The Chaser Report - Solar-powered barbecues can save the planet | Saul Griffith

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Energy guru Saul Griffith reckons Australia can lead the way in solving the climate crisis, with our abundant sunlight and love of new technology. Griffith has been advising the Biden Administration on renewables and is well known around the world for his passion for energy solutions that don't just work, but work better than what we have now. He reckons we already have all the technology we need to make it happen – if only we had the political will. His new book is Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook For A Clean Energy Future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Friday, the 15th of October, 2021, Dom Knight and Charles Firth with you once again with our final Freedom Week episode of long interviews with interesting people. Today it is Saul Griffith, one of the world's leading experts in getting rid of carbon by electrifying everything. He's got lots of ideas, practical ideas, about how we can stop burning coal and all that kind of stuff and instead transform the whole way that energy works in our country. And here's the thing, he's actually really confident about how practical it is. Yes, that's right.

And he was born in Wollongong in New South Wales, and he's sort of paved his way around the world. He's got this extraordinary career. But he's now come back to Australia with a single mission, which is to basically save the planet. And he's got a really good idea on how that can be done. Yes, I mean, he's worked with the Biden administration. Certainly the Australian government talked to him all the time. I mean, you might think they never talk to anyone who wants to fix climate change, but Saul Griffith they do actually talk to.

He's got a new book out about how this all works. The book is called Electrify and Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future. Although I think probably a lot of the key points are going to be covered in the next hour or so, Charles. But by the book anyway. Yes. That's all coming up right after Rebecca Dana-Muno brings you the latest chase and news headlines. Massive shortages have hit Britain's supply chain with concerns mounting that the country will run out of food and fuel by Christmas.

But officials say they can't blame it on Brexit, mainly because they've entirely run out of things to blame. Canberra is on track to become the most vaccinated city in the world still in lockdown. But experts say it's unclear whether the city is in fact in lockdown or it's just that there's nothing to do there. Scott Morrison has revealed why Australia is sending a rover to the moon. The Prime Minister said that he needed somewhere to lie low next time a crisis hits Australia.

That's the latest Chaser News you can't trust. Remember to like and subscribe to this podcast in your app of choice. I'm Rebecca Daynamuno, and I'm really looking forward to kicking back, relaxing, and hearing all about the impending global apocalypse over the next hour or so. Cheery stuff. So, thanks for joining us.

It's my pleasure. I see from the cover of your book, Electrify, that you're an optimist about our clean energy future. And, I mean, I can see why people will pick this book up in bookshops, because how can you be optimistic about our clean energy future? Do we have one? I don't know how to say this. I may as well tell the truth.

It's a novel thing, I think, in contemporary life. I argued against the publisher about that word. I said no. I said no. You can be like, you know, I can find the tiny bits of optimism amongst a sea of holy cow, but that they couldn't fit all those words into the space. So they didn't know with optimist.

But I, anyway, that's the joke. But I think there is reason for some optimism compared to where we were five years ago. Why? What's changed? I think the reality is our scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs have kind of done their work and they've created roughly the set of technologies that we need that if we had political gumption to match we could slide in at around one and a half definitely under two degrees. So the optimism is we still have a chance.

It does mean that we've got to go health or leather and we've got to change the nature of politics and we need to have a mass mobilization of the people like we haven't seen since World War II. So it's not to say it's easy, but I still have some optimism because I could now, in a short period of time, and maybe that's what you'll do to me on this show, narrate why we have all the things we need to get the job done and we can do it well in advance at 2050. I think I'm definitely up for hearing about that, particularly if it's one and a half degrees, I have yet to hear that that's really viable.

I thought sort of two was pretty much locked in at this point. So that is a relief. One and a half is heroic for sure. So I think more pragmatic people would say, because there are countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Russia, that have no intention of joining your mass global mobilization, two degrees is the best we can hope for. Right, okay.

But in the climate world, there's a concept called committed emissions. If you bought a Ute last year, it will, over the 20 years that it lives, emit CO2 because you're burning petrol in it. If you bought a gas heater for your home last year, it will emit for roughly 15 years until it breaks. If you bought a coal plant in China last year, it will live for about 50 years, etc. if you let all of the machines that are already born and exist on the planet today live out their natural lives, that'll give us about 1.8 degrees. Right. So the trick is to just stop making new commitments.

