The Vital Transitions in Energy Beyond Electrifying Everything: Tim Fisher on sun, surf & sympathy

Tim Fisher is the eldest son of the late Professor Frank Fisher. You’ve heard Frank’s name a bit on this podcast, legendary systems thinking educator in Australia – and good mate over the last dozen or so years of his life. Twice my good fortune was meeting Tim, and keeping in touch over the years. Tim is a wealth of experience, grace and salience in his own right. So, returning to Melbourne to see family for the first time in years, it seemed a good time to visit this extended family of sorts, and press record on a long-awaited chat about his fascinating life, dice with death, and vital work.

Tim has run publications across media platforms, government agencies and non-profits. He’s edited and written for the ABC, SBS, The Age, Broadsheet, Smith Journal, Surfing World, Surfer, Triple J, White Horses, Patagonia and more. As a board member of Psychology for a Safe Climate and a member of Surfers for Climate, he devotes much of his time to storytelling and communication around climate change. Especially on the bigger and often unseen picture of energy transition – including the opportunities and needs beyond electrifying everything. To that end, he’s currently Head of Communications at the Energy Efficiency Council, with the ear of the federal government, and a major conference in May featuring international keynote Amory Lovins.

We talk about all this – life, death, growing up with Frank, surf, media and energy transitions – and emerge with some consistent threads of success, and possibilities to go on with. You’ll hear some listener mail at the end too.

Head here for automatic cues to chapter markers (also available on Apple and some other apps, and the embedded player on the episode web page), and a transcript of this conversation (the transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read).

Recorded on 24 February 2024.

Title slide: Anthony & Tim.

See more photos on the episode web page, and to see more from behind the scenes, become a member via the Patreon page.

Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.

Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from the film Regenerating Australia.

The RegenNarration playlist, featuring music chosen by guests (with thanks to podcast member Josie Symons).

Transcript

Tim: 0:00

The average Australian house is 1.5 stars on the energy efficiency rating. AJ: And how many stars

AJ: 0:07

are we talking about in these days?

Tim: 0:08

Well, I think we're up to you AJ: 11 or something? TIM: yeah, that's right. And for new homes, the minimum is now seven stars in most states, yet the average Australian house is 1.5 stars.

AJ: 0:44

G' day. My name's Anthony James and this is The RegenNarration, exploring how people are changing the systems and stories we live by. Thanks to listeners like dear friend Suzie Wells and her colleagues at Boojum, another regeneratively oriented enterprise, for your generous support with The RegenNarration website. I couldn't have done it without you. If you're also finding value in all this, I'd love you to join Suzie, the Boojum crew and a great community of supporting listeners for as little as $3 a month or whatever you can and want to contribute. Members get event discounts, including a brilliant one happening from tomorrow that I wish I could get to, along with advance releases, invitations and more. Just head to the website via the show notes RegenNarration. com forward slash support, and thanks again.

AJ: 1:43

At the top was Tim Fisher, the eldest son of the late Professor Frank Fisher You've heard Frank's name a bit on this podcast legendary systems thinking educator in Australia and good mate over the last dozen or so years of his life. Twice my good fortune was meeting Tim and keeping in touch over the years. Tim is a wealth of experience, grace and salience in his own right. So, returning to Melbourne to see family for the first time in years, it seemed a good time to visit this extended family of sorts and press record on a long awaited chat about his fascinating life dice with death and vital work. Tim has run publications across media platforms, government agencies and nonprofits. He's edited and written for the ABC, sbs, the Age Broadsheet, smith Journal, surfing World, surfer Triple J, white Horses, patagonia and more.

AJ: 2:45

As a board member of Psychology for a Safe Climate and a member of Surfers for Climate, he devotes much of his time to storytelling and communication around climate change, especially on the bigger and often unseen picture of energy transition, including the opportunities and needs beyond electrifying everything. To that end, he's currently head of communications at the Energy Efficiency Council, with the ear of the federal government and a major conference in May featuring international keynote Amory Lovins. Alright, let's pull up a chair in the garden at Tim's place in the sunny northern suburbs of Melbourne. Tim, thanks for having us here, mate, it's great to be with you. Absolute pleasure. To start off with, I really feel like asking you how you might reflect on your dad's legacy in these days and perhaps how, having spent all life with him, how much you might feel it still shapes who you are today. Sure.

