We’ve just left the sandy beach and begun clambering along a slippery rocky shore, shoes in hand, when something small catches Tim Flannery’s eye. He briefly abandons his train of thought and bends down to pick up a perfectly banded stone that has been polished smooth by millennia of waves.
At least, that’s what I see. The celebrated scientist, author and conservationist sees something else.
“This is a lovely bit of fossilised wood from 195m years ago,” the professor declares. “Just before the great extinction killed almost everything on the planet.”
We silently ponder this for a beat, until Flannery gestures up at a rainforest-covered cliff a couple of kilometres away. “It all happened between here and those cliffs up there. This area tells the story of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when 95% of all living things went extinct,” he says.
“What we’re looking at here is really the greatest piece of dramatic theatre that exists anywhere, if you look at it right. We’ve got the extinction events, the ancient rainforests, the remnants of Gondwana breaking off. You’re getting things from this grand vista of time and through to the present day.
“To me, when I look at it, it’s just breathtakingly wonderful. There’s nothing that humans do that is as grand as this.”
We’re about an hour south of Sydney, at Thirroul in the northern Illawarra. It’s a slightly overcast Thursday, and McCauley’s beach is festooned with kelp and other ex-sea life brought in on the morning tide. The South Pacific is broad and shimmering, and behind us the verdant Illawarra escarpment conservation area looms like a green wall running along the coast. “It’s my favourite beach in the whole area,” Flannery says. “I like the geology here, the Indigenous history and the bush that’s been preserved up behind it. It’s just beautiful.”
For the past six years or so – since he relocated to the area from Melbourne with his partner, the writer Kate Holden, and their 11-year-old son, Colbey – this view has been only a short excursion from Flannery’s front door. Here, the 69-year-old has written books, regularly commuted to Sydney to study the Australian Museum’s extraordinary collections of specimens, and been a remote working guiding light for the Climate Council, the independent organisation he helped create in 2013.
Flannery was sold on the area when he heard the wailing calls of catbirds in the surrounding trees. It reminded him of his early years as a mammalogist and palaeontologist in the New Guinea jungles. He still returns to West Papua, working with local communities on protecting wildlife and forests. But he is best known for his work on climate change, particularly his lauded 2005 book, The Weather Makers.
That led to him being named Australian of the Year in 2007 and later to running the government Climate Commission in 2011 until it was abolished by Tony Abbott. Two decades on, he still sounds surprised by The Weather Makers’ international bestseller status. It was intended as a guide for high school students, but took him to the White House, won praise from global celebrities including Richard Branson and then Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and was credited with inspiring the introduction of a carbon tax in Canada’s British Columbia.
“I had no idea it would be as widely read, honestly, as it has become,” Flannery says. “I wish I had anticipated it because I would have been better prepared to deal with it, or make more of the opportunity.
“People were asking me: what should we do about this? Tom Daschle, the minority leader in the House in the US, asked me: what sort of policy levers should we use in the US? And all I could think of at the time was a carbon tax, but without understanding the local politics in the US and how very difficult that would be.”
Whatever reservations he has, he says he is proud of the changes in attitude it helped usher in. “I think the most important thing was the public-facing awareness raising,” he says.
“The shift in public sentiment – that’s enduring. It is very hard, once the sentiment has shifted, for fossil fuel industries to regain all their ground. In Australia, 45% of our electricity is generated from solar and wind. When I wrote the book, solar panels were a rarity.”
We’re walking early in the federal election campaign, and the Climate Council has just released a policy scorecard. It is blunt in its assessments, rating the Coalition as “harmful” for voting against every law introduced to cut climate pollution in the last parliamentary term. Labor is described as heading in the “right direction”, but is marked down for having no plans to phase out fossil fuel developments. The Greens’ positions are described as “strong”.
Flannery sets out the choice between the major parties in simple terms. A Coalition government would mean “continuing to back fossil fuels and some hypothetical vision of Australia as some kind of nuclear capable nation”, while a returned Labor party would “continue the transition we’re on” towards a largely renewable energy powered national grid.
