much for that introduction Sharon and welcome Mark and it's particularly notable I think within your book that AMU did actually feature quite strongly and so I think this is a great venue for you to be launching this book and having these conversations. I have to congratulate you on the book because I finished reading it again this afternoon and I thought it was a really broad perspective on the issue, comprehensive, integrative and particularly rich in detail particularly the historical detail of where we've come from and I think it's a really great exposition in that sense and I think we actually need that as Sharon just said we actually need to draw the dots between these issues so that we can actually have a stronger rationale for progressing rather than isolating this issue and so I think you've done a really good job there. So I guess one of the first questions I've got is with this book what impact do you really want to have with it? Where do you think this is going to, what sort of splashes are going to make and where the ripples go? In part it was an exercise in therapy over the summer just to vent frankly about how we've got to where we've arrived and I did it over the summer and it got much worse frankly in March in South Australia I talk about some anecdotes around South Australia's sort of the attack on South Australia's energy transition and particularly a concert that Adele did in Adelaide it was the only concert she did in the round so she did it in the centre of Adelaide over and she had a special stage made from this fabulous firm operating out of Bendigo that revolved, well not that fast obviously because she would have been flown off the stage in the centre of legal force but revolved slowly in front of the 70,000 fans and I bought two tickets, taken them home to my daughter and said yay we're going to Adele and she said yay you're half right took the tickets, took a friend but partway through the concert a whole bunch of the sound just went down and Adele said oh there's been a power black out and Jay said, Jay Weatherall the Premier said at an event we were doing the other night that he was with the energy minister in the corporate box Tom Cutsentonus who just passed out and had to be sort of revived with smelling salts but within, what had happened is that the revolving stage had grabbed a cord and pulled it out of a soffit not something you think you could really connect to the deployment of renewable energy in South Australia but that didn't stop the sort of blitzkrieg assault by the social media team and News Limity that literally were on Twitter within five or ten minutes criticising South Australia's energy policy Chris Kenny got on to Sky News and said there's been another power black out in South Australia because of renewable energy even the advertiser the next morning had a front page power crisis all because this plug got pulled out of the socket and some flustered road he put it back in and in about two or three minutes on the concert went straight on and I just, how did we get to this position how did we get to this position after the hope and the sort of consensus in the community that they wanted their government ten years ago to take strong climate action the level of support for climate action ten years ago was as high as it's ever been in Australia and I think Kevin gave voice to that in his usual way so not particularly understated way about this thing that the major social economic moral challenge of our time is because it is and yet we've arrived at that position where you could get that sort of peak stupid contribution to what had happened at the Adele concert and I think we need to start to call it out because we have been dragged Australia into this parallel universe all through those ten years you've just seen the scientific consensus get stronger the impacts of climate change start to unfold before our eyes and particularly over the last three or four years the rest of the world start to shift the private sector started to shift governments have started to shift even governments that are subject to very very difficult circumstances like the UK and I'll talk about the UK but not here in Australia we are just parallelised through this debate that is led by this very loud minority in the parliament, in the media talk back radio in Sydney and if we don't take them on and actually start to call them out and talk real facts and really give some perspective to the community about what's happening around the world and the depth, the gravity of the challenge that we face and the responsibility to our children and our grandchildren, we're not going to move forward we're just not going to move forward that's really why I did it unashamedly I'm a Labor Party person and so I've burnished Labor's credentials in undertaking and leading these sorts of major economic reforms because this is what we're confronting and I think this is something that the Labor Party should be leading calling on some of the traditions of past decades where the Labor Party has seen this as part of their core social democratic mission not just to break down those structural inequalities in society which was really the reason we were formed 130 years ago but also to manage these inevitable disruptions and transitions that come along every few decades like Bob Hawke and Paul Keating did in the 1980s so it is also a bit of unashamedly a handbook for Labor Party members, Labor supporters and a burnishing, I hope of Labor's credentials in this area while also frankly being honest about the mistakes that we've made over the last 10 years and we did make some substantial ones we've got to learn from them be honest about them and move forward No, it's really important in terms of trust repair acknowledging those things I guess for me you raise initially that issue about communication how we've got a real problem here I think in Australia and for me it's illustrated by if you look at the stats in the three quarters of Australians actually want more action on climate change two thirds actually want a carbon price so that consensus broadly across the society is really strong and if you're sort of starting to think well there's about 7% of the population who are sort of climate deniers in the sense they say climate's not changing and humans aren't involved anyway so that's proportionally across the community that's about 1.6 million people who'd expressed that view the science of climate change is that there's less than a 1 in 100,000 chance that what we're seeing is not