Yes. So just stop buying gas eaters from now on. I like to think about it this way because I think this is, And I don't want people to misinterpret it. It doesn't, this doesn't mean we need to go out tomorrow and put an axe through the bonnet of our two petrol-powered cars and disconnect the heater and use candles. All things that would actually be very fun.

All would be very fun. That revenge fantasy version of climate success would give us about 1.1 degrees. Right, yes. That we'd all probably wake up at the end of the weekend and feeling a little cold and a little over it. My wife, it's not even the third cold shower that gets her. It's actually the first one. So, so that's, anyway, 1.8 degrees is about as good as you can do.

This is why you hear people advocate for early retirement of coal. Because if you take out the heaviest admitting big machines first, that can bring you 1.7, 1.6. And then this is obviously why there's a huge amount of discussion about negative emissions. So would you say that Australia's Environment Minister approving three new coal projects in the last month? Would you say helping or not helping? I'm not sure how I would describe my feelings for that person, but the young, agitated activist version of me would certainly have fun with his front lawn and his doorstep.

like this is not on at this point we should be stopping it now you could have a more nuanced conversation about how you slowly transition Australia's industry because certainly I do have some sympathy my you know two or three great grandfathers ago we started my family started the cooking industry in Wollongong so and you know my first job was on the rolling mill next to the blast furnace in Newcastle. So I appreciate the cultural challenges for a whole lot of people who've worked hard in coal and steel and these industries that when they hear turn it off, they hear their job goes away tomorrow.

That's not actually how it happens, right? So the average furnace lasts 15 years, the average water heater last 12 years, the average car lasts 20 years. So as long as we just make sure that the next time you go to buy all of these things, we put in the electric option. And then we retire every coal plant and natural gas plant at the end of its life. Or, you know, for extra credit, bring it forward and retire them a little bit early. That's super good news.

That's the recipe for Australia. The problem is that we supply huge amounts of coal to Southeast Asia, India, China and others. And that's why we're approving those mines because we, I think we can squint and see the domestic solution. But there's still some greedy little eyes that one of them. make sure that we're going to enable other people to ruin our children's future. So it won't be our fault. It'll be other people's fault. But that's sort of at the end of the day, a lot of these things come down to the tricks

we played with the IPCC on whose emissions count where on the ledger. Australia is responsible for roughly 1% of global emissions, but 4% if you include the LNG, the natural gas and the coal that we export that's burned elsewhere. And 1% is already per capita puts us as the most, the highest emitter, doesn't it? No, no, I mean, you know, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Canadians, Americans, they're just slightly worse than us, but mostly because their climates aren't as lovely and mild. So it's not like we're better people, we just got, we just got blessed with a better, better weather. I suppose, because you, so you mentioned you started in Wollongong, but you've been over in America for a number of years.

haven't you? What have you been doing over there? I bought a one-way ticket to America when I was 19 to my mother's great dismay. And the first six months in America was just hitchhocking around Alaska, which was fun. But then I... And why did you go? Was it to not have to work at the furnace? No, I was studying metal. I suppose after a furnace going to Alaska makes a lot of sense.

I just finished working on the steel mill in Newcastle. And I was struggling to motivate to finish my degree in metallurgy at University of New South Wales. So I got myself an exchange program to go and do a year at Berkeley. But because of their academic year is six months off, hours, I got to have a holiday. So I went and worked on a fishing trawler and drove a couple of trucks and fought some fires in the far north of Alaska. Then I went to Berkeley. Then I traveled the world for a while. Ultimately, I went back to America to do my PhD at MIT.

which was really an incredible experience. Then I finished that in 2004, went to Silicon Valley and started starting companies. Nearly all the companies I've started have been in energy or in robotics, and I've done well enough that I can actually spend a lot of my time now fighting for good without having to sweat the paycheck.

So I'm very blessed, because as I've learned both in America and in Australia in the last two years, policy is made by the people who can afford to show up. So the fossil fuel industry shows up, poor, broke people show up, and I can show up now and influence policy, and so that feels like a good way for me to give back. So you said that we have the tools that we need to sort this stuff out,

and my completely just vague impression is that we have been getting to the point where even if political will is not there, it's become so cheap to go renewable in some situations that the profit motive is helping with this. But I'm excited to hear that we have what we need in terms of technology evolution. What is that stuff? So we don't have everything we need for every single segment of the economy. But what we do have right now, like you say, is starting to work. And this is a lot of the work we're doing with.

