The Joe Walker Podcast - Progress And Planet — Malcolm Turnbull

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Malcolm Turnbull was the 29th Prime Minister of Australia.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/malcolm-turnbullSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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audio explainers that help you understand their core ideas. Blinkist has also extended their philosophy of less is more to long podcast episodes, presenting the key learnings from famous shows like Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History in 15-minute shortcasts. To discover this world of blinks and shortcasts, head to blinkers.com slash swagman. You can get 25% off an annual subscription, and you get to try Blinkers premium free for seven days. So go to blinkers.com slash swagman. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. It is great to have you back and what a thrilling conversation we have in store. A couple of housekeeping items before I introduce it. First, I want to

proactively apologize to you if you reach out to me by my website or Twitter and I'm unable to respond. I do endeavor to reply to everyone, but it's not always possible. And lately I have had a lot on my plate. So sorry if I'm not able to get back to you. The upside is that I have an exciting project that I'll be announcing in the next month or two. So stay tuned. Second, if you have a friend who's interested in ideas and enjoys having this challenged, please share the show with them. I'm trying to corner the market for contrarians in Australia.

And if current listeners of the Jolly Swagman podcast are anything to go by, we have one of the smartest and most open-minded audiences, not only in Australia, but also arguably in the world, given so many of our listeners live overseas. So if you're anything to go by, then we want your friends on board as well. Please let them know about us. This episode is principally about two topics, climate change and technological progress. Until now, I've avoided running an episode on the topic of climate change, and that was for two reasons. First, this show is not a perfect menu of the world's problems. I try to create marginal value by exploring topics that I think sit at the intersection of being important and being underserved. And while climate change is an important question,

it's certainly not a neglected one, and I probably wouldn't achieve much by adding my meagre voice to the din. But second, my eyes tend to glaze over whenever anyone talks about climate change. My basic attitude is that regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of climate models, regardless of the sometimes strategic miscalculations of the environmental movement in over-egging things, the experiment that we're currently playing with the only planet we've got is asymmetric to the downside. And moreover, we're going to have to

move to sustainable energy eventually, so let's just get on with it. In this episode, I get around that second problem by trying not to ask cliched questions about climate change and trying to keep things interesting. And I get around the first problem by acknowledging that technology has come leaps and bounds in the last several years. And I don't think that fact is as well understood as is the challenge of climate change more broadly. So there is the opportunity to add some marginal value by promoting the fact that technology has come so far. This episode is also about technological progress. I discuss with my guest the stagnation hypothesis, the notion that side and their arguments stand in contradistinction

to the secular stagnation hypothesis revised by revived by larry summers in 2013 which focuses on the demand side to put things crudely demand side secular stagnationists say that there's not enough money supply side stagnationists say that we're not inventing enough new stuff this may seem counterintuitive to you. Most people probably accept the assertion of the former president of MIT in the journal Science in 2018. Quote, never has the pace of discovery been so rapid, the range of achievements so broad, and the changing nature of our understanding so revolutionary. End quote. And indeed, leading stagnationists like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen have recently hinted that the great stagnation may be coming to an end.

So these words could be obsolete, even as I'm speaking them, but let's at least understand their basic contention. Now, it's important to stress that their basic contention is not that there's been no innovation since the 1970s, which I think is a point that got somewhat obscured in the following conversation. Their claim is that the rate of change is decreasing, that progress is slowing down. So it's a big claim. What's the evidence? Well, we could talk about things like the stagnation in real wages seen in places like the United States and Europe since about 1973, or the disappointing total factor productivity growth the West has been experiencing recently, or evidence that new

scientific ideas might be getting harder to find. We could talk about how mismeasurement of inflation explains some, but not much, of the economic slowdown since the 70s. But instead, let me paint two pictures. Both of my paternal grandparents were born in 1919. Both are now past. Both lived extraordinary lives and both lived in extraordinary times. In the first 50 years of their lives, my grandparents saw flushing toilets, the arrival of radio and television, the expansion of electricity and heating, the dawn of air conditioning, washing machines, dryers and refrigerators, the arrival of air travel. They saw infant mortality plunge and life expectancy leap forward. In contrast, here's how the late great David Graeber described the second period from about 1970 onward. Quote, as someone who is eight years old at the time of the

Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be 39 in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. It seemed unlikely that I'd live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn't see any of them. The common way of dealing with the uneasy sense is to brush it aside. Oh, you mean all that Jetson stuff, I'm asked, as if to say, but that was just for children. But even in the 70s and 80s, sober sources such as the National Geographic and the Smithsonian were informing children of imminent space stations and expeditions to Mars. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick felt that a movie-going audience would find it perfectly natural to assume that only 33 years later, in 2001, we would have commercial moon flights, city-like space stations, and computers with human personalities maintaining astronauts in suspended animation while traveling to Jupiter.