due to human influence so if you do a proportionate sort of sum is there should be around about 270 climate deniers in the population not 1.6 million so we've got an extraordinary disproportionate sort of emphasis in the communication which focuses on I guess a position which isn't supported by the science it strikes me that this book by itself is not enough and so how does this fit into a broader strategy to break that communication nexus it is tough to break the locked in consensus view particularly the Murdoch media and a number of the key talk back hosts that this is all rubbish it's a leftist conspiracy to deindustrialise the west in a way that we weren't able to do during the cold war this is very much baked in to a lot of those mainstream media interestingly that as you'd know that 7% who respond to the CSRO community attitude survey and say they don't think climate change is real are then asked a question what share of the population do you think share your view and they say 50% I think half of the population is at the same view they have and frankly reading a lot of our newspapers or listening to Alan Jones you'd be forgiven for thinking that it is that broad I was asked last night when I was doing an event in Victoria because I was talking about the extraordinary progress the United Kingdom is making and someone very wisely said well the Murdoch media is just as dominant in the UK why is the difference why does the parliament in the UK have such a consensus position and the simple fact of the matter is that Murdoch media has different fish to fry in the UK they focus on division around other issues integration of the EU immigration, Islam, those sorts of things and they've sort of left climate change alone so we do need to face up with the fact we've got quite a unique monumental challenge about our mainstream media and the only way around that frankly is a bit of old fashioned sort of discussion and grassroots organising combined with the extraordinary opportunities that come through social media the way to work around those traditional mainstream media outlets and also to paint a story that gives people hope I think all of us have been thinking very carefully about how you communicate climate change given just the scale of the issue I watched Obama a lot in his second term where he really grabbed climate change as a legacy issue for him and one of the interesting things Sharon that you would have noted is that Obama hardly ever talked about climate policy without a health frame more at least a jobs frame one or the other he very rarely talked about it in the abstract he talked about it in a way that people understood either the threat and the challenge or in a jobs frame the opportunities that come with the shift to a low carbon economy I don't know that we've done that well enough I don't think we did that well enough when we were in government there was a bit too much of a focus on market mechanisms and carbon pricing and those sorts of means rather than the ends which are much more human rather than economic and market oriented so I don't pretend that I've sort of nailed this and part of going around the country and talking to people in a way that might sound a bit like therapy about what's happened over the last 10 years is because I'm really thirsty for people who are committed in Australia to seeing their parliament take the sort of action that you're seeing at state level you're seeing around the rest of the world I'm thirsty for their ideas about what convinces people what brings people with us on this journey That's a really good point and I guess one of the things that struck me when I was reading the book was that it broadened the debate about electricity system reform from reliability and affordability which has essentially dominated the airways for some time so far and you started to bring in issues about energy efficiency obviously the climate change greenhouse gas emission reduction regional development environmental benefits Great Barrier Reef, Fair Pollution etc employment benefits which are pretty obvious that Sharon was mentioning the thing I guess I was looking for there was really pulling all of that together into like an industry policy and how this like a whole of Australian industry policy not just focusing on this and likewise innovation policy and so making this a centrepiece for innovation we are going into a massive transition globally there's the opportunities there that we really need to be grabbing hold of Were you thinking about that or is that the next phase of the next book sort of thing? Yes my next book We are thinking about that and part of our challenge in doing this is just the scale of it the resources you have in opposition and the time taken to do this right part is also as simple as data collection so one of the things that strikes me about the UK is that the UK can say that getting these extraordinary cuts in their carbon footprint one of the members of 350Doll told me that their carbon carbon pollution footprint last year was lower than any year since Queen Victoria's reign it's just extraordinary the year before was the lowest since 1940s and they are doing extraordinary things but still they make three times as much steel as raw steel as Australia does they still have 800,000 workers employed in the automotive industry where we're about to shut our industry they're maintaining an industrial base while undertaking very ambitious decarbonisation and they've got the ability to collect data that allows them to paint a story about the low carbon economy so they can say for example this is old data from last year but they could say then 30% of all jobs growth in the last five years in the UK were low carbon economy jobs and we don't collect that data through the OBS here we can collect renewable energy jobs in a strictest sense of the term but I think we need to start what we're trying to do is think about how we measure this stuff so that we can talk about it not just in an abstract way but in quite a concrete way and talk about these stories these inspirational stories that are happening around the world that decarbonisation does not mean wrecking your labour market there are enormous investment and job opportunities here if you manage it right I'd probably expand that to enormous opportunities offshore as well it wasn't that long ago where we were leaders in terms of solar PV and also we had a wind turbine industry and other things and we had to sacrifice those in the 90s when we killed the energy research and