I started an organization last year called Rewaring America. This week, in fact, started an organization called Rewiring Australia, and that is to show that decarbonising our households or our castles and our cars, you might say, and our small businesses, is now really close to within reach in a bunch of countries. When I'm in the US, for example, I'll be addressing senators there and I'll say, if you could invent a country that had Australian Riftop Solar Policy, Norwegian or California electric vehicle policy and South Korean German heat pump building heat policy

you'd have the ideal country where the economics all works that's because in Australia we did really clever things about a decade ago that deregulated the made the soft costs go out of our solar because of clever regulations and so we have the cheapest electricity delivered anywhere in the world as Australian rooftop solar used in your house.

The California electric vehicle policy is to underwrite and subsidize the market until those vehicles get to cost parity and we're really close. So Bloomberg New Energy Finance, they're not a terribly, you know, their money-focused organization, they believe that at the showroom, you'll pay the same amount for an electric car that you would for the equivalent fossil fuel car in about 2025. Wow, that's certainly not the way things work here. No, but that could be happening here. I mean, it's still cost you about $10,000 and more today.

If you go and buy a Hyundai-Kona with a petrol engine in the US, it's about $40,000. And if you go and buy the Hyundai-Kona with the electric, it's about 52 or 55. So right now it's a little bit more, but that's coming down really quick. and then people who own electric cars know that once you own it it's one or two cents of a kilometer to drive it instead of 15 or 20 cents to drive your forward ranger so as long as

we can help people get over that front slug for a few years the the the the capix um you'll be right or as i like to say it now it's like if you can afford to buy Mercedes today you can afford to completely decarbonize your driving, you're just very consciously choosing to buy a Mercedes instead of a Hyundai, right, an electric Hyundai. If you can only afford to buy a Toyota Camry today, then there isn't an electric car that's you're going to be able to afford in the showroom. So there's still, that's, that's why California and Norway have good EV policy because they're helping the early adopters get over that upfront slug with, you know, in California, it's a $7,000. rebate. And Australia would do well to have policy that looks like that. But once you get all of

those things in place, if you could have that country that's Australia, Korea, Fauna, by about 2025, every Australian household will be saving a thousand bucks a year. And by the end of the decade, 2030, every Australian household would be saving five or six thousand dollars a year compared to what they paid a day. Now, that's not you're going to be in a smaller, home and have smaller cars and the you know you're going to shrink everything can ride the bus and become vegan narrative that's the we'll give you the same size car it'll be electric same sized home same suburb it'll be heated with heat pumps and electricity solar on the roof and you'll be able to recognize those savings isn't there a sort of problem though in australia

which is that every time they had the last election labor party rolled out a policy to try and get people to buy EV, some EV subsidy. And suddenly there was this massive scare campaign from the coalition saying, they're going to steal your Ute, they're going to ruin the weekend. And suddenly the whole, not just the coalition, but the Murdoch press came in with a full court press, basically scaring everyone that, you know, the plan to subsidize.

And, and also there was a sort of class war edge, which was, well, this is fine for the inner city latte sippers who want their Teslers, but, you know, what is, it was a real politics of envy thing going on. And, and so the idea immediately died. Like, it sort of, this, this, the political conversation in this country seems to be so broken that I'm not sure this sort of like how do you get around that problem I think we just got absolutely own the culture wars so um this is this is my new project um I don't know whether to bet you that it'll happen in 2022 or 22 or 23 but I'm going to win summer that's in a home build electric hot road wow all right that is a huge call and I'm just going to throw it down and

say like the reality is now um I'm I'm only my wife and I now have our fourth electric car and we drive we drove all of those four electric cars way more than we drove the other four cars that I own which are basically hot rod muscle cars you see what's not you know I may be an environmentalist but I'm also a motorhead and I have a 59 Volkswagen dune buggy with a Porsche engine in it and I have a 61 Lincoln Continental which is like definitive American muscle it weighs about seven tons 63 land rover and obscure a 600cc Fiat bus from the 90s, also from the 1950s. So I love cars and I can appreciate that people will want some of that car thing in their

future and a couple of years ago you couldn't tell a story that it was going to be okay. Can you do a donut? Can you do a burnout in an electric car though? Oh my God. I have a two-wheel drive electric motorcycle. I build and I can do a two-wheel drive burnout in my electric motorcycle. I've built a 16-wheel-drive electric car that has about 160 horsepower. It's actually a go-car with 16 wheels for reasons. That may be a 64-wheeled version of that might be what I win Summonauts with. What about a Monster Truck?

