Welcome to this Special Edition of Smarter Impact, where you can read through the detailed conversation I had with Blair Palese, Director of Philanthropy at Ethinvest, Managing Editor at Climate & Capital Media and Founder of the Climate Capital Forum.
If you didn’t catch the videos, they are here; Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
You can also listen in full via all your favourite audio podcasts using the link below.
Philip: Greetings, folks. Philip Bateman here, and welcome to this edition of Smarter Impact. I help CEOs and boards with strategy, attention, and investments. If that’s you and it’s something you’re seeking to improve, do get in touch. And it’s my great pleasure to be here with Blair Palese, who’s the Director of Philanthropy for Ethinvest, one of Australia’s oldest impact advisors. She’s the Managing Editor of Climate and Capital Media, and she’s the founder of the Climate Capital Forum.
Philip: Blair, it’s a real pleasure to be speaking to you today.
Blair: Thank you so much.
Philip: Niceties aside, you’re an absolute badass getting out there and delivering, being the all-swearing, all-force for change.
Blair: I used to live in New York. It’s hard to break the swearing habit! Maybe the nice thing about people who are your listeners and yourself is, at some point, you get to a stage in your career where you’re just trying to have an impact. I pretty much get up every day and think about how I can make a difference and look for gaps of things that aren’t being done. That’s how I’ve jumped into these three roles. Hopefully, after 40-odd years in the not-for-profit space, climate, environment, working with governments and companies, you learn a few things along the way.
Philip: Our conversation today was going to be framed around fighting disinformation, renewable energy politics, Europe, and North America—all the things that keep our little big island obsessed in the media cycle. So I was interested, when you spoke to those different groups you work with, what do you think keeps these sorts of people up at night? When they’re tossing and turning in bed, what are the questions they’re trying to answer? We’ve got the renewables markets, we’ve got the politicians on the other side. What do you think is getting them, in terms of being able to succeed or look at the challenges we face right now, and how we deal with that as humans?
Blair: Oh, most definitely. Climate change is a driver. Even if people are somewhat skeptical about how fast or how it’s being produced, you cannot ignore the impact of extreme weather happening all over the world—it’s incredible heat and incredible cold at the moment, which was predicted by experts. How do you solve a problem that’s that huge without, for instance, destabilizing your economy or keeping your company profitable? And disinformation is a kind of terrifying, anti-democratic force that most of us feel like we have no control over or very few ideas about what we can do. Those two things together are what I hear the most about when I talk to all levels of people—either our investing clients or NGOs that we work closely with, and also media, to see where the focus is. Anybody with an eye to the future, whether you have kids and grandkids or whether you’re just worried about what kind of planet you’re leaving the next generation, can’t hide from these two things.
Philip: And in relation to disinformation in the media and the movement of these things, often stuff is a little buried, like the real things that are going on. For me, I’ve always had this idea of the good news. I meet people and NGOs and leaders who are just doing amazing stuff, and I don’t hear that good news in our media silos. What are some of the things you think we don’t know that people should?
Blair: Oh, good question, and so true. I mean, there are some good news sources out there, but you really have to look for them. Certainly not coming through in the mainstream media—some better than others. But yeah, it’s a pretty dark time. The best news of late is this study that happened about two weeks ago, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald and many other outlets globally. It showed that while growth in the economy of China is going up and also the rest of the world slightly—not a vast growth, but it’s not a decline—we’re seeing China’s emissions in particular not only level off but begin to go down. Scientists believe this may be the turning point on climate because China is the biggest emission producer, as it produces so much of what we buy and use all the time. So when I say China’s emissions are going down, I mean the world’s emissions are leveling and going down. That’s maybe something I didn’t expect to see as someone who spends most waking hours looking at climate change as an issue. I just didn’t expect to see that good news come across at this stage. I thought it would take us another 10, maybe 20 years to start getting there, and that every year we spent waiting, we’d have greater impacts. So, I guess the takeaway is that we actually could solve climate change, which is something you’re not going to hear people say often. It’s in our grasp that we could turn it around. When you think about the size and scale of the change we’re talking about—transforming not only our global energy systems but our global economy that’s been based on fossil fuels—those are pretty big things to be hopeful about if we continue to roll up our sleeves and get to it.