End quote. Or, as Peter Thiel puts it in a nutshell, we wanted flying cars and instead we got 140 characters but you should make up your own mind on the topic and I recommend the following books The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen is a classic as is The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth by Robert Gordon for a different perspective you can read Fully Grown by Dietrich Vollruth The Second Machine Age by Eric Brynolfson and Andrew McAfee, or any relevant academic articles by Joel Mockier. And now to our guest. Our guest needs no introduction, at least in Australia.

He was a journalist, a lawyer, a merchant banker, and a venture capitalist before becoming Australia's 29th Prime Minister from 2015 to 2018. Ladies and gentlemen, he is also a return guest to the show. Without much further ado, please enjoy this conversation with the great Malcolm Turnbull. Malcolm Turnbull, welcome back to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Thank you very much. Good to be with you. So, 26th of April, 1937, the Germans unleash a torrent of bombs on the Basque country town of Guernica. And in the wake of the carnage, Pablo Picasso paints one of his finest paintings, also called Guernica, depicting the terror and the destruction of those events 11th of september 2001 the modern age begins with a bang as two planes plunge into the twin towers in new york city where was the great artwork

uh well that is that's a that's a good question i think that is a that's that a few people have asked that question i'm not sure what sure whether there have been any great artworks prompted by that disaster. I'm sure there's been a lot of representations of it, but possibly nothing to quite equal Picasso's work. Is that a characteristic of our age? Oh, I don't know. I don't think so.

Sort of, you wonder whether an artist could ever do justice to the actual event which people saw. You know, we all saw it. I saw it live happen. I mean, television was on at home late in the evening and we saw the second plane fly into the building. So I think that event, but not just the fact of the event, but the image of it is seared into everybody's memory. That's a good point, that if there was a high-definition video of the bombing of Groningen, Picasso might have had a harder task. Well, it's difficult. You see, the bombing of a city, terrible though it is,

is hard to capture in one frame. But the... And, you know, this in a way is where the attack on the World Trade Centre was so calculated. You know, this was the propaganda of the deed. And it was something that was so visual, so literally a frame in one picture. Yeah, I mean, it had an enormous impact an enormous impact because it's because the the scale of it the dimensions of it if you like visual dimensions

of it were discrete whereas you know the um the bombing of a city is a series of, you know, explosions, buildings, deaths, fires, you know, it's event which has got a discrete visual scale in the picture, which is gigantic in real scale, is, of course, an atom bomb explosion. You know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in particular. What do you make of the argument of stagnationists like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon that we're living in a period in human history where technological advancement is slowing down the rate of technological change so the thing that accounts for the slowing productivity growth and economic growth since the 1970s is that we've somehow picked all of the low-hanging fruits outside of a narrow cone of technological change within information and telecommunications look i'm not familiar

with their writings on this so uh but so you know i if leaving aside what their thesis is. I'd say, however, that I actually think the pace of change is accelerating. So I wouldn't agree with that. I'm not sure whether that pace of change is going to result in improved productivity. You know, they're two different things. certainly if you define productivity as a measure of the amount of output you can get per worker and you know which is obviously enhanced by technology and capital investment and so forth I think that is certainly increasing in most areas. But, you know, it's increasing to a point where you're getting, you know, very high levels of automation, which then raises the question of what happens to employment. So if productivity growth isn't a perfect measure of technological progress, what sort

of things do you look to to come to that conclusion that the rate of change is increasing well just i mean being a alert uh sentient early adopter person i mean you know the um let me give you a couple of examples if i had said to you if we had done a podcast 18 months ago and I had said to you, you know what, I reckon we are now at a stage where most of us can work from home and there's no reason why people have to come into office buildings like this. Everyone can work from home because we've got pretty much ubiquitous broadband

and, you know process you know computers processors are got the capabilities to you know essentially do live video pretty much anywhere you would have thought that was a bit wacky or a bit ambitious or aspirational or maybe you wouldn't but I reckon most people would have anyway that's what happened so, you know, that's been a pretty big change. That's just one. I think the, you know, generally, in my experience, technology advances faster than our capability to imagine its use. You know, so, you know, my old partner in Aussie mail,