development corporation which also I thought I was looking for that in the book which I didn't see because I think that's a story of the public policy failure where that was actually a clean green high tech high paying future for Australia which we forewent at that stage but I guess there's the economic offshore opportunities but also that of regional development so as part of our aid program as part of bringing other countries up so they can leapfrog the trajectory we went through the fossil fuel intensive trajectory and actually get into the clean green economy much quicker than we have again are you looking to sort of bed that into policy we are we're still having a look at really what the government is doing with its sort of climate change overseas aid crossover and how some of the new mechanisms beyond the Kyoto Protocol roll out there will be new design to the way in which there's essentially a finance transfer from developed countries to developing countries as well as a knowledge transfer and I think that's incredibly exciting and I think the post-2020 framework under Paris is going to be frankly much more sophisticated than the Kyoto Protocol framework we'll learn a lot from that it will be a market that Australia is able to sell into as well as buy in terms of international carbon credits which I think gives the Australian land sector enormous opportunities in the future but it's sort of pretty embryonic work at the moment we're certainly spending a lot of time with those organisations that are involved in the development of the sustainable development mechanism at the global level that's a very active area of discussion and some of the things you raise in the book play well into that I guess some part of the Paris agreement also is this idea of just transition and you've painted out a picture of doing this at a regional level better than we have over the last few years but the sort of scale of transition that you're talking about is actually huge and doing it piecemeal is probably not going to cut it I think you're going to get a lot of people who are left behind in an environment of budget repair how do you start to think about juggling those things? So this is I deal with this in the chapter of the book and it was a clause in the Paris agreement that this transition to a clean energy economy or a low carbon future must be a just transition it was one unfortunately that our government fought against inclusion but the NGO sector particularly fought very hard for it to be included and we have to give it meaning it's part of the international commitment we've made but it's just the proper thing to do as well and we need to, I try to be honest about the fact we've not been good at structural adjustment in Australia and there are some exceptions, I talked about the 80s in the car plan the steel plan, the waterfront reform authority some of the other microeconomic reforms that Hawking Keating oversaw then had some good examples of structural adjustment but the scale of this as you say is quite unprecedented and unlike a lot of those industries that were often located in big cities this is significantly going to impact regional economies those communities that in the post-war period were largely built on coal-fired power and sometimes the energy intensive manufacturing that co-located Hunter, the Yellow Warrad or the Trade Valley the Iron Triangle in South Australia and finding economic reasons for those communities to continue to exist and to thrive is not going to be easy it's not going to be easy and there's not a great bucket of money in the budget to do that probably the most exciting model I think that's been floated over the last several years came from the Crawford School here at ANU where Jotso developed this idea essentially of a reverse tender that would see the power industry effectively financing a structural adjustment package for the electricity sector now obviously this is not just a transition that's going to impact the electricity sector but what I would like to see is for us to think about new ways of doing structural adjustment in the electricity sector that can be used not just frankly for transition that flows from decarbonisation but for a whole range of different industries in transition I've come from Adelaide where right now over the next couple of months Holden's in a series of supply companies are shutting down essentially because of government policy thousands and thousands of workers are losing their jobs and the transition plan there or the structural adjustment plan there and in Victoria is pretty pitiful so I'd like us to learn not just about transition but frankly transition more broadly in the economy because there's lots of other pressures frankly on the economic status quo that's right and I think Newcastle was a good example of where that has actually worked very well but you can only do that so many times you can't keep on rolling it out so you need to be looking for niches which are regionally specific so I think that's a really important part of the picture but it also plays into that idea of having essentially an industry policy which integrates these issues really thoroughly with regional development etc and it's a challenge as you know but I think it's something we should aspire to It is and I think also we should talk more positive not more positively than you and I are but more positively than is the orthodox approach to what the energy transition is going to mean for our industrial base I talked about what the UK is doing but Bloomberg New Energy Finance does some really interesting analysis of the comparison of levelised costs of solar power and of wind power between Australia Europe, China Australia, the US China, India and the EU and because we have such stronger solar resources so our solar farms operated efficiency factors of about 45% compared to China's 25% because our wind resource is so much stronger than all of those other jurisdictions once the transition has flowed through and we're all operating under this sort of an energy system the cost advantage the comparative advantage that we got through lots of access to cheap coal in the 20th century returns to Australia in the 21st century we've just got to manage the transition right and and be careful about maintaining the industrial base that we have because frankly it's very hard to build once you've lost it you know it's going to be very hard to rebuild a car industry having lost it really through a couple of weeks of impulsive policy decisions by Joe Hockey and