If you turn up to Summer Nat in an electric monster truck, I think you'll just win. You can crush all of the petrol power cars. Summernats, I thought was a little bit nostalgic. I mean, there's no monster trucks in Australian nostalgia. I think maybe if you showed up in an FJ40 cruiser. with electric and, you know, then you'd be in the right game. But this is sort of, I don't know whether this is going to work, though. Because, okay, so you've got the sort of hoons.

I still don't see how you stop it being subject to some sort of scare campaign. Because it's not that, you know, Aussies love their hot rods. That's not the problem. The problem is that, you know, actually, frankly, Frankly, a lot of the coalition is captured by these mining interests. They're carbon captured. And they will go to the wall. They'll try anything to try and slow the electrification of Australia.

They're absolutely going to go to the wall and they're going to try and beat us on everything. They're going to try and beat us with their barbecues. They're going to try and beat us on jet skis, on cars, on motorbikes, and all the things. Yeah, they're trying to steal your gas barbecues. you know next you know right so i think again we just got to own that saul griffith is trying to steal your lump of coal that you've had you know that you take to bed each night and sleep with i'd love to imagine angus taylor going to sleep tucking in next to his big lump of coal and i've heard he does

he does in the 1970s none of these things were partisan issues and in fact when the first energy crisis hit the u.s it was on richard nixon's watch and it was the oil arab oil embargo and america was short 15% of energy and there was no department of energy so Nixon invented one they studied what was wrong with the problem and they realized that they should make cars more efficient by 15% and they should make appliances more efficient by 15% and that would be enough to solve that problem and that gave us a traditional energy policy as we now understand it more efficient car policy which drives the world you know America's cafe fuel standards drive the world's vehicle standards and it gave us energy star appliances and you see

the little label when you go to the harvey norman that's where those two things came from so we've only had an efficiency narrative around solving our energy problems for 50 years and efficiency rhymes to people with somebody taking away your truck or making you live in a cold or smaller house or something like that the amazing thing about electrifying our stuff is an electric monster truck doing exactly the same things as a petrol powered monster truck does it using one third of the energy, right? It might, it'll cost you 80 cents to have an eight minute luxurious natural gas powered shower, but because if you do that with an electric heat pump, it'll only use one

third of the energy. If you're powering that off of your rooftop solar, that'll only cost you 10 cents. So the efficiency, you know, and if you, if you use a coal powered plant to make electricity, um, three quarters damage is wasted. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is we've had a denial list efficiency narrative. for 50 years and no one's ever dared to have an abundance narrative. So let me give you an abundance narrative of this electrified future, right? The electric Ford F-150, which is even bigger and more handsome than your small, Australian,

tiny Ford Ranger, will go on sale next year for $40,000 and it'll be all electric and I'll have about a four or five hundred kilometre range, right? And so the weekend's now still within reach. The car has more room. and it can get the job done. $40,000, and that comes with a hundred kilowatt hour battery in it. So today, if in Australia, you're buying a battery for the side of your house, you're paying about $1,200 a kilowatt hour.

Think about that Ford truck as $400 per kilowatt hour battery with a free SUV, right? That's coming. That's going to completely change the climate debate, and we need to be in. anticipating that now in Australia so that we can have enough vehicle charges and et cetera to make all that work. Thinking about it this way, if you want an abundance narrative, we'll have, we'll, instead of designing our solar to just barely, you know, the rules by which we encourage solar on rooftops is only generate enough to cover the loads that you use on an average day. Never ever really dared to think. Cover your whole roof and a bit of your yard too so that you get way, way more electricity, in which case you could power both

your whole household or your heating and you may as well put a jet ski in the front yard because a jet ski needs about 100 kilowatt hour battery to have the same full throttle one hour experience you get with the existing one and so your jet ski then becomes your house backup battery and you spend $30,000 on this jet ski your wife now approves of it because you're saving your children and you're backing up the house and this is a grid connected asset probably a state premiers should be competing with each other to give rebates and discounts and incentives for people to convert their two-stroke jet skis to electric jet skis so that we're actually using these things as great assets to balance our wind and our solar. I see you laugh. Unfortunately,