Sean Howard, used to say, we've always got plenty of technology. The problem, what we're often short of is technological imagination. So I take that example of working from home and the technologies that are facilitating that, but you can look at countervailing examples like the fact that air travel hasn't become any quicker

since the 60s or the 70s, the fact that in some parts of the West, life expectancy is actually deteriorating. There are lots of examples of... Yeah, but you see, but I've got to make this point, though. Sure. This is where just... See, it depends what you mean by technological progress right so you know people can do things that uh they couldn't do before i mean if you call technological progress if you define that as being technological changes which enable

you know things that couldn't be done before to be done or to be done more efficiently or quick more quickly and so forth well you know you can make a case that the motor car has had some very adverse consequences because it has resulted, sure, it's given a great deal of mobility, but it's also resulted in cities being more spread out. It enabled the suburbs to develop instead of denser development, with all of the negative consequences that has had for social isolation and so forth. It's also resulted in people walking less. And so you talked earlier about, I think you were referring to obesity in the West, that it's obviously given rise to that so you know just again just because you've got a technological change does not um doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing i mean you know the fact that i have

a remote that i can change the channels and sound and so forth on my television without getting up off the couch is that technological progress well let's say it is but i might have i might be healthier if every time i wanted to change channels i had to stand up walk over the tv and turn a knob so you know i mean not all technological change has you know great outcomes um for well-being well for well-being well i mean you know was okay was gunpowder a good idea question mark um you know was um well you know you go on i mean there's so many there are so many examples uh you know i I think the... You see, the question of what is progress and what is good are in large part moral judgments.

They're very subjective judgments. And, you know, very advanced technology can be used for very good purposes. You know, cheap, affordable, efficient video cameras can be used to keep an eye on a sleeping baby to make sure it doesn't, you know, stop breathing or you know, to monitor it, monitor its health. You can use that as a baby monitor or it can be used to monitor a whole population and keep them in a state of subjugation. I mean, Herbert Hart dealt with this many years ago

after the Second World War. He wrote about the concept of law. And, you know, you cannot get away from, you know, the moral aspects of it. I mean, there are many laws which have no inherent moral component. I mean, there is nothing moral or immoral about whether we drive on the left or the right-hand side of the road. What is immoral is to drive on the right-hand side of the road if, by doing so, you make all the people who are driving on the left-hand side of the road, you know, at risk of having a head-on collision. So, you know, the law and technology overlap with morality, but they, you know, it doesn't,

better technology does not necessarily mean it's better in a moral sense, you know, or any more than skills or intelligence do, you know. The most, you know, a skilled, really skilled carpenter can be making, you know, a house for people to live in a cradle for a baby to sleep in or it can be making a guillotine to execute you know enemies of the tyrannical regime he serves right so but i think to the extent that technological advancement is one of the biggest levers driving economic growth we can

say that in the long run sustainable economic growth is a good thing yeah well i think it's sustainable i mean that's the key word sustainable is the key word uh and economic growth as long as its outcome is equitable and as long as it gives greater opportunities you know for people to realize their dreams ambitions you know destiny however you want to describe it self actualization yeah I mean of course of course I mean the critical thing is sustainability, as we're now becoming increasingly aware. Yeah, and I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about that.

But I just want to kind of finally come back to this point of the rate of technological change. And we've spoken about a few examples on either side of the counter, but I think the argument of the stagnationists like peter teal and tyler cowan and i know you said you're not familiar with their work so i take that well i'm familiar with who they are but i'm not sure sure so maybe maybe you're vaguely familiar with the sort of great stagnation argument that peter teal has been banging on for about for a number of years that we're not experiencing as much change as we think we are. There's this sort of narrow kind of progress in IT and computer science,

but everything else is slowing down. And so just to tie that off... But compared to when and compared to what? I guess compared to that period of like 1920 to 1970. Well, look, I'm not going to argue with the proposition that change does not, technological change does not occur in a strictly linear fashion. I mean, very few things do. Yeah. Yeah.

And you get, you know, it gets lumpy. And events, you know, the, for example, the, you know, the rate of video conferencing, adoption of video conferencing as a means of, you know, meeting and engaging, communicating, has, you know, went through the roof because of COVID, right? That was probably always going to increase, but it's went through the roof because of covid right that was probably always going to increase but it's went through the roof uh and that's you know that those kind of changes occur i mean i look i think yeah i'm okay well let's say he's right. So what? What does that say? So what? When the change, let's assume that technological change occurs in fits and starts.