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“To me, it’s like when the local council is fixing up the road in front of your house,” he says. “They might say, ‘Look, we can do it quickly with the current technology, we’ve got it half done, it’ll take another three years to get the rest done – or we can try some of this new stuff and it might take 20 years.’
“I say: ‘I just want the road fixed.’ Transitions are messy and they’re awkward. Continue with the conventional methods you’ve got – solar and wind. They’re cost-effective, they get the job done in the shortest time. That’s what we need.”
That said, he believes the country should be substantially more ambitious than Labor is proposing. A board member at Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, he backs the mining billionaire’s push for “real zero” targets that abandon the use of contentious carbon offsets, which are often used to justify ongoing polluting. He says the national goal should be a dramatic reduction to reach real zero emissions by 2035.
“My view is we’re in such desperate straits now we need to both cut emissions and draw carbon down [from the atmosphere] at the same time. It means offsets are out of the question,” he says.
On what some see as desperate straits in the US under an increasingly authoritarian Trump administration, Flannery has a more optimistic take. He sees a struggling movement fighting for its life. “What we’re seeing is the last gasp of the patriarchy,” he says. “It’s already on a trajectory to failure. You can see what the impact will be on the US economy, and just look at the polling in terms of Trump’s popularity. They will use every trick in the book to fight back, but everything has to go perfectly for them to win from here. And that’s very, very unlikely.”
He believesDonald Trumpis fighting a similar losing battle, at least on the global stage, with his abolition of climate measures. “He may be able to affect the trajectory in the US, but the rest of the world is just going ahead very fast towards a cleaner energy future, led by China,” Flannery says. “They’re doing everything, whether it’s solar, wind, electric vehicles, electricity infrastructure, HVDC [high-voltage direct current] cables. They’ve got factories that can build them for the world.”
While the subject matter is often heavy as we talk, you mostly wouldn’t know it from Flannery’s face or tone. He talks like he walks – lightly, but assuredly. We exit the beach via stairs that lead to a manicured grass area, bike path and a row of large houses. Flannery is unimpressed. Unlike at his home, there is no bird habitat and, unsurprisingly, no birds. “This is not my thing,” he says. “This is just concrete blocks surrounded by grass. To my mind, it’s as boring as batshit.”
He gestures back to the escarpment, still filling the skyline. “I mean, this is the great opera, the great drama. But this,” he says, turning again to the houses, “is just a dead end.”
Not literally. A track takes us into a small area of regenerating coastal rainforest, where lilly pillies are growing, and the air is filled with the sounds of birds, frogs and insects. Flannery says this is an example of coastal protection done right. The forest was saved from development after a long-running campaign by traditional owners, the Dharawal people.
“Community action has drawn down many tonnes of carbon here, preserving the place from development and then planting trees and taking care of it.”
There may be a moral here, somewhere.
Discussion turns to what the area would have looked like about 5m years ago, the last time temperatures were 3C above pre-industrial levels, where they could be again by the end of this century. Flannery says he has “dug the fossils up with my own hands” and the answer is “wet”. That means rainforests as far west as the Hay Plains, more than 700km inland, and productive oceans teeming with life.
“Having visited that place in my imagination, I’m not fearful of the destination,” he says. “But I’m terrified of the journey, because the journey to get there will involve massive sea level rise, it will involve huge disruption to what we do, our infrastructure and everything else.”
Will humans be able to survive? Flannery is “very hopeful” – and, again, sees something I hadn’t.
“I think we are here for a sort of a purpose, even though it’s not perhaps an articulated purpose,” he says. “My philosophy, just in a very potted form, is that information organises matter. Take a long-term view: how much matter will be organised around [humans’] information systems in the future? A lot, basically. Maybe that will be an enduring thing for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.
“And maybe the only way we have that sort of impact is by working together.”