Tim: 3:53

One of the very personal private memories I have of my dad is how different he was to other parents. When I was very small, and a good example of that is I went to an inner city primary school with my brother in Melbourne and when dad picked us up he was on his bike and he never took his helmet off. He sort of made a point of not adhering to the sort of social norms that might inconvenience him. If he was riding somewhere and he was about to turn around and ride somewhere else, taking his helmet off just meant he would have to carry his helmet, so why would you take it off? So for me as a eight, nine, 10-year-old, I found that quite awkward because you don't want to be different at that age, or very few kids do.

Tim: 4:53

I certainly didn't, and dad was the different one, and it took me a long time, as it takes everyone a long time, to just be comfortable with not being self-conscious about these things which you realise over time no one really notices and no one takes much notice of.

Tim: 5:12

So that difference is something I always associate with what dad did, because the way he saw the world and the way he everything was conservation first for him, or perhaps community first, conservation second. To me, that just seemed very different to everyone else and still, even now, in the 2020s, the way he was choosing to live in the 80s and 90s are still radical and I find that an enormous shame. And what I examples of that might be the fact that he bought everything in bulk to reduce packaging 40 years ago. This is an approach he had, and our school lunches were wrapped up in old bread bags. This reuse, this idea of reuse, was very foreign then and it's still somewhat foreign now. It's much more common. We have reusable coffee cups, but that next step of inconveniencing yourself to reuse things is still a bridge that folks are coming to terms with crossing.

AJ: 6:29

Yeah, and it was still as ever, I guess. When I hear the inconveniencing, it's true, isn't it? But only for a short time, till you create your next set of norms, or which, again, you probably don't want to get too attached to you, like, keep seeing, you can be nimble with these things. But you know, once we, for example, had spare containers because we'd always get served too much food in our punyers on the bike. Well, there they were. There was no inconvenience at all to you know need to take a doggy bag or another container from a restaurant. So just sort of that transition period which then is emblematic of the bigger picture, isn't it? Whether it be energy or whatever. We might circle back to it. But for the moment though, tim, I'm really interested.

AJ: 7:16

Now that you're a dad, how different do you? Do you turn up to school? You know, I'm asking you seriously, obviously how do you play that card? Do you tread your own path in a similar fashion? That's really its own form of public expression, deliberate public expression, or do you? Are you more in your kid's eyes and trying not to? Or you're trying to weave the balance, like, where are you at with being a dad in this way? I?

Tim: 7:47

wish I could say I have grown out of my self-consciousness, but that's not true. On-going journey I definitely take my helmet off. You know. I do turn up to school to pick them up on the bike, but I'm definitely not alone on that island. You know there are lots of bikes.

AJ: 8:09

In a city Melbourne we're talking. That's exactly right.

Tim: 8:11

Yeah, it's a very particular community here, where that's not noteworthy anymore, and that is that's lovely, Because it was when your dad was doing it.

AJ: 8:21

so there's a statement.

Tim: 8:23

Yeah, yeah, and having said you know there's a lot of things that are still radical about the way he lived 30, 40 years ago, there are a lot of things that aren't too, and that is definitely one of them. The bike is now a much more acceptable form of transport. We are still a car-dominant society, but you can get around in other ways and it's not noteworthy and that's lovely. And to that idea of reuse, we are doing that a lot more. You know it is not weird to walk down to a cafe with your own cup anymore. You know that is entirely something that happens without comment and those sort of things are lovely. But it's just taking that next step, isn't it? And that's something that dad was always. Really he had it top of mind that. You know it's lovely that you're doing that, but what about everything else? You know, how can we prompt people to see that these things that might be viewed in the first instances inconveniences can actually be these transformative, positive ways of living that just open themselves up to new experiences?

AJ: 9:31

to your point, before let's loop back to that very shortly. I'm always conscious of letting some of that, yeah sure, have their say, ha ha ha. Firstly, though, in thinking about your experiences, you know the bit I know, and thinking about your dad, one of the things you ended up sharing, and maybe you've had more than one deftifying experience, but you had one that required significant surgery, and at a young age, so that was quite some time ago, wasn't it? I wonder if that felt like another thing you might have bonded on at the time. And, of course, I wonder it was so transformative for him, like so transformative really became the foundation for the legend he became known as in this space. What about for you? How was such a situation for you? Did it transform you in ways that you wouldn't have anticipated?