I mean, let's assume the graph, the line on the graph is, you know, is a bit jagged. But the trend is, you know, heading, inexorably heading upwards. I mean, we haven't had a sort of a downturn like you did after the fall of the Roman Empire, you know, where technologies were, you know, often, very often forgotten. I think it matters. Sure, sure. I think it matters because you don't want to be

overly pessimistic or overly optimistic. Both sort of converge to doing nothing. So knowing where you are on that curve is really important for knowing whether you should be doing more. And if everyone kind of believes that narrative of techno-optimism, then maybe a lot more people are tempted just to sit on a couch, crack out the popcorn and watch the future unfold. Right. Let me give you some examples. So if you accept that global warming is our biggest, you know, biggest existential threat, then the question arises,

how do we generate all of the energy we need without cooking the planet. And, you know, to be honest, that looked pretty hard 10, 20 years ago. But now it's actually quite clear how you do it. I mean, this doesn't answer every aspect of emissions abatement, but the fact is, we can generate all of the electricity we need with renewables, with solar and wind. And if you plan the firming and storage right, you can back it all up. You do that with batteries and pumped hydro. mean they're just there are other other opportunities but it's all doable it is now absolutely doable and in fact

if you plan it correctly you'll end up having more electricity at a lower price then you electrify your economy so that you don't use, you know, gas, you know, gasoline, I should say. For motor cars, you, you know, use, you know, EVs or maybe hybrid hydrogen fuel cells. The, all of those techniques are available to us. So, you know, that's... Now, that's a function of technology. Now, in the solar case, the actual photovoltaic module, the core of the solar panel, its cost per watt's come down by over 90% in the last decade,

but also all of the other costs, you know, manufacturing, shipping, assembling, all of that has improved as well. So that's, you know, that's a good example of that. Some, you know, large improvements in the energy efficiency or productivity of wind as well, but not to the same extent. That's a more mature technology. I think there are some areas of tech where the scale for big improvements, sometimes quantum improvements, literally, are available. In others, you say, well, is our tech for building bridges going to improve? Yes, undoubtedly. tech for building bridges going to improve? Yes undoubtedly but is it going

is it going to be you know in ten years time will we be able to build a bridge for you know 20% of the cost we can build one today? No. The reality is no. Because a because there's a you know substantial labour component and that's you know always going to be there and b because there's a you know substantial labor component and that's you know always going to be there and B because there's a certain physicality I mean is that this is probably this is not a technical term right so don't don't take it out too often but this is the way I get my head around these things when I was you know used to spend a lot of time thinking about things like

water and carbon capture and storage and you i realized i had a really good insight years and years ago which is that where you've got anything that you're doing that has a high level of what i call physicality which in practical terms means for this purpose, concrete and steel and energy, it's all, you know, it's going to be very hard to get the costs out of that. So you take water, water, a thousand litres of water, which Sydney Water will sell you in your bathtub for, you know, $2.30 or something like that delivered to your home a thousand liters is a ton in weight and a cubic meter in volume now there's not if you think about it there is literally nothing else you can buy a ton of for $2.30 let alone a cubic meter of anything for $2.30 and yet that's delivered to your, as I said, to your bathtub

and if you're a farmer obviously you could only afford for irrigation purposes only afford to pay a few pennies. So what that tells you is that water has a very low value to volume and to weight and that means it costs, it's always going to cost a lot to move it around relative to its value and a lot to store it unless you have you know some you know fortunately designed topographical feature you know like warragamba dam you know a long deep valley with a narrow neck and you can effectively put a plug in the end of it

and back up a lot of water. So, anyway, bottom line is, as a consequence, no matter what the tech, large-scale water projects cost a lot of money and are very rarely economic. So when you get crazy people, you people, shock jocks like Alan Jones and others who say, oh, we should build a pipeline from the Kimberleys to Melbourne, you know, this is – and then I think it all goes downhill naturally, of course, from the top of Australia to the bottom has to go downhill, which of course it doesn't, interestingly, but anyway, that's another

question. But the point is, that can never work, right? That absolutely can never work. It's interesting. So I got very interested years ago in desalination technology. And that, I mean, there are different techniques, but the most common one is something called reverse osmosis and it basically involves pushing seawater through a membrane with very small holes in it that essentially keep the salt molecules out that's essentially what it involves and so you're pushing the water through there and you get you know that you get the water that comes out is fresh water and the water that stays behind is is brine um anyway uh now the operation of those ro systems reverse osmosis systems keeps improving and it improves so that the cost of the membranes is less and the amount of power you need is less,

so that's still high. But, here's the but, you still need to build a big, long pipe out into the ocean to collect the seawater, and you need to build another big, long pipe out into the ocean to safely and sustainably dispose of the brine, which typically has twice the salinity of the seawater which it's being mixed in.