the audience isn't hearing you laugh, but this is not an impossible future. And Australia is one of the countries that's lucky enough that has enough abundance of these resources that we could live in that world. Now, the environmentalist for me doesn't exactly love this narrative because, you know, we could solve climate change and still choke the oceans with microplastics, but it's to say we don't have to have the

doom and gloom anymore. The technologies and the costs are here where we could be saving money and we could even be over-investing in our toys and both of those activities are aligned with eliminating carbon from our domestic lives.

But it makes sense that electric people hasn't worked really in the decades that it's been happening selling them on a sexy vision of giving them the things that they want in a better version regardless of how it's powered i can see how that makes sense and it's i mean i'm sold but how do you make that narrative a mass narrative how do you put it out there in abundance so that people who don't already agree with you change their minds and want to go electric you show up summonnats and you beat them i i actually think um what the world really needs, and this is what I'm trying to do in rewiring America, maybe this is what rewiring Australia will become.

But you need a centrist climate movement. You need a plurality of the people in the middle, at neither extreme, who want to do this for sensible reasons. And I really think that means we need the middle class moms and dads and the middle class grandmas and grandpas to be like, oh yeah, I can actually totally see why now the economics is near enough that I don't have to feel bad about doing this and it's for my children or my grandchildren's future. And I'm not going to have to deny myself so many of the things that I'm going to feel

uncomfortable. So now I'm going to feel comfortable enough to vote for a centrist climate politician. Isn't there a problem with that though? Because, you know, consistently the polls in Australia has shown that 70, 75, 80% of people support more action on climate change, right? But that is the poll. And that has been the polls now for at least five or six years. So you'd think that there's a sort of centrist position there. But no one, but the parties don't deliver them. No, neither party has a climate platform that they are going to be comfortable.

We don't have an Australian. In fact, honestly, there's not a government in the world that you can point out that has a satisfactory climate policy. Because they're trying to balance all the things the governments have to balance. And I think, sadly, we're in an era where governments are run by polls, not by leadership. But also aren't they run by interests? Absolutely, they're run by interests. And so we've, you know, absolutely we have to organise against these interests.

I've just stared down the American natural gas industry for the last three months while trying to fight for centrist climate policy in the US. And they're, you know, the evil people, it's coal and oil aren't even at the debate anymore. It's all natural gas. And they're still telling all the bridge fuel bullshit stories. And we just, you know, we just got to get in there. But there's no money on the other side. There's not enough of a coalition to fight.

So we were outspent thousands of dollars to one by these lobbying interests in the US. And from what I can see, Australia is exactly the same. Well, the problem we have here, too, is the nationals. I mean, the nationals get, I think, four and a half percent of the primary vote at a federal election. But because they're part of the coalition and can set the terms of the coalition agreement, which is secret, they have a veto over energy policy and they've had for a long time. So even though some in the Liberal Party, and certainly we see that in New South Wales, actually want to at least move somewhat on this

and businesses telling them that they should while you've got a party that's basically in cahoots with the Gina Reinhardt's of this world, how do we change that? I don't know. Our political system seems uniquely designed to stop us achieving reform in this area. I think this changes with storytellers

and I think you guys... It's up to us. We're going to save the world. No, no, no, absolutely. Seriously, I'm going to push it on you. You're trying to drive me into a place where I'm uncomfortable. I'm going to drive you guys. I actually think we are failing on the political narrative.

I actually believe that the people who want the change are not having deep enough empathy for the interests of, for example, the nationals. As a kid, I was lucky enough to spend a hell of a lot of summers on a sheep farm, dagging lambs and castrating them. Not terribly pleasant when you're a 10-year-old boy to castrate a few. hundred lambs in an afternoon, but that was, you know, what you do. And I developed a deep appreciation for how difficult the rural life is. I also worked in the Australian steel industry and recognized that, you know, a huge amount of our prosperity comes from our metals industries. And so I think

if you can have some empathy for those things being the lived and real experience of a lot of Australians, you can have some empathy that a political representative that's elected to represent them is going to be resistive to policies that make it sound like that's going to go away. We've made farming harder, not easier in the four decades since I was a kid. And it's not entirely unreasonable. You know, what's really Barnaby Joyce asking for? He wants a farm subsidy because it's a pretty darn hard life. And we don't pay enough for our meat and we don't pay enough for our vegetables in the cities. And so, you know, if they have to package that through a, you know, very cynical climate policy, then maybe that's it.