Tim: 10:33

So dad was chronically ill. His entire adult life he had Crohn's disease which you know, when he got it in the 1960s involved a lot of intervention, a lot of surgeries and a lot of pain and a lot of inconvenience. But throughout his life he estimated he'd spend at least a day out of every week full time just to manage his illness and to make sure that he had the systems to move through the rest of his week and get everything else done he wanted to do, but that was also in that day or week. There was also the waiting time as an outpatient at public hospitals. But he incorporated that into his life and what it meant, the way it sort of translated to me, was this enormous faith and gratitude for the public health system we have in Australia. He was just felt enormously privileged to be part of that, and something he said about his illness that I've never forgotten is how grateful he was for it, for the insights it gave him into, the insights into the vulnerability, our vulnerability as humans, but also how reliant we are on society, how reliant we are on government systems and the goodwill of the state.

Tim: 12:02

For me, in my very early 30s I had a blood bacterial blood infection which necessitated open heart surgery. I now have an artificial aortic valve and it was all dramatic at the time and I was in hospital for two months, but it was only that two months and of course there are ongoing problems. I have a result of that. I'm on blood thinners for the rest of my life, but they're fairly manageable certainly much more manageable than something like Crohn's disease was. So I think, in terms of the commonalities or the ways that we bonded, it was really over that absolute faith that the public system would look after us and also this enormous gratitude for it.

Tim: 12:48

There are parts of the world where what happened to me would have resulted in a debt that I would carry for the rest of my life, or it would have been vastly more complicated and with no guarantee of good outcomes. So I think that's the main thing. But something I knew I would lose, but I was really conscious of when I first came out of hospital, was just that gratitude for being alive. And, of course, as you move beyond a kind of a big life-threatening illness or physically traumatic event, that memory and that gratitude fades and that's an enormous shame. So I think, yeah, the thing is just to be really grateful that we have the kind of systems in place that we do here and a sense that they need to be advocated for. You can't take them for granted. That's a big thing, isn't it?

AJ: 13:44

And that's not being activist in that way, really, it's just it's there for you, there for it. That's a really good distinction.

Tim: 13:54

It doesn't have to be being advocate, it doesn't have to be being activist, it's just being part of it. So for Dad, what that meant was as much time as he spent as an academic running the Graduate School of Environmental Science and later at Swinburne he also, in a volunteer capacity, was a consumer advocate on the board of several hospitals, and he felt that's the way he could ensure that he could provide. I don't hesitate to use the term give back, but just at least make sure he was contributing in a valuable way to the health system as well as the conservation movement.

AJ: 14:34

So let's talk about some of the path you trod that was quite distinct in a way, but perhaps overlapping in some ways too. And your surfing life. I'm curious how that started. It wasn't something that your dad taught you, I don't imagine. So how did that kick off?

Tim: 14:51

When I see we my brother, and I had the enormous good fortune to have parents who were part of a cooperative down the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. They had friends who introduced them to some other friends in the very early 1980s who had some land in a tiny little town on the Great Ocean Road called Skid Row and eight families owned this bit of land and two of the dads of those original eight families were architects. Another one was a builder. So over the years this sprawling holiday house took shape and it wasn't run as a timeshare. The families all went down together and they had working bees together.

Tim: 15:41

So we had this big extended family and always had somewhere to go on school holidays and any weekend we could find the time to do the three hour drive from Melbourne down there. But it meant we had a place that looked over the beach and of course I was in the water on a boogie board when I was very small. But some of those parents of those original families surfed and when they saw that I was interested in it they were only too happy to take me out out the back when I was ready for it and from there I just that was the bug I caught Surfing, was it? Which is an?

Tim: 16:24

interesting and frustrating hobby to have growing up in Melbourne because we're a long way from the coast and especially when you're that age you don't have the means to get down there as often as you'd like. So we had a lot of friends who were very young and they were very good friends. So what that meant was I became very invested in surf media and in the 90s that meant surf magazines because they were a lot more affordable on surf movies and that was my window into that world and that was the way that, as a inner city kid from Melbourne, I could feel part of the surfing community was through surf magazines.

AJ: 17:05

There you go. It says so much to me too. Hey, you've got to get together and made this thing happen for each other. There's such a and it's increasingly coming back to, I think that ethos, whether it be in accessing land or some of the projects that regenerate country in some form, or urban indeed urban projects. It's just get together and make the economies work for yourself, but to pick up the thread for your life. So you ended up becoming editor at Australian Surfing Life Mag. So writing them must have become a passion, and media generally is that sort of how it played out.

Tim: 17:38

Absolutely how it played out. I the only thing I can remember wanting to be was a journalist, even before I really understood what that meant. You know we I grew up in a household where Radio National was on.