You then have to get your desalinated water into your city's water system. And typically the reservoirs that feed a city are not on the coast. They tend to be up behind the city on higher ground, in hills. You know, that's the typical sort of thing. And so that involves building more pipes and more pumps and more concrete and more steel.

And so, you know, all of that makes it expensive. So there are areas where you will get meaningful improvements in the cost in technology but there are areas where the physicality of the process involved is always going to result it's always going to mean you know it's still going to be very expensive so that's but that's just the nature of things, I think. Social discount rates help us compare the interests of future generations with the generations alive today. And a high social discount rate implies that we value the interests of future generations less.

Low social discount rate implies that we value the interests of future generations a bit more than that and because they compound over time they can lead to wildly divergent outcomes depending on which discount rate you choose and when they're put into climate change models they can lead to very different optimal policies so for example nicholas stern back in 2006 had a very aggressive climate change policy because he used quite low discount rates, whereas William Nordhaus proposed more modest mitigatory policies because his discount rate was quite high. By how much do you think we should discount future generations? I honestly don't think about it that way I I think you I think you've got to you know you've just you've just got to be practical about this I think we we owe it to our children and grandchildren to do everything we can to leave the world

a better place and certainly no worse a place than one the one we found or we found ourselves in so um i i don't i think a lot of these sort of attempts to turn political subjective political human judgments into mathematical formulae i mean they're fine up to a point except that they're really of really of interest to nobody outside of academe. You know, you... But they do have big policy implications. Well, yes, well, they do, but the real... So the real question is this.

You know, are you just kicking the can down the road in a policy sense and creating a bigger problem you know for people in the future now the argument but you know there is there all sorts of women the fundamental thing is just sheer selfishness and lack of altruism that's obviously one but there is an argument and this is what William Nordhaus is sort of essentially talking, which is that we can reasonably assume that the cost, for example, of mitigating climate change 20 or 30 years from now is going to be less than it is today because of constant technological improvement. And I'm very sceptical about that.

I mean, I think you... You know, again, you've got to... You've got to make sure that whatever you're doing makes sense from a political point of view in the sense that you can persuade people to go along with it. But, you know, expecting... Assuming that you can, you know, wreck the environment in this generation

on the basis that a couple of generations hence they can put it all back together, that's a very big assumption. Very, very big assumption indeed. And so, you know, prudence tells you that you've got to do everything you can to avoid environmental destruction now, in the here and now but you know regrettably all too often that you know the drive for you know economic very

short-term economic advancement is overwhelming that spoken like a true Berkey and conservative I think at least I know who Edmund Burke is as I say most people who claim to be conservatives and politics nowadays don't know the difference between Edmund Burke and Tony I think the easiest thing to say is that the discount rate should be precisely zero. And so what does that mean? The interests of future generations should be valued equally to current generations. There's some good literature on that. Yeah, well, I mean, I would intuit, as a matter of justice, I agree with you there, but I can also see the argument.

See, look, there are two okay so you could argue that we should be more prudent about future generations well-being because that's our altruistic obligation that's kind of in part of our should be part of our human nature uh to after your children, you know, try and, you know, nurturing, looking after your children and grandchildren is kind of, you know, drilled into our DNA in most cases. But I think there's also the thing that there is an assumption, you know, we shouldn't assume that future generations should necessarily be as well able to deal with these problems as we are okay and equally I think the assumption that they'll be better able to deal with them which is what William Nordhaus sort of argues is I think heroic so I'd be comfortable with a discount rate of zero as you say I. I think that's a good, sensible balance.