Well, I disagree with you there. I don't think, I think the National Party is a mining party dressed up as farmers. They cosplay their farming. But I also hear you've got the skill set to castrate Barnaby Joyce, which I think could be in the national interest, but that's another thing. I think you're right. The nationals are certainly skewing more mining now than they ever did. um and they are huge interests and you know clive palmer outspent everyone on the environmentalist left

in the last election uh trying to swing the election in favor of what he wants to do so without doubt you can pin the tail on that donkey and they are complicit and but i'm not i think we should go after and try to figure out how to redress the power of the the small number of individuals at the top but I thought we were just we shouldn't be flip-flopping between the cultural conversation which is all the people who are struggling to earn their money

in those industries versus the very cynical people at the top of those Ponzi schemes who are shifting to climate politics It makes sense you've got to bring these people with us and from what you're saying it's possible to construct an argument to make things better

I mean I'm sure that if you can if your electric vehicles can go out on the farm and you can power and, you know, cut all the petrol costs for tractors and things. Maybe that's part of the story, too. I don't know. And in some ways, it's an easy battle because actually the narrative on the other side, oh, no, no, we can save the coal industry.

No, no, we can save the gas industry. Is a false narrative, and it's selling out those constituents. It's, you know, like you're telling people in the Upper Hunter, no, no, this coal community can last for 30 years. I don't know anyone from the Upper Hunter who actually believes that when you talk to them. They know that they're being sold at false... And AGL themselves are going,

no, this is not... We don't want to do this anymore. This is... That's better, guys. That's more of the story telling. That's right, yeah. No, it's just who tells this story? How do we get the will inside Parliament?

So Matt Keane, as we know from talking to him a few weeks ago, is a fan of this stuff. Yeah, who are the allies? I think there's a huge number of allies that are working in state politics you could take the if you took you know the demand response programs being run in queensland because they have so much solar that they're now trying to figure out how to put it into your swimming pool and your hot water heater if you took the ac t's electric vehicle rebates and incentives if you took um some of victorious programs to to underwrite or

rebate the purchase of electric appliances to go with your solar if we took south australia's um you know battery policy, solar policies, you add up all the state's policies and you have pretty much a comprehensive policy that doesn't, that looks exactly like what I've just basically been advocating for. So we're doing it in pieces, but we're not doing all of it in one place and we have no federal support for the good work being done at the state level. Now, the federal government will say some like, well, it's a free market and we shouldn't, and states have their own power, so we shouldn't interfere kind of bullshit line, which is absolutely visionless and leaderless. But what they could be doing is saying, you know, Ambrosio, Keen, others are doing

the right things. We're going to be, we're going to unite the AEMO policy so that all of the grids play nicely with this vision for the future. We're going to sponsor a program similar, you know, internationally, Australia's Riftop Solar is known as the Australian. and solar miracle. And part of the genius was of it was that we ran a certification and training program that built capacity. So it trained the tradies on how to install it, but it also certified them to inspect it and grease the skids of the permit process. So they eliminated all of the soft costs, which is very important and why it's so cheap. We should be doing the same thing for electric vehicles. Let's train all the tradies to install the electric vehicle infrastructure we need. Let's

train all the tradies to install all of these heat pumps we need for water heat and space heat. Let's train all the tradies to tie all this together and put batteries in your barbecue and batteries in your jet ski and wire it up to the grid. And those policies is roughly all you need from the federal government as long accompanied by a commitment to help finance these things so that every Australian household can afford it. Because you're not going to solve climate change, if only the top 50% of households can afford these toys, we need to make sure that every household can. And if we don't make sure every household can, this is going to assure us hell become the political wedge issue. They're going to be like, oh, it's for those

tofers in their Teslas in Turok. We really need to think carefully about how you make sure low-income, multifamily housing units and these other more difficult, you know, the story for the single-family suburban home is pretty easy. The story for everyone gets a little bit harder. We have perfected the narrative of what we have to lose on climate change one of the arguments is our fantastic fossil export industries well we only we export about 60 billion in coal we export about 15 billion in lNG and we import about 32 billion in oil and petrol and diesel but that's not really a fair way of looking at it is it because on your exports you have to spend a lot of money to find mine and make and refine and transport them.