Philip: Yeah, absolutely. I distinctly remember sitting in the energy summits with the Australia-China Business Council about eight years ago, and they had the guys from FiveB there, who were working on the massive solar field in the Northern Territory, with the undersea power cable to Singapore. During that summit, they were charting the growth of renewables in China and how much they were implementing. I remember looking at the trend line and the base load of coal generators that wasn’t really going down. But what it didn’t account for was this massive spike in renewables, all being taken up with hydro and renewables. They’re installing the equivalent of five nuclear reactors’ worth of solar every fortnight.
Blair: Yeah, it’s about a gigawatt a day if you can imagine that. China is installing about a gigawatt of renewable energy a day. That is phenomenal and positive change. Granted, it’s easier in a country like China due to the nature of its government. It says it’s going to do it, and it does. That’s not as easy in a democracy like Australia, America, or even India, where many other factors play into decisions. But nonetheless, because of the size and impact and the dependence we all have on China for so many things that we buy and use, it’s a phenomenal positive step. I take that to heart and say, don’t give up yet. Ultimately, if we can solve this, what can’t we solve? It’s just such a scale of a challenge for us as a human race. To do it means we have the capacity to work together and solve all kinds of problems. That’s pretty inspiring, and more than ever, let’s double down and keep to it, not be sidetracked by distractions. If we look at the nonsense of a nuclear debate in Australia, it makes zero sense economically, from an energy time point of view, and from a risk point of view. It simply doesn’t make sense. Many similar things are being put out in the world to distract us and allow fossil fuels to continue. We can’t let that happen, or we won’t meet that goal.
Philip: I was looking at your Twitter account—oh, sorry, X account—and you’ve been like 70,000 posts deep. You’ve been…
Blair: Sorry about that.
Philip: No, I didn’t go that far back! But I noticed a variety. When I think about disinformation in the social space of the public commons, if you will, and discourse, like when I saw that meme about the five power stations’ worth of renewables being installed every fortnight, it’s just a simple thing. And your feed had a reshare about Woodside drilling offshore into the Barrier Reef, exploiting all the gas, with our Commonwealth having no tax whatsoever. That kind of stuff drives me crazy. And at the same time, in Europe, they’re developing overriding public interest laws, assuming that renewables are in the public interest. It’s a framework, a regulatory framework. This is a prompt from Tim Buckley in the background. What’s your take on adopting that mechanism or having something overriding public interest?
Blair: Really good question. In Australia, for many reasons, we’ve kind of lost that appreciation of public interest as a whole, whether it’s legally the right to protest or decisions taken around ownership of public assets. Often the business sector has lobbied hard against that when, in fact, even for a strong economy, it makes sense for some things to have an underlying appreciation that some things—like healthcare—have a public interest factor. One of the things I love most about Australia is our ability to get healthcare and the appreciation that it doesn’t just help me, but my entire community has access to healthcare, including mental healthcare. When I lived in the States and went to university in New York City under Ronald Reagan’s years, literally ending any funding for mental health facilities meant something. Mental health is still health. Patients were out on the streets of the city. It was dangerous to walk around at any time because there were people who had no access to medication or care for diseases like schizophrenia, who could become violent. You were consciously aware of it all the time. So when people think about healthcare, often they get that underlying sense of the importance of public interest in Australia, but they often don’t connect that with things like the energy transition. Why that will build a strong economy—giving us more energy diversity and security, and control over prices. The cost of living crisis in Australia is heavily impacted by the low cost of gas, which we buy back from companies that develop it here, produce it, send it offshore, and we’re buying it back at incredible cost. That’s insane, and no other country in the world is doing that with its own resources.
Philip: Yeah, heartbreaking. With no tax, and also no agreement that some of that has to stay here for our own population because, after all, it’s our resource.