But, you know, prudence and common sense have got to play a role here. You know, we live in a time of enormous uncertainty and unpredictability. A prudent person, a conservative person, takes care to look after the environment, in this case, and does everything they can to ensure they pass it on ideally better, in better shape, certainly not in a worse shape. Do you have a psychological model of climate change denial i'm less interested in that's really interesting yeah yeah so so sorry to interrupt um i'm less interested in the motivations of the fossil fuels industry because the the pure self interest is sort of obvious there but there are a lot of people for whom climate change denial is even contrary to their

own interests well look i really i'd be very interested in your views on this uh and anyone else's views everyone's views i think it's one of the most interesting and disturbing questions we face yes you're right obviously if you own a coal mine you you want to sell more coal. Okay, I get that. At least I don't agree with you. I understand it. But why has the political right, the sort of populist right, increasingly the populist authoritarian right, why have they adopted denial of climate change as a values issue. I mean, that is what is so puzzling, because denying the reality of global warming is like denying gravity. Now, obviously, if you say to me, I don't believe in gravity, I can, well, you can't open the window in this building,

let's say you can, I could say, well, I invite you to conduct a real life experiment, you know, I'll just call the ambulance so he's ready to pick you up at the bottom. Well, I guess one's denial of gravity is so readily disproved and catastrophically disproved. It's not an issue. But global warming, we have known about the physics of global warming for 150 years i think it's longer than that and it is so obvious what is happening and yet that denial is there now is it is it just global warming or is it denial of science and modernity, generally. I mean, it's not so long ago, it's now the end of March 2021, a year ago, people were denying COVID was an issue.

And they continued doing that for quite a while. You had people denying that wearing masks was helpful. I mean, obviously, if it's a virus that is spread, you know, with aerosols or, you know, droplets, large or small, clearly covering your face is going to be beneficial, may not, you know, be the whole answer. But I mean, people have been wearing masks to stop spreading disease for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Yet we had... It was as though you had one common-sense, sensible measure

after another was being denied. And, you know, now, of course, you've got people, you know, the anti-vaxxers are out in force. So this denial of science is very interesting. And, see, I do not... I honestly do not understand the way in which climate science has been turned into an issue of values or belief.

I can understand why you could say, well, you know, I don't support gay marriage because, you know, I've got a strong religious belief about it. Okay, I don't agree with you, but I understand that, that I accept that. But why would you say you don't believe in global warming when it is clearly a physical fact? And it's not even remotely, the fact of it is not even remotely controversial and shouldn't and really hasn't been for decades now i have my own little kind of pet theory if i can share it with you please so there's a really interesting paper by a few duke university researchers from 2014 i think

the title is something like solution aversion a psychological model of climate change words to that effect but i'll send it to you um and solution aversion sort of a form of motivated reasoning back during the 1990s when addressing climate change necessitated very heavy-handed market interventions. This is, you know, before technology saved the day. So, there's nothing intrinsic to the concept of climate change, in other words, to the problem that's inimical to conservative or right-of-center ideologies. But solving that problem required solutions that were ideologically unpalatable so as per motivated reasoning psychologically the easiest thing to do is just to deny the

existence of a problem because then the need for a solution evaporates and so that's how it was kind of bootstrapped into existence yeah and there's mich what Michael Mann sort of argues in his latest book. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's phase one of how it starts. But then the really concerning thing is that now with renewables plus storage, we don't need new coal anymore. Yep. and so solution aversion doesn't need to be the reason to deny climate change anymore but the problem is has it taken on a life of its own has it generated its own momentum when now

it's just a symbol of tribal loyalty i i i think the answer to i think that's all of that's that's a very good explanation and i think your tribal loyalty point is a good one too but it is you know it is it is barking mad there's no doubt about that and the um you know the the well we talk about future generations. I mean, the reality is right-wing ideological opposition to taking action on global warming, particularly in the United States, has really held up the pace of global action. You know, and that's a price that we're paying, starting to pay now,

and I think when we'll be paid in larger measures in the future, because as every year goes by, the cost of cutting emissions becomes less. It becomes more, I mean. Have you ever thought about, say we move to a renewable energy world, have you thought about the geopolitical implications of that in the sense that so much of the exchange economy

is based on energy? On moving energy around? Yeah. Yeah, no, I think it's a good point. Well, I mean, Andrew Forrest, of course, sees a big opportunity in green hydrogen and green ammonia and shipping green energy around in one or other of those forms. I think there's a lot to be said for that.