decisions made when the dollar was a dollar five that's right we all knew that the dollar was going to come back to sub 80 cents and with a bit of investment the car industry would be able to get through that and the sort of currency exchange rate that's at now Holdings and Toyota would be doing fine they'd be exporting vehicles again to police forces in the US to the Middle East they'd be fine they just needed that support through that sort of Dutch disease period where the currency was over a dollar and that's right so in the book you talk about how to deal with emissions intensive strategically important industries and I think probably with the current global volatility that's even becoming more important in the policy sense but it's a difficult thing to do trading off the specificity of that versus an overall approach to say emission reduction and have you got any other thoughts how you might approach this in government if and when so this is a really tricky bit because in both iterations of our ETS the pennies CPRS and then Gregg's plan energy package we had to deal with what are called emissions intensive trade exposed industries that was tougher then when there were very few carbon price systems across the world there were more now most notably perhaps China is introducing their national ETS coincidentally with very very similar design elements to ours because so many of our people were engaged in helping design the Chinese ETS same scope of industries, same threshold of about 25,000 tonnes really interesting similarities to our package but we wanted to make sure that there was some understanding or recognition of the competitiveness issues between for industries that effectively operate in global markets and I think what we did was we essentially took a cookie cutter approach rather than thinking of the fact that I can't imagine Australia not making steel being a substantial economy in our position in the world essentially an island nation we should have a steel making capacity and we've got to find a way to reconcile that strategic imperative with our decarbonisation objectives rather than treating every emissions intensive trade exposed industry the same and having this sort of decay factor in their level of support which was essentially how the CPRS and Greg's package were designed we should be a little bit more nuanced about this I think now quite how you deal with those conflicting imperatives particularly in industries like cement and steel that don't have a technology on the horizon that will deal with their inherent carbon intensity is no easy challenge but I think that's the debate and we talk about that in our policy that we took to the 2016 election and we talked about it there ultimately I think certainly in the short to medium term it's going to involve those industries having to deal with their carbon footprint through an offsets arrangement which would in a domestic paradigm probably focus particularly on reinvigorating the carbon farming market that allows offsets to be produced in our land sector both in the southern half of the continent but also excitingly I think in our original communities through savannah burden projects that were starting to get off the ground under our carbon price mechanism but really had their market taken off them whenever abolished it all and we already see a couple of mining companies already converting their operations to solar and so even for extraordinarily energy intensive operations you know we're getting to the price point where in fact that that can occur and so I think that's a really positive sign that opens the door for others to follow through Well completely make sense for those operations that are off grid so mining operations that are in remote Australia to set up solar and particularly with some batteries and then some diesel backup but increasingly I was doing business round tables in Bendigo yesterday and all of the companies were talking about going solar they're really under pressure with their power bills they're coming up to renegotiate their contracts and the power prices that they're getting quoted are more than twice what their last contract had and at the same time their gas prices have doubled or tripled so they're really feeling the pressure and you know they're not interestingly none of them were saying we've got to build new coal-fired power stations they were saying we're going solar we're going solar it makes sense and we see the storage revolution coming at us like a locomotive train and we're ready for it and we want to invest in it and absolutely and I was going to ask about the storage right now and so one of the things I've noticed is that there hasn't been much criticism or critique of Snowy Hydro too here at ANU we've got some people who are very strong proponents of pumped hydro and it's prospects in Australia but it's I mean Snowy Hydro is a a very specific example but I haven't heard much from your side of politics on this Well we tried to be even handed about it but also take it for what it was which was the announcement of a Feasibility Study that will run over the course of the rest of this year and it's a huge project Malcolm sort of grabbed onto it as something that he really needed I think to appear nation building appear to be doing something in energy while this party room was really pushing him just to announce new coal-fired power stations so we saw the politics of it but equally the rising gas prices over the last 12 or 24 months have meant that that Snowy 2.0 has become economically viable according to the company it wasn't two years ago so we want to look at the Feasibility Study it's Malcolm sort of I think gave a sense to people that building would start in January after the Feasibility Study was received in December we're drilling really big holes through mountains in a national park I think we might want to do an environmental impact statement before we do that really if this happens it's not going to come on stream before 2025 so it's no short medium solution to some of our challenges in the way that South Australian battery is but I think these sorts of things should be assessed I hope that the Feasibility Study tries to compare the idea of a very big pumped hydro massive pumped hydro scheme to what we know is coming in battery storage but also the really exciting work that the ANU through Andrew has been doing about a much more dispersed or distributed pumped hydro network that they've been working on with so this is going to be great the idea of lots