Blair: Exactly. It takes a moment to consider what you need first to build a strong country, society, and economy. That’s that idea of public interest. We really have to consider what aspects of that are essential—healthcare being one of them, but I think resources are another. Things like public interest law, where people have the right to challenge and protest, because some of the best outcomes we’ve seen throughout history in any country have happened because of those two things. Individuals, communities, and groups have challenged wrongdoing, something that’s blatantly wrong, and the only way to change it was to start a movement to say, “We’re going to find a way to change that.” That’s certainly the case with climate change because fossil fuels, like tobacco, will be dragged kicking and screaming to the end of production. 120 years ago, it was great, right? It fueled the industrial economy of the world. But we recognized 50 years ago, or more, that the more we collect fossil fuels and carbon emissions in the atmosphere, the more danger we create for a heating planet. We’re seeing that play out. So now that we know that climate change is real, we’re going to have to make difficult changes. I’m always inspired by Europe’s ability to look at problems, find solutions, and get on with it, without the kind of corporate-sponsored and funded misinformation and disinformation we see in places like the US and Australia to try and prevent that change. Smart companies have every opportunity to make the transition and become profitable in the brave new world of renewable energy, battery storage, and other opportunities.
Philip: If we look at the population variation in size between Europe and Australia, and then we think of the profit motive of corporates and the small population we have here—not the drain, but the draw to higher wages in the private sector—regulation and government have nestled within that. We’re an industrial nation. So the regulator is arguably there to enable industrialization from day dot, rather than having a hard civic class of people who see civic duty and being in government as something you would do because you exist. It’s more, “We leave the people in the crater (Canberra) to figure it out; why would you go and be a politician?”
Blair: In that regard, I think, showing my political stripes here, Independents are an alternative to that capture. They’re not in a two-party system that was captured a long time ago by that thinking about making money for corporates, whether they’re paying tax or not. The rise of community Independents has come about because people are frustrated with that capture of the two-party system, in our case, three if you count the Nationals. They want something different that represents their communities and electorates’ interests. They felt they were not being represented, and we saw seven new community Independents elected, controlling the balance of power in the Senate, which is pretty dramatic. I watch the outcome of those seven plus the additional Independents elected into Senate and Parliament.
It’s remarkable what they’re doing. They’re talking about integrity. They’re talking about media independence. They’re talking about how we deal with truth in advertising laws, right? And disinformation and the impact on children—access to online pornography for children—things that have not been on the political agenda of this country for a very long time.
They’re pushing tax reform, right? Imagine that being sexy. In my electorate of Wentworth, tax reform is Allegra Spender’s key issue because it’s outdated. It’s truly outdated. And actually, part of our Climate Capital Forum is that reform needed to remove, for instance, fossil fuel subsidies that lock in. There’s an amazing story I heard yesterday from Tim Buckley, who, by the way, I confess, is in our forum. We spend a lot of time together.
But imagine countries like South America, where BHP has already electrified its entire big, large-scale mining fleet. Why? Because it makes sense. It’s cheaper. But hey, why haven’t they done it in Australia? Because of the fossil fuel subsidies. It doesn’t make it cost-effective. It’s sort of insane, right? We want them to electrify their fleet. In fact, it’s holding them back as a company to be a leader in this aspect of electrification.
Philip: The wild thing is, I’ve been in Brisbane with one of the largest industrial manufacturers of mining equipment, working on their self-driving, autonomous underground mining trucks. They were fully electric. So, we make it here in the country.
Blair: Guess what? We don’t make a lot of diesel, but we’re importing it so that BHP can use it in its trucks too—but not in Peru, where they’ve electrified.
Philip: And low-quality diesel that burns terribly. I don’t know if people realize that.
Blair: Constant reform is key, right? You’re not necessarily going to get the governance you need as a country if your political parties have been captured. I’ll say that Labor’s Future Made in Australia Act is a great attempt to follow the lead of the US IRA, to look for what makes sense here in terms of legislation that can help us do electrification better, renewable energy and battery storage better, and encourage the kind of reforms we need tax-wise to keep some manufacturing here and make it investment-ready for Australians to invest here—not overseas if you want to be invested. So, it’s a start, and it’s a good start. We’ve got to get it over the line. But that’s just the beginning. We have much more ambitious things we should be doing as an economy, and that takes a government that isn’t captured.
Blair: So, you’re all for more community independents because they literally look at every issue with their electorate’s concerns and what they want at heart. And that’s what government should be at its core.
Philip: Absolutely. I was very pleased to convene a session of Smarter Impact with Monique Ryan, Nicolette Boele, Julianne Schultz, and Despi O’Connor. We called it “Search for the Soul of the Nation” prior to the last election cycle.
Blair: Fantastic. I really hope Nicolette gets in this year again. She’s an old friend. In fact, one of the first people I met when I moved to Australia to work with her brother. It’s a very small world, but I help her when I can in any way I can. She’s an outstanding example of what we want in government.