Tim: 17:53

That was the background to our home life, and, of course, we subscribed to newspapers, and my parents, in a way that I worry we're forgetting to do, felt that it was part of their responsibilities as citizens to have an idea of what was going on in the world.

Tim: 18:13

So they were, they bought media, they invested in media in ways that we've forgotten to do a little bit, which is another conversation.

Tim: 18:23

And writing was the thing that I felt confident about at school and that I enjoyed more than anything else, and when I was getting to the end of high school, I was fortunate enough to be introduced to someone who'd been a lifelong journalist, and they gave me an articulation of the possibilities of journalism and media that I just wouldn't have been able to come up with by myself, which is that journalists help people be more effective citizens in a democracy.

Tim: 18:58

And I, just as an 18-year-old, or however old I was when I first heard that, thought, yep, I understand this, because Dad, as much as his life was defined by his commitment to conservation, his first love, the thing he would have sort of gone over the top four, was democracy, and so that really was a way where I could see I could give words to, a way to use the things that I felt confident and passionate about doing with this broader purpose. It sort of it enmeshed my sort of unarticulated desire to do something in the conservation movement at some point with what I thought I wanted to do, which was become a journalist. And suddenly, you know, the Venn diagram was really clear.

AJ: 19:55

Wow, that's so interesting to hear Because I recall what in one of our exchanges not long ago you expressed some I don't know. You certainly reflected upon a past where you were observing how your dad would go about advocating and being in public for that end to that democratic, community-oriented, ultimately what the word sustainability has been sort of put on top of, with those functions underpinning it, and feeling like, oh, I reckon there'd be other ways to go about it that could be more effective. You felt a dose of that. Can you describe what you were observing there?

Tim: 20:37

Sure, and I think it comes back to where our conversation started, which was me feeling a bit awkward that my dad was different. Frank Fisher was an environmentalist who really wanted to. He wanted to bring people on the journey, but he was also really uncompromising. He expected of people that they would be able to get themselves there. I think he got very tired of starting right at the beginning and being encouraging of people who were at the very start of their journey and needing some positive affirmation that separating their rubbish was somehow meaningful, when that wasn't even the bare minimum as far as dad was concerned, this is just something that should have been automatic.

Tim: 21:29

He was much, I don't want to say he was impatient, but he could be quite uncompromising and I just felt that you just had to find that patience with people and that way to be encouraging. And I absolutely understand the many people in the conservation and environment movements the climate movement, I guess, is the catch all now who just no longer have that patience Because the stakes are so high. The urgency is what it is. The amount of time we have to make these meaningful changes is so small. But it's just so alienating to behave in that way for the vast majority of people who might be interested in joining you but will be alienated by such an uncompromising stance. And I know there's so much in that.

Tim: 22:28

But I think there just has to be a lot of Not pride swallowing, just a lot of deep breaths. We've just got to continue to take to make sure we're bringing as many people as we possibly can on this journey, and Dad didn't. He found that enormously difficult and part of that was just how patient he naturally needed to be because he was chronically ill. He was in pain all the time. He was always low on sleep because he had to get up so many times during the night because of his illness and all the rest of it. I absolutely understand why he was impatient but that if there was anything that I really felt sort of viscerally as holding him back from really bringing everyone on the journey, it was just that uncompromising nature that he had.

AJ: 23:26

So I wondered then, conversely, in your experiences and let's start with surfing, but we might map over a few that you've had since on how the surfing community related to some of these bigger picture issues and how that's changed over the time you've been involved with it.

Tim: 23:46

As with the wider community, there are people who are on board, and I should say with Dad of course, there were untold hundreds and thousands of people who found his ideas enormously exciting and were on board or were already well on the journey. When they came into contact with him he certainly wasn't alone on his island, and it's the same in the surfing community. But I do, I need to be careful because I can be a bit cynical about surfers, because they're quite an insular bunch by and large. This idea that surfers are all sort of open-minded hippies for one of a better term is not the case, certainly in Australia. Of course the surfing community has that within it, but you can't generalise that that is all surfers.

Tim: 24:42

A lot of surfers come from very small coastal communities, and coastal community or any remote or regional communities have their insularities and then surfers are a niche within that community or a sub-community within that community. So they've got all the same problems well, not necessarily problems, but all the same traits of any other sub-sub-community but at the same time are incredibly connected to the natural world in a very particular way. And that doesn't necessarily mean that connection, I guess. To take a step back, what I'm trying to say is that incredibly privileged connection to nature that surfers have doesn't automatically translate to a need to protect the natural world. I think surfers, as with any other people, take for granted some of the gifts they have, and that gift is watching the sun come up from the ocean more mornings than they do.