more storage plays right into my ambitions of deploying renewable energy I'm not sure that the coalition party room quite saw through that but really this turbocharges the ability particularly of Victoria New South Wales and South Australia to expand renewable energy whether it's snowy hydro or lots of distributed pumped hydro building the interconnector between South Australia and New South Wales export lots of South Australia's growing wind we're not finished yet we're going to build more wind I tell you in South Australia and we haven't even started building PV solar so it's quite exciting but it's a Feasibility Study and let's not see it as anything more than that at this stage that's right I mean I absolutely agree you've got to do a good job on the cost and benefits of the full range of options there I guess it's almost like part of the process of democratisation that we're seeing happening more broadly across society and have you sort of started with the democratisation of the energy system have you started thinking about how that might feed into your just transitions ideas well maybe not so much in the just transition frame but certainly we're thinking very carefully about it from a social equity perspective the solar rooftop solar revolution in Australia has been just extraordinary when we came to government ten years ago there were 7000 houses across the whole country that had rooftop solar just 7000 the whole country and there's now 1.65 million in just ten years we have more rooftop solar than the US with 320 million people it's just it's quite unique what we've done here and batteries coming through the system is going to transform that as well but although I always take issue with the criticism usually made by right wing media and some of the coalition that this is a sort of a champagne sipping latte sipping when did champagne and lattes get so evil anyway apparently rooftop solar is all about you people who drink champagne and lattes whereas actually we know because we have very very detailed data on where the solar panels have been installed and there's actually an inverse relationship between penetration rates and socio-economic status of suburbs the further you get away from a GPO the more likely a suburb is high penetration rates of rooftop solar it's lower income households that are doing this for a range of reasons but it is overwhelmingly a revolution for owner occupies it's a revolution that's largely closed off to renters to people in public housing the people in congregate housing like in the big cities and we've got to fix that partly because it's a wonderful thing for them to do the right thing by the planet and to get significant savings on their power bills but also it's just going to get worse like their exposure to the sort of power bill increases we're seeing at the moment their exposure to having to pay for the grid which was gold plated to an extraordinary degree to tens and tens of billions of dollars that now need to be repaid by consumers there are very serious social equity questions I think here that we're working with community power groups and so on about how to fix it's not going to be easy but it's very exciting you add electric vehicles to that you've got a very different system I agree it's really exciting one of the other things which I think is going to get worse are the impacts of climate change itself so we're seeing acceleration in terms of sea level rise temperatures extreme events significant impacts here and overseas your book focus very strongly on the emission reduction there was essentially nothing in there on climate adaptation but they're two sides of the same coin and arguably Australia is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change itself and in fact the impacts of climate change are the fundamental rationale for emission reductions and part of this energy transition story are you likely to come out with a book on climate adaptation so it's perhaps climate peace we've got to get out we've got to get to this and it's hard while we're still fighting the climate wars to talk about adaptation the Murray-Darling Basin Plan I think is our most significant piece of adaptation policy certainly over the last 10 years or so it's not always called that but it is and even that is being revisited before Monday night's extraordinary report on four corners even that people are calling for that to be revisited particularly the 450 gig that's supposed to be returned to the river system so it is hard to have a sensible debate about adaptation I would drive say from Sydney north up through central coast into Newcastle and so on and stop off and you could go to different areas depending on local council boundaries where you had profoundly different policies about coastal development because the last local government elections might have been won by an Abbott group where the new council leadership came in and told the staff to expunge any reference of climate change from all of their policies to go literally 20 minutes north into another local council boundary which had more progressive leadership where they had very strong climate change adaptation policies around coastal development this is crazy this is utterly mad so there is a role for national governments the national government I think to do this is not to micro manage it but to facilitate a process that sees the very important work that needs to happen around adaptation particularly around our coasts start one of the one of the really interesting things that goes through my mind about how you have that discussion I'll talk about this a bit in the book to what extent a lawyer is going to drive this that's how seatbelts became mandatory in the US through litigation I think there will be some really interesting litigation about whether the levy at Lismore should have been higher some of these sorts of things are going to end up in courts and we will get the courts pushing parliaments to up regulation around adaptation which will be quite interesting but I thought a really interesting contribution to the debate was an article that some people might have seen in New York magazine a few weeks ago which has gone viral a bit and one of the journalists there didn't talk about impacts around the two degree mark it tends to be where we pitch our general discussion around impacts on ice melting, sea level rise heat events all that so about two degrees maybe two and a bit degrees he wrote a piece based on the upper end the upper end at sort of five or six degrees what does