She has worked in every kind of asset, responsible investment, which gives you a perspective about that challenge of keeping good investment in Australia. Renewable energy sector within government. We worked together at the Sustainable Energy Development Authority, so she has the kind of amazing career background that would be the perfect kind of skill set you want in government—not a career politician. I’m all for bringing people with expertise in, not people who’ve spent 30 years in a political party, and that’s what they know best.
Monique Ryan’s another great example of that—coming with a medical background, at the highest level, one of the best and brightest, and smartest of our medical professionals and research professionals. She just brings a whole different mindset and set of skills to government. More of that, I say, and less of career politicians whose only focus has been working within their political party.
Philip: It amazes me that people are in charge of things without experience and domain expertise. And they’ll say, “I rely on my people to inform me, and then I make choices.”
Blair: Yeah, but what’s it based on? Where’s your hands-on experience? As much as I spend a lot of time in Canberra talking to people about all these things, with the Climate Capital Forum in mind, still—400 fossil fuel lobbyists in Canberra every day. And virtually, I know one lobbyist for the emerging clean tech sector, which will be the future economy of this country, and where we want our kids to be working, and where we want to invest, right? Because we want to be at the cutting edge of that emerging global market. But we’re not going to do that with 400 fossil fuel lobbyists whispering in the ears of captured government officials.
The other artificially weird thing about Canberra—people live there during the entire sitting. I’m not saying they don’t go home to their electorates and meet with their own electorate. It’s a weird world where you get in your car in the morning, park under Parliament House, and have zero touch with real people facing difficult challenges, like paying their bills, affordability of housing, and food. They just live in a world in Canberra where that doesn’t exist—you just don’t see it, you don’t interact with it. You can’t get on the train in Western Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane and not see people struggling every day with the simple aspects of dealing with life—getting their kids clothed and fed, finding access to good schools, you know, all those things that should be driving how government thinks and works.
Even having lived in Washington, D.C., you have that. You see it, you can’t escape it. In Canberra, you really don’t. It’s an artificial world that worries me for Australia. It’s just not in touch with normal people living every day—the people you are there to try and support as the main priority.
Philip: So, autocracies can get things done. If the autocracy belonged to Blair, what would you do?
Blair: Well, it’s a very good question. In a funny way, I would put term limits on government officials so they couldn’t become captured. I wouldn’t take over the government and make it all my way. I’d find the best way to protect the democracy we have, but that needs improvement to ensure it survives things like disinformation. I’d find ways to ensure the smart people we’re talking about, who have incredible experiences and careers, see the call to government as something they might do for four years. We would be all the better for it.
Blair: The other thing I see constantly as an issue in the States and here is— in the US, it’s the Constitution; here, it’s many of our existing laws. They need to be regularly updated because things change a lot. Disinformation and the kind of challenge we see in a world of shrinking independent media is something you couldn’t have imagined 25 years ago. So, government has to keep up with that.
Blair: I think one key thing I would do is every 10 or 12 years, we have to reconsider—stop everything and think about what has to change right now. Don’t keep rolling on with what you have. In the US, the Constitution was very much written by founding fathers—only fathers. No women, no younger people, certainly no people of ethnic diversity. That world has changed, and yet that constitution was written by English white men who came to America. It was meant to be rewritten, and it’s never been rewritten. So, gun laws—insane, right? Why doesn’t America have gun laws? Because people are hanging on to something in a constitution that was written well over 200 years ago that no longer applies. The right to bear arms is an insane idea in a modern society.
And you’ve got open-carry gun laws in states in the South, where people are literally getting on a bus with a gun strapped around their chest.
Philip: I went into Oregon, and somebody said, “Don’t get out and pump the gas.” I asked, “What do you mean?” They said, “It’s illegal to pump gas in Oregon.” And I went, “But I could have an AK-47 slung over my shoulder?” “Ah yes, you can open carry, but you can’t pump gas.”
I don’t mean to diminish the discussion there because that was just silly.
Blair: No, no. That’s a great case in point where we have to update our laws to be relevant to the time we’re in. That would be the second thing I’d say—term limits and that we have to revisit government and what our priorities are.