AJ: 25:52

Not all these wonderful things. It looks a bit like to the public system stuff, isn't it? It's like you can take it for granted, but probably shouldn't.

Tim: 26:02

Not taking things for granted is an enormous challenge, isn't it?

AJ: 26:06

It's the gratitude piece, though no, it's another aspect of it though. Yeah, just actively. And yeah, we were talking before because I always felt strange that, as an ocean person, that I didn't find my tribe around ocean. I found it elsewhere, and now even in some farmers. I'm like, what am I doing out there? So that's sort of a thing. So I always felt a bit twisted and pulled and stretched, trying to find my place in the world. But then you talked about surfers for Surfers for climate, surfers for climate. Yeah, and what you've observed there, tell us briefly what you told me is fascinating.

Tim: 26:44

So Surfers for Climate is this wonderful little organisation. It's an Australian, very small Australian not-for-profit set up by very committed surfers and committed environmentalists as well, who are really trying to, at a very grass fruits level, mobilize the groups within the surfing tribe, the surfing community, who are genuinely concerned about the environment and do want to have an outlet or just don't understand how best they can be effective members of of the climate movement. And they're doing that by just having a series of conversations up and down the Australian coast and getting into communities and having what they call carpark conversations, and the idea resonates instantly with any surfer. You know is a big part of the experiences getting out of the water and not being ready to leave the beach.

Tim: 27:48

You know you've had your surf the bit. You just need to. You need to talk about the surf you've just had. You want to watch other surfers and you just don't want to leave the ocean. So that is where you you spend a lot of time. Or you, you know you just pull up and you're checking the surf and you're deciding if you're going to go out there or somewhere else, and it's those conversations you have are a big part of what it is to be a surfer and through this very natural, organic way of being with other people, they're just trying to introduce Australian characters like Rebecca Huntley to come into these coastal communities and just have conversations about how to engage their friends on really existential matters.

AJ: 28:35

Yeah, but she does it very well. Obviously it's fascinating on so many levels and I laugh because I've as much got my wife's voice in my ear about the impossibility of leaving the beach. What have you taken so long for? So you're lucky I'm leaving at all. This is such as the poor.

AJ: 28:55

So the other hat you wear at the moment, one of the other hats, is psychology for a safe climate, that organisation. You're on the board there and I find there a relationship I'm wondering what you think, because I'm passionate about. I mean, we hear a lot about the kitchen table conversations model that changed our federal parliament, for example, and so much else on the journey to be doing that Different forms of connecting with people that aren't out to get anyone, they're not out to make people think a certain way in a certain time frame, but in, in having that approach, the trust is built, the relationships are built and, yes, a parliament can be transformed and whether they're town halls even, I mean similar sort of, they're all the same thing we're getting together to tend our place. And your other hat, then, with psychology for a safe climate I mean Rebecca's talked a lot about this too speaking of which, it's how you communicate and how you do this in a way that does engender trust and does carry the patience that you're talking about. Drawing threads together.

Tim: 30:01

What most stands out to you, would you say, about what that organisation has found work, what it's standing for, in that sense that we could learn from Psychology for a safe climate is a really special little organisation, founded by a woman named Carol Ride and some other mental health professionals who were sort of late career, and has been around for a bit over a decade now and exactly to your description.

Tim: 30:36

Their version of what you're talking about is what they simply call climate cafes, where people get together and they share stories of climate grief, essentially, and they hold a space for that grief and that sense of overwhelm and that sense of loss and anger and despair that we all have.

Tim: 31:01

And when the organisation was formed, I think they they spent a few years casting about to to work out where, what their place was, where they could provide value, and it became apparent that people in the climate movement were feeling very burnt out, didn't have forums other than you know, talking directly to one other person who they felt able to have conversations like this with, and so they now are creating these spaces.

Tim: 31:32

So you have mental health professionals, people who really deeply understand not just how to speak but how to listen, creating spaces where folks primarily, but not not only, confined to the climate movement, can have these conversations and can share how tough it is to look directly at these problems we're facing all the time for your job, and I came to psychology for a safe climate out of a really conscious decision to invest myself more in the climate movement.