But certainly, okay, well, you know, here's a paradox, right? Typically, it's the right wing of the coalition parties in Australia who are most concerned about energy security you know and the fact that we don't refine let alone produce enough of our liquid fuels in Australia well you know one way to deal with that problem is just to get them out of the transport system like have you had all of your you know road vehicles or almost all of them running on uh on electricity and batteries you wouldn't have a liquid fuel security problem would you i mean or if you did it'd be tiny by comparison so so you know there's a um yeah i mean i I think I think that's that there will be a big change I

mean there are some parts of the world where renewal you know renewable energy is not as abundant as it is here and maybe you know that's why you're going to need to have bespoke solutions everywhere but you know frankly the we you know we can we can you can see the future I mean it is it and I think for Australia it is overwhelmingly solar plus wind mostly solar and storage and you know one of the great insights that Andy Blake is responsible for is just pointing out that opportunities for off-river pumped hydro. You know, you don't have to build a new gigantic dam to do pumped hydro.

Now, in Snowy 2, we're connecting two existing dams that happen to be 20 kilometres apart and 700 metres difference in elevation. You know, regrettably, there's a large mountain in the middle, hence the tunneling cost. But if you want to do smaller pumped hydros, you can do bespoke ones. You just need two reservoirs, you know, ideally a couple of hundred metres or more elevation difference, and you connect them. My big concern on the energy storage front is that there is not enough pumped hydro being built. I'm all in favour of batteries, but I think people are assuming that batteries are going to provide

long-term seasonal storage, which I don't think they are likely to be able to do, at least other than that, a stupendous cost. I guess one of the key problems with solar is that you can't bring it in overnight, to paraphrase Gerald Ford. Well, the sun isn't shining, it's a tree. But you can't bring it in overnight in the sense that we can't move to solar speedily.

Oh, we can. Well, actually, solar, I sort of disagree. I mean, you're right about overnight, obviously. But no, I think actually this is, you put your finger on a big issue. So to build a new solar farm or indeed a new wind farm does not take very long. You know, if you had the approvals, you could build a huge solar farm in well under a year. Because it's been commoditized, you know, like it's almost like ikea you know i i used to say you needed an allen key and a post hole digger and a cement mixer you can put up your solar farm in fact you don't even need the cement mixer

the uh and the post hole digger because you you know there's a a, you know, the guys at 5B, you know, I've got that Maverick product, which is where the solar panels just roll out like a concertina. So anyway, bottom line is it's pretty straightforward. To build a pumped hydro scheme does take a lot longer, you know, typically five to seven years because you've got to, every site is different. You've got, you know, specific to the topography. There's often going to be, you know, environmental issues. And, of course, you get back to the point I made earlier about physicality.

You know, you are using steel and concrete. You're digging tunnels. You're building turbine chambers, you know, under mountains and all of that stuff. So my concern is, and I've been doing quite a bit of work on this with the International Hydropower Association internationally, my concern is that we are allowing variable renewables, wind and solar, to roll out at a great pace. And they are smashing the business model of the traditional thermal generators

because for large parts of the day, the electricity price, you know, goes very close to zero. And yet we're not getting on with building the storage now snowy you know was an exception but you know frankly if i hadn't been prime minister uh um it would never have happened you know that was very much i mean i've been around and i'm aware i'm sufficiently self-aware to be aware of my idiosyncrasies, and that was a very idiosyncratic, you know, decision of mine and initiative of mine, which just simply would not have happened.

And has any other big pumped hydro been established since then? No. So, you know, frankly, we've got to get on with it because otherwise we're going to find we've got, we're very short on storage. So like you, I'd probably think of myself as a small L liberal, although I'm probably not big on thinking and labels, but whatever that means. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm wrestling with the notion of freedom of speech. Obviously, we don't have a constitutional right to freedom of speech in Australia, freedom of political...

Well, there is a sort of... Implied freedom of political expression, yeah. But at least, say, in the United States context, that right sort of emerged in a very contingent historical context in which we didn't have the modern technologies that we have today. So, there was no ability to kind of broadcast a tweet to the whole country, let alone the whole world. But now we live in a very different set of circumstances. And I wonder how we should grapple with that and i'd just be curious to hear how you think about freedom of speech and its limitations well there's a really great essay

in the new york times magazine uh about six months ago by emily baslon about this which i'd commend to you and your listeners but look in a nutshell the justification or the rationale for freedom of speech and say in the american context the first amendment is that in the contest of ideas the truth will prevail in other words let everybody tell as many lies and say as many crazy things as they like because in the contest of ideas the sensible ideas the true facts will emerge triumphant well you know is that right uh the we're drowning in lies as emily wrote in her essay um i think a lot of our thinking about freedom of speech was premised on a certain degree of responsibility

on the part of media and journalists and publishers. But you've only got to look at a lot of Murdoch's outlets, Sky News in Australia, tabloids very often, certainly Fox News in Australia, tabloids very often, certainly Fox News in America, to see that crazy falsehoods, conspiracy theories, lies are not solely the province of social media. You know, I mean, that mob that stormed the Capitol on the 6th of January were motivated in large part by their belief that Joe Biden had not in fact won the election and that he had rather stolen it from Donald Trump.