Blair: Here’s a crazy idea that works really well over in Europe—always kind of leading in this. They’ve got democracy, but it’s definitely got a public interest driver at the core of their society. It’s this idea of citizens’ juries, where people are asked to get involved and help make decisions about big issues. They come to it with no expertise, spend a significant amount of time learning about one specific issue, and then they make recommendations to the government about what should be done. Disinformation is a perfect case in point.
This works really well—not only as something you do to see how it goes, but in many countries in Europe, it’s required that the government enacts what this group of the public recommends. It’s mandated. I was part of two of them in Australia—the first one and the second as the writer for the group. My job was to help them end up with a document of those recommendations. As a writer, my background is in communications. This group put unbelievable amounts of themselves into this process. They took it very seriously. Their recommendations were outstanding, and they handed it to a government official in Canberra who said, “I look forward to putting this on the library shelf.” I kid you not. “I’m going to enter this into the archive” was the gist. As in, “We don’t care. We’re not listening to what you had to say.”
Blair: The look on the faces of the group who’d put in four months of their lives into a process to make this paper through the recommendations was gutting. I mean, their confidence dropped. They had grown in confidence as citizens—to be asked and to value their opinion through this process—only for the representative who received it to literally pull the rug out from under them and say, “We don’t really care.”
Whereas in Europe, they have to take those recommendations seriously. So even the process of these regular citizens’ juries and the responsibility that people take up to be part of it has an incredible impact societally—they’re being listened to, and they’re being taken seriously. That would be my third thing. I would install citizens’ juries on 12 to 15 issues a year to help government make decisions that represent the public interest. And in my experience, almost everyone I’ve looked at has taken it seriously enough to put that public interest at the center of their decisions and recommendations.
Philip: In my experience of seeing groups that are doing grassroots movements to create political change, I’m a big advocate for creating kitchen table conversations. I’ve seen Cathy goes to Canberra and movements across North America and Europe. It’s this idea of a people movement—like the current US election coming up—the people versus the individual in most respects. The idea that citizens have agency, when it rises up, it’s very apparent. Citizens have a lot of agency.
I’d like to take that to disinformation now because truth is based on experience and values. When the average person hears about disinformation, I think the term only came into popular nuance during the COVID years when people suddenly thought, “What is disinformation?” I feel like I’ve been tracking it in a hyper way since the start of the Iraq war.
Blair: Well, yeah, that makes sense. And then Scott Morrison’s re-election campaign. I think that’s the first time Australia really saw Reaganesque tactics—good versus bad—amped up through bots, digitized, and with fake profiles used to simply poison the well, if you will, from a discussion perspective.
Philip: How do you think people react in general to the idea of disinformation? How would you frame it as a subject or a mechanism, or a pervasive evil that’s destroying lives?
Blair: It’s a post-truth, post-science world where people are honestly asking, “Is there truth? Is science accurate?” And that’s dangerous. When it comes to solving real problems in the world, we need to believe and understand that there are proven aspects of things that are happening. For instance, emissions in the atmosphere causing a warming of the planet that is essentially threatening our existence—that’s real, right?
One of the biggest challenges for people who are not scientists is understanding that science is never finished. The best we can do is take scientific expert opinion right now and know that things may come along and change that, but that doesn’t diminish what we know right now. A lot of people have put a lot of time into, for instance, finding cures for diseases or recognizing the trigger points that show us why climate impact is happening.
Philip: It also doesn’t mean that the current bit we’re pushing on invalidates everything below it in the stack.
Blair: Exactly. Physics is still a thing, right? Basic things we figured out thousands of years ago are still relevant today and important to build on. That’s a key thing about truth and science that we need to understand, which is being undermined by both dis- and misinformation.
Disinformation is an active campaign to spread chaos through making things up and getting people to believe things that are not true and then act on them. Anti-vaccine stuff was probably the most blatant example. People threw out all kinds of crazy notions and ideas about vaccines to make people say, “I don’t want them.” The impact is real—take polio, for example, where there’s a new outbreak in Pacific Island communities where it was once eradicated. Misinformation, on the other hand, is more about confusion—spinning something that could be true or maybe isn’t true.