So your profit margins are far less than 50%. If you look at the accounting and do the best guess accounting you can without actually getting into Gina Reinhardt's books, we lose money net net on fossil fuels in Australia. We spend more buying our petrol and our diesel than we do, you know, all the profits we make on all of our fossil fuels. Do we really? Microphone drop, for God's sake.

We're defending these industries that are ruining our water tables and suffocating our children and destroying the future just so we can drive the use. You're including the amount that we all pay in retail petrol purchases, are you in that analysis? Yeah, that's the money we pay in retail petrol purposes for Australia. I can actually, I can't believe that. So, okay, Saul, so we put you in charge of Australia's energy policy.

Let's say you had unfettered control of what to do. What's the roadmap? What's your game plan? Other than making an electric ATV export industry, which I think would probably earn a $60 billion. Yeah, and a jet ski for all, not just the rich. No, no, no, no. I actually was on a phone call with Lily D.M. Razio from, I probably said her name wrong, from Victoria.

She's fabulous. And we got into a little bit of a, it was getting a bit dull because it was one of these endless Zooming. So I decided to spice it. I was like, you know what? we should have the lily di ambrosio electric induction barbecue for demand response of 2021 act and imagine how popular you will be if you give every victorian home an electric induction barbecue which heats up quicker doesn't make your snags taste like fossil fuels cleans more easily

etc and by the way can also be part of the national grid battery to balance our solar and wind right your barbecue can be a battery now we're talking your barbecue can be your battery now we're cooking without gas so they'll be earning you money while you're not using them

like so that's you know there's this there's my federal climate platform right there barbecues and jet skis for all which is very Bernie Sanders sort of isish but no

winding back from that I think your question is good isn't your point though, that there's sort of, we are probably the most abundant nation in the world when it comes to energy in terms of the amount of sunlight and wind. We have everything. Not only do we have every energy, we have every metal, and we have them in bucket loads.

But this is the, this is like, because I reckon Australia's at the point where we sort of are looking at Donald Horn, whose whole point was Australia's the lucky country because we have this abundance and we have the most incompetent mediocre leaders leading us through, but they still succeed because we have such an abundant country. And we're sort of going, have we got to the end of this? Like we're sort of looking, oh, if we're not allowed to export our coal and our gas, we're not the lucky country anymore. But actually, it turns out that the next step is to harness sunlight.

Well, it's like we're the sunburnt country for fuck so. Oh my God, yes. We have, in our national poetry is embedded all, you know, it's the weather, it's the wind, it's the storm, it's the sun, it's the flooding rains, it's the pumped hydro. Like, you know, Dorothy McKella basically should run our energy policy. Yeah. It's all right there in our sunburned country. And that's going to be the thing that makes up for not having coal, isn't it?

Like, isn't the point that... Okay, what does the world need to get from here to decarbonize? They're going to need a lot of silicon. they're going to need an awful lot of steel for all those wind turbines. They're going to need a lot of copper because electric things like copper. They're going to need a lot of aluminum because the transmission lines like to be aluminum and a whole bunch of other things like to be aluminum. And then they're going to need a bunch of other things.

We have like nickel and cobalt and all these things. And you know what? Some countries aren't going to be able to do it on renewables. They're going to need nuclear. Guess who makes most of the world's uranium. Like on ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Australia is in the top five producers of all of the things that the future needs. but right now let's get everyone in the country humming this all the way to the polls whether

it's called in November or whether it's called in March and be like oh let's post some people who actually want to make the future nice and help here's roughly the layout we are the first country in the world that is going to break even on the economics for every household and every small business in a package that is solar on your roof electric vehicles in your garage electric heating systems for your water and your space heat and throw in a battery in an electric kitchen as well and that lily de ambrosio electric barbecue that the government's going to gift you yeah that's right yeah it all we need is bunnings to go electric and i mean there's probably there's nothing wrong with that being true we can get electric barbies at bunnings game over yeah

yeah no we're not we're not even we're not being satirical it's genuinely a good idea i well then maybe that's the political movement that you're looking for step one picket bunnings until Bunnings is all electric and they won't sell you a two-stroke or a chainsaw that runs on petrol anymore. I'm actually just pondering whether we should start the barbecues and jet skis party and the platform is everyone gets a free barbecue and jet ski.