Tim: 32:09

I have been fortunate to have a bunch of different kinds of jobs in the media and they were all fun and enormously rewarding and I learnt lots in all of them. But at a certain point I just I knew that I was going to gravitate towards spending the rest of my working life in the climate movement, and the first opportunity I had to do that in a meaningful way was as a volunteer with psychology for a safe climate, where I've been on the board for a couple of years now, and I just I saw an ad for they were looking for volunteer board members and I just applied and here I find myself.

AJ: 32:47

Yeah, terrific, absolutely terrific. Speaking of the media spread, you've had, then, conscious that you've been with the ABC News Corp local broadsheet, for example, here in Melbourne. So much experience over a diverse array of media and and how they run, even and we touched on it earlier. Of course he said that would be a whole other conversation. But just to come back to it briefly, what thoughts do you have about media today?

AJ: 33:17

I even wonder, for example I mean, here I sit, we talked earlier about your member-based organization that you work for now and might come back to that in a moment too and that there was a situation when you were young, paying for media and increasingly, thankfully I'm certainly finding listeners subscribing to this, and that that's happening in other fora as well, including, you know, the Guardian, for example, mainstream press. So I think a lot about maybe that models coming back, so in a way that we don't even need to rely on the classifieds you know, advertising-based media as we used to. So it could even be better ultimately, maybe, if we're prepared to pay for it. But there's some speculations and obviously some of my personal experience. But how are you feeling about media, and somewhat detached from it now, I suppose, working in not as a journalist. As such, you think about it much.

Tim: 34:16

I think about it constantly. I thought you might you're either gonna say I've left it behind.

AJ: 34:22

Don't talk to me now, or yes, I think about it all the time. I thought it might be the law.

Tim: 34:27

I've been listening to you and and thinking about where to possibly start, because there is just so. Firstly, there are so many people who are doing such terrific thinking in this space and I don't want to I'm sort of hesitating from just stopping myself just rattling off a whole bunch of people you know, the quarry doctors of the world, who folks should go and get to know. They really want to roll up their sleeves and get to grips with the future of media. All of that said five or six years ago. My primary concern was, as I said earlier, that people have forgotten that they, that the news was something that they ever paid for and in another generation has never had to pay for it. So there's not a business model for news right now and news is an enormously expensive thing to produce. Journalists aren't going to go and sit in local council meetings on a Tuesday night unless they're paid for it. I mean, someone might, but they might not have the skills to ask the right questions or write a story that's that's going to be read by a big audience. All of that stuff. It's news. Organizations to be effective need a lot of people because they need to be talking to an even greater amount of people to do their jobs effectively, and that's just something that it takes the time and the people hours that it takes.

Tim: 35:58

Now, my concern is not so much that folks have forgotten to pay for the media because, as you said, there are all sorts of different subscription models.

Tim: 36:07

You know, with streaming services the monster streaming services at one end, and the very topic specific media organization such as yourself, at the other end, which people find enormous value in.

Tim: 36:22

You know both ends and are perfectly happy to pay for both of these things.

Tim: 36:27

But the problem I have now is that I worry that the outlets which are able to talk to a mass audience are disappearing. So the ability for folks who don't think the same way as you do or don't see the world the same way as you do, to hear your voice and I'm speaking to you, anthony James, how are you going to speak, how are you going to preach to the unconverted is something I worry about, and you know, newspapers have always been partisan and so have TV stations, but at least there were organs, outlets, platforms, whatever you want to call them, that spoke to huge numbers of people and told them what was happening in the world, and now folks are just leaning towards the platforms that subscribe to their worldview, and that's entirely understandable, but it's a real problem in a world that's as hyper partisan as ours is indeed, and it's so much of what comes up on this podcast and and some of the stories about how people are broaching that, but not so much in media.

AJ: 37:39

Well, maybe, maybe it's coming on. I'm going to follow this thread a little with some of the people I've just become aware of, even in Australia, a little on elsewhere, but certainly with community processes like the ones we've touched on here that do bring people together and do manage to bridge those gaps. And you know, we see it work out in that last federal election, for example, at scale, as it were, almost in spite of media or astride it. But it does make you wonder if we had adequate media in this way. That I, far from look back on when it did speak to everybody, I mean to the extent that the current vestiges of what was do. But it's not really that news media anymore, isn't it? It's not the news media we're thinking about from the past. It's a different kind of TV and tabloid thing, but I don't necessarily look back on that as glory days. So I wonder what new model there is to be.