Both are terrifying and are starting to impact everything we do. It’s not just about the information, but how trolls, algorithms, and social media are being used. And the diminishing aspect of independent media is another piece we’ve missed. Over the last 50 years, we’ve watched independent media shrink, largely because of free online content, making it almost commercially unviable for media to exist in the way it did. When I was growing up, media sources’ job was to impartially tell you news about the issues and activities in the world. That’s shrinking at an alarming rate, particularly in Australia, more so than in other developed nations.
In Australia, having one owner—Murdoch—dominate the media is dangerous. It’s more propaganda than media. If you think that’s your sole information source, you’re fooling yourself. It’s a little more subtle, but it’s absolutely there. The tactics used are dangerous and worrying when it comes to the dependency we all had on media as an independent source of information.
I’m also worried about the ABC being shifted with a clear mandate to try and stack the board with people on the right, linked to that propaganda agenda. I don’t know how to solve the problem of a diminishing, commercially viable independent media, but it brings us back to the question of public interest. Do we, for instance, ensure that the public interest—through sources like the ABC and SBS—remains independent? We pay for that, right? But what we don’t have in place are assurances to keep it independent.
In the US, despite the public broadcasting service being tiny, somehow, due to the size of the market, they’ve maintained some fantastic independent media sources. That needs to be a priority here.
Philip: In some ways, the population size gives rise to the fact that with a few key people willing to chip in an amount of money, you can do a lot with media. It doesn’t take a lot to get a story out, and whether people consider it disinformation because it’s factual or not is another issue.
Blair: Exactly. I grew up as a journalist watching journalism, seeing the news, and thinking, “This is great.” I know that emotions work better than facts, and that’s why I have a business. My work is about getting the facts out of people and helping them share it in their voice, in an emotional way.
Philip: Yeah, because we’re all human. We take in information with emotion as a key part of what builds the trust of hearing things. And that echo chamber we’re developing through dis- and misinformation is worrying. It plays on that emotion, leaving out the facts, and it’s easy to start heading down an endless tunnel of disinformation and believe it’s true without any check.
Blair: Exactly. The delivery mechanism is a key part of it. Algorithms purely seek engagement, so the most engaging things are often the most emotive ones—they don’t have to be factually true. They just need to be socially approved by being shared and engaged with.
Philip: And we’ve seen the photos of the mobile phone walls where someone is programming trolls to interject into our information through that social media network.
Blair: It’s terrifying.
Philip: There are simple gates, if you will, to people’s awareness. I’ve put up pictures before showing the mastheads of Murdoch papers across the country during Dan Andrew’s time, during COVID—personal attack after personal attack. You put them all as a wall, and you can see how coordinated it is.
Blair: Absolutely organized. During the last election, I was a victim of that—accused of some outrageous things just because I volunteered for my independent candidate in my electorate. Personal attacks of the most horrific kind for having a conscience and a concern about human rights issues. That was orchestrated across eight women in each of the independent seats. They spent hundreds of hours poring electronically through our social media posts.
It’s dangerous stuff. I’ve had a career as a journalist, a campaigner, and a spokesperson, so I can handle it. But for many women who were first-time volunteers for independents and were politically attacked and accused of horrific things, it’s not so easy. And you see the impact of things like robo-debt, where people who aren’t strong enough to handle it end up dead. Suicide becomes a real thing when stuff like that is thrown at people who aren’t used to it, don’t know how to cope, and don’t have support mechanisms.
That’s dangerous to our political landscape, and something we have to think long and hard about.
I want to mention one thing in relation to this that your audience might find even more worrying. We started Climate and Capital Media out of New York to cover the opportunity side of climate change through the voices of experts, because we’re seeing a diminishing business media that’s honest, legitimate, and truth-based. It’s a risk to our investors and economy. When Murdoch media buys the Wall Street Journal, we have to worry about the economic information we’re getting. Is that disinformation, misinformation, or propaganda?
Certainly, when it comes to the opportunities in renewable energy and clean tech, we have to worry about that because we’re not getting as much free, independent information. Bloomberg is fantastic, but you have to pay for that. If you’re a smaller financial advisor, how and where do you get legitimate market information about how fast things are changing? If all that’s free to you is a Murdoch source, you have to question its legitimacy.
That’s why we started Climate and Capital Media. I urge everyone to constantly question where they’re getting their information about the economy and markets. Sure, you can look at the Dow, but when you’re looking at interpretive material, you have to be very careful now and seek a variety of opinions to understand what’s really happening.