the world look like what's New York like and it's scared the bejesus out of me and there's been this really interesting debate follow this article which I encourage people to read in the Atlantic and a whole bunch of other American publications where climate scientists are now out debating should we be telling this story this is at the upper end of the possibilities we're all assuming we start the lower end this is at the upper end this is not fantasy land this is very very serious but this is not a fantasy this is a really interesting debate that I don't know if you've picked up on Mark about whether scientists should be and presumably policy makers as well talking about this very very serious scenario of impacts and I think I'm watching that very closely I think we all are it's a crucial part of that communication challenge that we all have in making this a normal part of conversations rather than an exceptional part of conversations anyway that brings us to an end of our interaction together now we've got Q&A I'd just like to say thanks Mark for having such a great conversation thank you we have some time for questions from the audience here I just have a question the psychologist Jonathan Haight wrote a book called The Righteous Mind in which he described the polarised world views for republicans and democrats who lack a common language to facilitate a dialogue so how do you get opposing parties to move out of the trenches when those political parties talk across purposes you can talk about rational arguments and you're really talking to the converted in terms of your arguments here but there are opposing views on that and those views won't even register with them that's right well let me maybe go back to the UK experience where in spite of the fact that Thatcher supported and in a way driven the establishment of the IPCC and the UN framework through the 80s climate had been an issue of division in the 90s and into the early part of the last decade David Cameron took the decision you might remember when he took over the party the Tory party that he had to change that party's image to get rid of it's what he described as a nasty image and so he really exercised the leadership to shift the Tory party to the centre Labor party frankly shifted a bit as well and they were able to agree the climate change act in 2008 really the rest very much is history you do need leadership and I think that's really the clean energy target debate that is whether Malcolm likes it or not I think going to be raised in the party room over the next couple of weeks is going to be a question of leadership I mean Tony is trying to exercise leadership quite clearly through his insurgency here and there's a very open question as to what sort of leadership Malcolm is going to exercise I'm not going to be able to talk the coalition into changing their view the coalition party room it's got to be an internal discussion that flows from their appreciation about what the rest of the community is thinking one of the things I think has changed dramatically over the last few years well since we were trying to introduce our clean energy package in 2011-2012 is the business voice there were too many business organisations frankly that should have known better that were out there arguing effectively that there should not be any climate change policy in Australia that was the Abbott position and they were supporting it not that they had a disagreement with some of the detail of our policy but that we should not have any policy whatsoever now they've shifted on that almost all of them except maybe the Minerals Council have shifted on that and they need to be making that argument to the coalition members of the voters in the electorates of members of the coalition need to be going to them and talking to them about what they expect to their national parliament to deal with this challenge but also to harness the opportunities so look it is really hard and I wake up some mornings and look at the newspapers and listen to the radio and I think look it's it's almost hopeless to imagine a position where Australia had the same sort of political approach to this as the UK and I often harp on about the UK but given the similarities here about our media structure, our political history I think it is a really important example but at the end of the day the coalition party room is going to have to have this out because that party room essentially was taken over in 2009 by the Abbott view of this issue and it's essentially been hostage to it since then and the rest of us have been hostage to that as well you know I hope that sounds very partisan of me but I just can't see a way through this without the coalition having this out and that will require leadership of the type that David Cameron showed in the British Tory party Sorry it's sort of follow on from that question we mentioned before that our deniers in the Australian public make up about 7% if that sort of statistic holds up with our parliamentary representatives surely there must be a majority of parliamentarians who believe that we should be acting on climate change and can we break across party lines and get some consensus within the parliament Yeah I think the important thing about that data that CSRO comes out with is it is only 7% that don't think climate change is happening but of the 75% or 80% or whatever it is that think climate change is happening there's still a very substantial share of that I can't remember the latest data but around 40% of people in Australia still think that climate change is happening but it's not a lot of human activity so that group is not the only challenge that we have there's still a substantial body of opinion it's declining quite quickly as it is in the US but it is still a substantial body of opinion that yes something's happening but it's not us there is a clear majority of the parliament everyone in our party everyone in the Greens party we want climate action the small groups in the Labor Party over the last 10 or 20 years that were a bit sceptical about all this they've moved on this is a consensus position in Labor it's obviously very much a consensus position in the Greens and there's a strong body of opinion in the Liberal Party at least that this is real and something we should be coming to grips with but that party room is just captured by the group that doesn't want action and that's why I say we're not going to pull liberals away from the party room to work with us across the aisle it's not like the US in that sense