Tim: 38:38

Yeah, I remember, maybe 15-odd years ago, reading a column by Laurie Oakes, legendary Australian political journalist, talking admiringly, a little bit fearfully, of the way Kevin Rudd at the time had been able to just circumvent the media and talk directly to Australians through all these then relatively new platforms like his YouTube channel. But the problem with that is exactly what we're talking about. You've got to assume that people are interested enough to go to a politician's YouTube channel and for all sorts of completely understandable reasons, lots of people are just not going to do that. They're not going to go and seek out a Kevin Rudd's YouTube channel to find out what he's got to offer them. They might be receptive to his views, but they'll come across it passively.

Tim: 39:36

And that sort of passive media consumption is the way most people consume media. They just want to turn on the telly and watch something, or they want to open a newspaper and read something. But if they're not buying newspapers and if the TV channel, if the thing that's on the telly when they turn it on, is tailored exactly to them, where are these other views coming to them? How are these other views coming to them? And I don't yet know what the answer is. And there is still a really crucial role that organisations that see themselves as having that democratic responsibility to help people be more effective citizens. And there are still wonderful news organisations that feel that in their bones I don't know how long they're going to survive.

AJ: 40:29

Yes, it makes me think a few things. One is certainly I'm even thinking in a podcast domain. Kate Cheney, for example I don't think she might be saying was thinking of having a podcast called Behind the Curtain. We're in this here at Curtain and it was going to be bringing people together who aren't already rusted on her and having a discussion about the stuff we don't agree on, but in a way that you could have a discussion.

AJ: 40:53

And I think about what I did witness in Curtain, where there was that showgrounds full of people on election night before she even won, and she said to everybody because it was crazy, it was an incredible community festival vibe and she said who's never been involved in a political campaign before? And the whole place puts hands up, basically, and I think, well, that happened without media too. So there's certainly a degree to which they may not need to go to the PMs or would be PMs YouTube. They can go to the car park or the cafe or the, but it still makes you wonder, and so I'm thinking about even how this podcast can do a bit of what Kate was imagining on hers, the potential still in having more of us just come together, whatever media, even broadly thinking about media and storytelling other storytelling avenues we might use to that end.

AJ: 41:51

So, tim, to bring us towards our close, perhaps the dominant hat you wear at the moment brings us back full circle to your dad too, because he was an electrical engineer and had a real focus on energy, and you're now, with the Energy Efficiency Council, doing terrific work. I'd love for you to bring this in before we wind up today. Tell us a bit about your role there and what it's trying to achieve. Thanks, aj.

Tim: 42:15

And it's. I mean I would say this, wouldn't I? But I think work we're doing is worthwhile as well. So, essentially, the Energy Efficiency Council is a little climate NGO. It's a member organisation that advocates for better energy efficiency and energy management policies. So what does that mean? It means we work on the demand side of the energy transition.

Tim: 42:41

Renewables are wonderful and they are going to save us all, but if we're actually going to get to net zero emissions, we also need to look at how we use energy and we need to use less on it. There is less of it. There is no point putting solar panels on a house that is uninsulated, that is full of drafts, that still has gas appliances and where you're still going to have to use a significant amount of energy at night when no sun is shining on those solar panels. So they're the kinds of things we're thinking about, and the kind of advocacy we're doing is for better housing standards. It's for getting off gas and electrifying our homes. It's for helping super large energy using industries such as concrete manufacturing and brick manufacturing to think more strategically about when and how they use energy. And can you use electricity instead of gas when you need to super heat something, and how do you do that?

Tim: 43:43

So these are enormously exciting things to think about, but they're also much more complex to hold people's attention with than something like solar or wind. You drive into the country and you can see wind turbines and it makes inherent sense. If you install solar on your house, you can see the panels on your roof and you open your bill and you can see the effect. You install insulation. It's kind of messy to do. It's a bit of a pain. It's not that cheap.

AJ: 44:14

There's no smart device telling you what you've saved or whatever.

Tim: 44:17

Absolutely not exactly right, and it doesn't make any aesthetic difference to your house. It will make a huge difference to the comfort of your house and your bills over time, but you can't see it. And then of course, there's the problem just using insulation as the example of the pink bat scandal, which was a very well-meaning but incredibly mismanaged government project to try and get more Australian houses insulated. Because Australian houses are by and large terrible. They are tense, they're incredibly inefficient and the government understood that bang for buck.