And this was a lie. A huge, gigantic, you know, just massive lie. But that was pushed out and pushed out and pushed out and you saw the consequences. So, you know, we actually do need to have a debate about freedom of speech and responsibility i'm in favor of freedom of speech and have been all my life and i certainly wouldn't want to see government censorship sure but i also think that we have to start holding people to account uh you know and i think i mean i'm surprised that there hasn't been a movement

to discourage people from advertising on fox news for example you know in the united states i mean if i was an american i would be feeling really abused uh by that whole episode by the way in which lies were peddled and promoted through a big, you know, television cable channel with making billions of dollars. And the damage to the American Republic was enormous and continues to be enormous. So, you know, there's a colourful expression that Rudyard Kipling used to describe the power of media proprietors. He said they exercise the prerogative of the harlot, power without responsibility. I've never quite understood how the harlot gets into this, by the way, but it's memorable at least. But the truth is that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from responsibility. And I think, you know, we have to, this is really what we need

to be discussing in this context. You know, it's very flip and glib to say, oh, it's social media. Oh, it's Twitter. Blame it all on Twitter. I'm sorry, Fox News is not Twitter. Sky News is not Twitter. You know, the Murdoch tabloids are not Twitter. They're mainstream media run by big companies making large amounts of money in many cases. And they've got to be held responsible. And, you know, you don't have to theorise about division

and social angst and stuff. I tender the siege of the Capitol, the assault of the Capitol... Exhibit A. ..on 6 January. That's Exhibit A. And that is, you know, that in its own way is even worse than 9-11. I mean, we talked about 9-11 earlier. There were more people killed in 9-11. I mean, we talked about 9-11 earlier. There were more people killed in 9-11, obviously.

But in the assault on the Capitol, that divided America. 9-11 at least united Americans. You know? The internal divisions in the United States are staggering. And the idea that major news outlets would promote things that they knew were lies, literally lies. Just, I mean, there was, I mean, how many court cases were there? 60? 60 applications to courts? All of which found that there was no basis for saying the election had been

fraudulent, and yet they continued pumping these lies out there, and so you ended up with how many thousand people, some of them dressed more creatively than others, sacking the Capitol. And so the fundamental asymmetry we have to grapple with is that it takes a lot less effort to spread a falsehood than it does to clean one up yeah exactly well that's the point i've made that in my book and mediscare yeah well mediscare yeah so how do you how do we contend with that look i think the answer is the lesson learned is you've got to treat it like whack-a-mole. That's a tough job. It is. No, it is very tough. It is very tough.

Because the traditional political wisdom was that if your opponents were spreading an outrageous falsehood, just ignore it. Let it go through to the keeper. Because otherwise you give it salience. But in this environment, in this viral environment, you cannot assume anything, no matter how crazy, is not going to cut through to at least some demographic or other. you know, what they call low information voters, which basically means people who are poorer, less educated, and very often older, in marginal electorates, they will be the ones that get taken in. And that's exactly what happened in 2016. I mean, that cost us seats, there's no doubt about

that. So did that falsehood change anyone's minds in Wentworth? No, because they knew it was ludicrous, right? How could the federal government sell Medicare, even if they wanted, like there's nothing to sell. But, you know, in marginal seats in Tasmania, and elsewhere, you know, the outer suburbs of some of our big cities, it really did cut through you know again i've gone through that in a bit of detail in my book but it's uh but it's you know there's a big lesson there but it's also again this question of how do you hold people responsible in politics i guess responsibility ultimately is is accountability is delivered through the ballot box. With the media, you know, I wonder if it isn't going to need advertisers to take action.

Mark and Turnbull, great to speak with you. Come back any time. I will. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Two things before you go. One, if you want to read the transcript or the show notes for this episode,

you'll find them on my website, thejspod.com. Number two, please subscribe to the show. It means that you won't miss new episodes like this one and it also makes it easier for other people to find us and I would appreciate your help. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our dehydrated video editor is Al Fetty. I'm Joe Walker. Until next week, thank you for listening.