Philip: I spend so much time hanging out with growth-stage companies, climate boards, and going to conferences. I’m always excited about the next thing people are chipping away at. But when I speak to people who aren’t in those environments, they’re reading papers and thinking, “Why am I going to have kids? I should just give up because we’re all burning in a fire.”
Blair: And in some ways, that’s true, but they also don’t understand that they can get a climate job and help this along. People are pouring money into this thing.
Philip: Absolutely. I remember being at a maintenance company for power stations at Loy Yang about 12 years ago, and the guy said, “They’ve never maintained these things, so the cost to keep them online is huge, and they were end-of-life ten years ago.” But we keep saying, “We can’t go to renewables; it’s not possible.” And it’s these layers of contravention that make it all so complicated.
I get my information from the market, but then there are pundits and new journalistic comedians like Friendly Jordies and Punters Politics who are politically oriented and offer a different perspective.
They’re these early thirties, hilarious internet meme guys who are just saying absurd stuff while weaving in really pointed facts—media you’re not getting from mainstream sources. We’ve gone from Ray Martin and 60 Minutes to Friendly Jordies with the death of traditional media in the middle and the complete sole ownership of the Murdocracy across it all.
Blair: It’s a really challenging landscape. Imagine you’re 19 and trying to figure out the world. It’s even harder because you don’t have the memory we do of a solid independent media where you had reliable sources of information.
I’d like to say one thing about business and investment information. I went to a presentation by an investment firm and sat next to an older gentleman—an investor, retired now, but still doing his own investments. He asked, “So what do you think about uranium?” and I was like, “Oh, terrifying, right?” But it’s working for him.
This idea that uranium and nuclear are going to become the best solution to our energy problem—there isn’t a single bit of legitimate market information that would tell you it’s a good bet, for a million reasons. The sheer cost—compare building a nuclear reactor to renewables. There’s not even an existing commercially running small modular reactor anywhere in the world. It’s a lovely idea, but it’s not going to happen practically in our lifetime.
So moving on from that, what we have are old, antiquated technology reactors that are extremely expensive. Australia’s never had one, so we’d be starting from scratch. On top of that, you’re looking at six, eight, even twelve times more expensive than renewables and battery storage, which are easy, fast, deployable anywhere, and diversified. It just makes 100% sense from a market point of view. But here’s someone sitting next to me, hearing conservative voices saying what he wants to hear: uranium. It’s a diversion from the speed at which we need to switch to renewables, battery storage, and a range of other efficient, AI-driven ways to use energy.
Philip: He’s not hearing that, because is it generational thinking for the benefit of the public as an outcome of citizens’ juries and civic responsibility, or is it a political wedge issue to get opposite political support?
Blair: Absolutely. And if you’re an investor, be worried, right? You’re going to have to look a lot harder. I recommend Renew Economy—watch it every day. It’s just following the money and the success stories of who’s breaking through and the companies that are pursuing this transition.
Philip: I was at a Wind and Energy conference, and Corio Generation—Macquarie bought the UK Green Investment Bank, and the Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners—they are not spending billions and billions of dollars on nuclear reactors.
Blair: In fact, let’s face it, Europe is still rolling them back. Sure, due to the Ukraine and Russian situation, there’s a pause of, “Oh geez, we can’t do that as fast as we want to.” But the truth is, it just doesn’t make sense.
And you look at a company like 5B, and you should be excited, right? SunDrive, be excited, right? Australia’s still at the cutting edge of some of the best new technology and renewables in the world, even better than China. Are we doing all we can to make the most out of that economically? Not even close. So as a nation, with the public interest in mind, let’s look to this stuff. There’s big opportunity here.
Philip: And is that because the new economy is collaborative and not competitive?
Blair: I love that. And I think it is collaborative and less competitive. It’s not to say people won’t make money, but what works to make money in this new economy of the low-carbon world is that you can’t be successful without collaborating across the supply chain, and potentially with other countries who produce parts of that supply chain that you’re not going to produce in your own country. That’s true in the States, it’s true in Australia. So that collaboration piece is important, but also great. It’s a new, more distributed way of thinking about how a company operates, and less monolithic and top-down. There’ll be thousands and thousands of successful companies in this new clean tech world, and that’s exciting. That’s more opportunity to work in it, invest in it, have it here in Australia.