And I think that would actually win the Senate at the very least. And it's defensible as national infrastructure and I'm really trying to change the dialogue of what people think is infrastructure because in the past we thought infrastructure was your coal mine or your snowy project. But if we're going to have to have bad, batteries to store all of their sunlight.

Put them in the barbecue and not on the side of the house. I'm sold. I love it. Your rooftop, your barbecue, your jet ski are part of critical national infrastructure. Right? So I think it's those types of ideas. But anyway, so this decade through 2030, Australia has the opportunity to be the first country to actually prove its scale that this stuff works. That means we'll solve the last two meters problem. What's wrong with this story right now? is the software to glue it all together and make it balance and the distribution grid balance nicely. It doesn't quite yet exist in a way that makes it easy for someone to turn on their oil electric house. But we do that this decade. We'll create these export

companies that will be showing the rest of the world how to do this. We'll be realizing those savings. That $5,000 or $6,000 saving per household that I told you by 2030, incidentally, that's $40 to $45 billion a year we save. That's saving way more. money that those households will then go and spend on all of their other consumer goods that will create lots of positive effects in the economy than we do from all of our fossil fuel industry exports. That decade buys us enough time to figure out how to do the other stuff, how to embed all of our solar energy, all of our wind energy into products that we ship to the rest of the world. Those products will include not just shipping our

iron filled dirt to south korea and japan to turn it into steel but actually using our sunlight here to turn it into steel and then making a much bigger margin when we sell it that's what australia used to do that's why australia paid for my undergraduate degree you know it was paid for by bhp through a co-op program because they needed metallurgists to go and work in australian industry to to continue that export story so we embed our solar and our wind in in steel exports aluminum exports copper all of the other metals i included and also a little bit in hydrogen and ammonia and that way we'll you know we we have the best possible story we could go to glasgow and tell the world we'll do our domestic economy by 2030 and then we'll help all of you with all of these hard to decarbonize industries because

we've got so much renewables that we'll be able to help you with your steel problem and your aluminum problem and your copper problem. Australia, it's like, it's a slam duck. It's win, win, win, and win all the way home, except for a few magnates who would like to scare you into thinking otherwise. Thank you so much, Saul. That was absolutely fascinating. I mean, I was already sold, but I'm even more sold.

I now feel it's actually viable, which is, it's a nice feeling. Yeah, and just remember as long as we, you know, as long as we install the right government or make this one wake up, we'll all save $5,000 a year, which, you know, three years in, you'll be, you'll get the jet ski. I wish we could convince Clive Hunter, so it pays bad. I just think that you think jet skis are more appealing. Oh, no, I hate jet skis.

I really, I really hate that my father has, my father believes that jet skis should only be legal to ride one mile or more offshore. And so as long as you're prepared to swim it out there, you're all good. But if they're electric, it might only be 100 metres because they're less noisy. Yes. So, but, you know. Well, Charles, we made it.

And a completely pre-recorded week with absolutely no effort from us for the entire week. Yes. And as you're listening to this, we, the Chaser team and all the interns and everyone, are gathered around in a completely legal outside courtyard, having a drink and catching up for the first time face to face in several months. Yeah, so we're having a wonderful time, probably. Or it's very awkward, you can we've forgotten how to relate to one another as human beings. Either of those things might be true.

But if you made it this far in the interview, why not tell us, go and tweet at Chaser and tell us that you actually finished the Saw Griffith episode. We'll be so impressed that you made it this far. It will prove that you care about clean energy and the future of our planet. Good for you. And also go to the iTunes store and give us a five-star review. And tell us there. Tell us there as well, please.

Bragg that you made it this far. And the code word to prove that you really did is... Banana. Banana. There you go. Normal episodes of The Chaser Report resume on Monday. Not looking forward to that at all. Are you, Dom?

Yes, because my daughter will be in childcare after 15 weeks. So I'm up for any work. Bring it on. Yeah. Gears from Road Microphones, and we're part of the ACAST, Creator Network. Thanks for listening. Catch you next week. See ya.