they're going to have to have this out within their party room Christian Downey from the A&U I just wanted to ask a question about I guess how do you win the battle and how do you win the war you spoke about framing I think it's important to frame this around tangible things that people get but another strategy obviously which you've spoken about is coalition building I just wanted to ask what's the kind of lesson you learnt from last time in government about where the key coalitions need to be built that are enough to win I guess well well I think the critical the swing factor is business I think and you're not going to get the whole business community because substantial parts of the Australian business community are deeply threatened by the decarbonisation agenda you know we know who they are but those groups that were very negative campaigned against us campaigned against there being any climate change policy have shifted and they are an important part of the coalition particularly not the coalition as in the Liberal Party coalition the sort of coalition you're talking about particularly when I cannot see a time in the foreseeable future where we do not have a concerted opposition from Australia's mainstream media so we've got to work around the fact that mainstream media is going to continue to campaign against that but the government's muddled attempt to introduce mandatory emission standards and cars are the last developed economy not to have them two weeks ago it just gives you an example about that it should be low hanging fruit if they'd done it we would have come out and said we support you fully you know there are savings to consumers over the life of the vehicle that runs a thousands of dollars it's low hanging fruit and they messed it up and then the daily telegraph ran a sort of a crusade against them for carbon taxes on cars so you've got to keep business I think focused on on policy that is stable and enduring that's what they want but I think they've shifted over the last several years they understand first of all there's no getting around this I think after Copenhagen and frankly even a bit after Abbott got elected and the renewable energy target was in the mix I think some of them thought well maybe we'll duck this maybe this has all just been a phase and we'll get back to how things used to be well that's gone they recognise they understand now they're being told by their global headquarters for those that are multinationals this is the future get with it and find opportunities to invest so probably they're the critical group I think Up to you I've noticed that there's a bit of a debate over whether the two degree Paris goal is actually achievable and I was wondering in light of the fear that came about when America withdrew from the Paris Agreement if we don't meet the two degree goal how do you think that'll affect attitudes towards climate policy in the future I think it's important I'll talk about this a little bit in the book how we came up with the two degree threshold and maybe somewhere in this room but climate scientists were were nervous about adopting a threshold as a policymaker I like thresholds I like clarity I like something that we sort of structure policy around but we need to be clear that this is not a black and white issue that if we manage to hold below two degrees everything's fine and if we don't well we tried no use crying over spilt milk these are shades of grey and even if we can't hold to two which I think is going to be incredibly challenging I mean I'm not a scientist but on all of the advice I get all the stuff I read holding to two is going to be very very challenging it requires huge shifts over the course of the 2020s and then really strong decarbonisation right through the 2030s and with the odd exception that's hard to see that sort of willpower happening so you know we can't see things fall apart just because some people are going to come out and say look it's going to be really hard to hold to two we've got to keep that commitment to try and hold to the Paris commitments we don't quite know what well below two degrees means yet in a carbon budget sense the IPCC will be publishing its carbon budget for the new fame under Paris next year I think in 2018 and we'll have to if we were in government we'd then get the climate change authority to try and calibrate that for an Australian carbon budget that's all going to be new but I honestly don't know the answer to that because there is going to be increasing discussion about how achievable two degrees is and quite what we have to do to get there that's going to be an incredibly difficult discussion it should never though become a question that bears on whether or not we take strong climate action I love the carbon budget approach sorry I love the carbon budget approach I don't know why we weren't doing this 10 or 15 years ago it's obviously hard but two degrees is sort of easy to talk about it's hard then to calibrate transport policy around that or energy policy if you've got a carbon budget which is how the UK works then you can actually sort of structure policy and I think over the next couple of years trying to work out what the carbon budget for the Paris agreement is and how you distribute that fairly across countries is going to be very important and just to reinforce the need for rapid response is that there was a study which came out just a few weeks ago from some researchers in Melbourne which indicate depending on the state of the Pacific we could actually reach 1.5 degrees by 2026 and so the time for moving on this is actually extraordinarily short and that's why I think the consensus is the chance of reaching 1.5 is essentially disappeared and the chances of staying below two are starting to shrink really quickly just to give you a sense about where we're going at the moment the UK so if you used 2005 as the baseline which is the baseline we use the UK will has already reduced its carbon pollution by 30% since 2005 and will its carbon budget for 2030 is for a 61% reduction of 2005 levels so the data the projections that will be released just before Christmas project that by 2030 on current policy settings Australia's reduction between 2005 and 2030 will be zero with zero OK we've only got time for one more question OK as long as we're going to go over 7 then so there's one here I just a very quick one to Queensland as with the high unemployment in the north especially of a million sorry a billion dollars so Darnie would seem to be attractive as the Labor