We have unique things that are great here. We have the world’s most incredible amount of rare earth minerals. We have the smarts to build circular battery systems that will recycle and just use them over and over again. Incredible. We have smarts in IP and technology, quantum, etc. I’m not all for going to the US to do partnerships in quantum. We have that right here. Let’s use our own smarts—from a national security point of view as well as from an economic point of view. Let’s get smart about making Australia our priority economically, and I still think we’re lagging behind, thinking we’re not good enough. We are 100% good enough, and we just have to support our own.
Get them in a position where they can be in the market globally, doing what we do best, which is the smart side of it—not the labor side of it. We should become the Scandinavia of the Southern Hemisphere and build the systems and the how-we-work-it-in, and then we should be exporting that lower-carbon alternative to things like iron ore and steel. We have every ability to do that stuff, but we’ve got to get behind it.
Philip: Yeah, and you know, props to the marketing department of the government who came up with the Future Made in Australia Act.
Blair: I know, right? Says it all. That was a clear home run, that one.
Philip: What’s something you’ve changed your mind about in the last six months?
Blair: That’s a really great question. I change my mind all the time, and again, one of the challenges of our post-truth world is people getting attacked for changing their mind. Don’t do that. Changing your mind means you’ve got a brain in your head and you’re using it as the world changes. We have to support people changing their mind.
I would say the thing I changed my mind about was that America was over, honestly. About six, seven weeks ago, I thought Trump was in and that’s it. They’re going to rip out every bit of the US IRA that’s transforming their economy and bringing back manufacturing that looked impossible five years ago. They’re going to rip that out and go back to fascism. Quite frankly, Trump has a fascist platform. If you haven’t seen that document, I recommend you dive into the reports on what’s in it. It’s the destruction of their democracy in a very clear and directed way.
So given that, I’ve changed my mind because if you want to get kind of creative about thinking about what just happened with Biden and Kamala Harris, I think they planned it a good while back. That delay tactic was to allow them to have everything in place when he did step back and she stepped up, which is just smart politics. When you’re up against a Trump who will play every lowball game to win attention without any content whatsoever, that’s where I changed my mind.
Philip: Yeah. If you’re not excited about watching that transformation, I think it’s exciting. I took Tim Walz’s initial speech in Wisconsin and stuck it up online. Look at this for speechcraft—it’s beautiful.
Blair: And to use “freedom” and that idea that what’s at risk is our rights and freedoms in this election goes right to the core of what’s been happening in the US media in the Trumpian world, and it’s resonating instantly. One word—freedom. What’s at risk? Freedom. It’s resonating with people who were not necessarily big Biden supporters or Democrat supporters because she’s communicating really well about what’s truly at stake in a sensible, truth-based way.
Philip: I struggle with the entrenched polarization of America. When I hear two people on stage talking about, “We’re going to war with each other. When we fight, we win. We’re going to fight each other,” I’m like, maybe we’ll get a few more percentage points one way or the other, but I don’t think it’s going to do anything for the future.
Blair: “We need to fight, and then we need to heal.”
Philip: Oh, this is “hearts and minds” and invading places.
Blair: Yeah, it’s bad language, isn’t it? Aren’t we smart enough to work beyond that? As a world, we should be problem-solving-based. We’ve got a lot coming at us all the time. As things change, we need to be ready for that.
Philip: As we wrap this up, where do people go for good, insightful market knowledge on investments in climate?
Blair: Climate and Capital Media. We do work with—we partner with—a lot of similar organizations. One in Canada, a few in Europe and the UK, which is Green Central Banking, which looks at the pointy end of finance. EthInvest—we do a lot of good work around good impact investing, what that looks like if you’re interested in that. And then the Climate Capital Forum—we look really at Australia. What can we do here to make sure that we, as an economy, get the best out of the emerging clean tech world and the NetZero market that’s emerging? We think it’s an amazingly positive opportunity to be at the center of that global market, and we have that chance if we take it.
Philip: That’s really wonderful! And just a reminder, if you’re a CEO or a Board Member out there and you’re interested in positioning yourself within those markets and going to these people, I’d love to help out with your strategy, attention, and investment. Thank you so much for joining me, Blair. It’s been a real pleasure, and I’m going to stop there.
Blair: Thanks, Philip. It was great. Appreciate it.