Party thought of saying OK if you elect us we will make a concessional loan to the Queensland government for renewable energy of a billion dollars I mean they can't argue about where the money is going to come from and that sort of thing yeah well interestingly I was talking to someone who did it around through the central Queensland coal fields over the last couple of weeks yesterday and they said the coal workers up there just stopped talking to us about the Darnie we don't think it's going to happen the jobs will be minimal because we know the jobs are not going to be the sort of job numbers that they trumpet I don't think the thing will get off the ground anyway but I think at what you point to I think is the need for an alternative jobs narrative for central and north Queensland because they really aren't suffering I mean they've lost a lot of jobs up there over the last few years I don't think renewable energy needs concessional loans in Queensland I think they're ready to deploy right now without concessional loans what we took to the last election is that the Northern Australia infrastructure facility which is the fund that Canavan wants to use to finance the Adani railway line and a new coal fired power station in Townsville we said that we'd get $1 billion about the tourism infrastructure and there are a whole range of other things that Albo and Tony Birkenau were up in North Queensland a couple of weeks ago trying to sort of talk about these sorts of things other than just talking about coal and there are all sorts of businesses remote Aboriginal communities that have tourism opportunities they can't get credit from banks but they need to do things like build some roads or build some decking through some wetlands to do walking tourism things this sort of facility would change their operations but the government's not focused on that the government's focused on throwing a billion dollars at Adani or this crazy idea of building a new coal fired power station I mean when Malcolm came out with this idea in January no one had talked about new coal for years when he came out with this idea in January and said I'm interested in private sector partners to build a new coal fired power station there was deafening silence deafening silence until Clive Palmer said I'll do it when I'll finish building Titanic 2 I'll do it so I think you've raised a really important broader point which is what the Adani thing raises I think from a Queensland political perspective is the need to talk about alternative jobs opportunities and there are plenty up there just one last question you mentioned Mark the views of the coal workers in Queensland I'll be interested in your understanding of the sort of broader views of the union movement and how if they're part of this coalition they speak up very much on the issue On Adani or? No no sorry on the broader issue of climate change and climate policy So the mining and energy division of the CFMEU which used to be its own union the mine workers union has coverage of the coal mining and coal fired power sector up the eastern seaboard it has been going to climate conferences essentially since they started they are deeply engaged in this debate and when you go and talk at their work or when I go and talk at their workplaces or delegates meetings they know far more than anyone else in the community what is happening in their industry they know it, they're living it and their focus is on just transition it was unions like that along with NGO groups that really drove that provision in the Paris agreement Sharon Burrow you might remember was the head of the ACTU, now runs the global union movement was the key advocate the key face of that campaign in Paris because they understand the realities of what is happening and I think particularly that union or the mining and energy division of the CFMU Tony Ma their national secretary has been one of the most thoughtful and courageous advocates about what is happening in climate change in Australia for two decades he was a strong partner for Greig Combe in the development of the clean energy framework now obviously that had some stuff in there about how the power sector, the coal fired part of the power sector was treated in a transitional sense but this is not a union that's pulling its cardigan over its head and pretending that everything's going to be rosy this is a union that's deeply engaged in the realities of what is happening and have been for 25 years so I think what we owe to them to their members and to their delegates particularly as a Labor Party frankly is to take the challenge of just transition very very seriously great point to end on Sharon So my job is really just to to thank both of you really I think what we've heard is a very very thoughtful exploration of incredibly challenging very contested issues Mark, it's very hard when you've got two marks but Mark Butler really is giving us I think a call to action to come be part of this wide coalition with the Small Sea of concerned citizens I'm sure there are enlightened business people in the room as well and of course within the NGO sector to really come and get together to help shift this agenda going forward I also heard that actually data is power, you spoke about the importance of data it's such a powerful tool for the researchers in the room we've got to make sure we have the sorts of data that enable these types of actions and feed it constantly into our politicians and policy makers I was very upset that we didn't speak about the food system because the food system is one of the biggest contributors to climate change as well and is also one of the systems where we can actually do something about it maybe that'll be another book you've got an awful lot of books to write Mark I'm sure why not but really please a time for hope we have I think courageous leadership as we've just heard from Mark I'm delighted to be part of a university that takes this really seriously and really pleased to work with my colleague Mark Howden with Climate Change Institute as I said across the university come and be part of REGNET as well as we plug for our skill the skill of regulation and global governance we think about exactly these sorts of issues of how we how regulation then weighs different forms of governance to move these sorts of issues forward but really thank you thank you very much I think very hopeful ideas weighs forward Mark I'm sure will be outside for a wee file, happy to sign the books please thank you very much for coming out tonight