Tim: 44:57

Very few things you can do to a building help its efficiency more than installing insulation. It's a great, relatively low-cost thing to do. Unfortunately, they rolled it out too quickly and the rest is history and a very tragic history. A tragic because lives were lost as a result of that program being rushed, but also because a decade and a half later it's still politically toxic. And now governments are slowly coming around to acknowledging that insulation is just something necessary, but they're making sure that when they roll it out choose the Australian capital territory, for example, as an example who've just introduced minimum insulation standards for rental properties. They're making sure that those people installing that insulation have accreditation and are properly trained and they're doing everything they can to make sure that it will be installed safely for both the installers and the folks who are living in the houses. So this is the sort of work that the Energy Efficiency Council does, sort of being responsible for the accreditation and the training of insulation installers and also looking after the interests of the manufacturers of that insulation.

AJ: 46:13

And these are the members of the council.

Tim: 46:15

That's right yeah yeah. So for me, I enjoy it because there's this incredible communications challenge of getting people, if not excited, then at least engaged with the demand side of the energy transition, as opposed to just the supply, the renewable energy sources, but also that very pragmatic sense that I've had beaten into me from creating media which is not knowing when he's going to be. You can't make people care about something You've got to find. You've got to use every trick in your book to engage folks, so that I'm finding really, really rewarding.

AJ: 46:57

Which I guess ties back to all the other things we spoke of. You're taking those learnings to experiment in this domain, right? So you said something the other day when you mentioned there's some politicians Chris Bowen and other significant ones who are actually you're engaging with. They're open, they're listening, you're having those conversations and you said, wow, politicians aren't actually interested, but who might actually act on the idea that, say, we build our entire energy system around, how much energy we need. And for people like us who've been around that thinking for a while, it's like yes, imagine that, but still it's so unseen, isn't it Unthought of? And I say that in a way that when you say it, when I read that out, it's so obvious. Like what else would we do? And in a sense yet even for I mean, I was just at the launch of an extraordinary piece of work, really again talking out of our lived experience in Curtin, kate Chaney's office. So Kate sort of underpinned a net zero Curtin project and there was a 70 page report that was brought together by 50 community members like us lobbing up to offer their bits and pieces and have these conversations, and then one person in the office on a day and a half a week, if you don't mind. Who coordinated and pulled this together over a year or so? Just launched the other day Amazing thing, beautiful report to artwork by kids. I mean a lot. It's great. Yet and I haven't had this conversation with them, but it's topical in the moment for me.

AJ: 48:35

Yet the one thing that was never said was how much energy do we need? And I remember suggesting to people a while back what if we just use a real bog standard business concept like optimal input? So what's our optimal energy for the things we might be after? If we broadly call them a set of health and prosperity outcomes or whatever, we can figure out what they are and what's our optimal set of input energy input for that. We might call that our need.

AJ: 49:06

Where it's the sweet spot. You're not just blasting energy at society and then getting what you want a whole bunch of extra costs, which is our current situation. And then, if you can pull it off, you're not going under that either and missing out on potential benefits. And where that optimal was actually researched over decades, it was showing that we need a fraction of the energy that we use today, and obviously your dad and many other since have experimented with that in home lived lives and found that to be true. A third or quarter even, are very energy used by just these basics and really thinking about well, the rest is just either going to heat all the atmosphere, or even just too many calories on the body, on their individual selves, or whatever it opens up. Well, if we put in those terms, 60, 70, 80% cuts in your energy is just with that thinking. So, something that seems so obvious, something that is embedded in business as a concept, yet still elusive in this domain. Why is that?

Tim: 50:10

I actually think I've got a reasonably concise answer to that question. Why that is, is because we can't explain it in a sentence.

AJ: 50:21

And I'm the living, breathing example in that right, that moment.

Tim: 50:25

There is the challenge and politicians understand this. Yes, chris Bowen and his assistant minister, jenny McAllister. They're enormously interested and alive to these problems, but most people, for completely understandable reasons, have no idea about their energy use. If you ask most people what is the most energy intensive appliance in your house or where does most of the energy in your home go, they would have no idea. I would guess that most people would point to their fridge because it's big. They'd say it's and on all exactly right. Or they'd say cooking.

AJ: 51:04

you know cooking, which it's not, by the way, f-i-r.

Tim: 51:07

Right, yeah, most of the energy use in a home or any building goes on heating the space, heating and cooling the space, followed by heating water. So it's a hot water heater and it's our air conditioners and actually making it a liveable temperature. To your point about, you know why it is that we can't turn people on to the idea that we don't have to assume that the amount of energy we use now is the amount of energy we will always need to use. It's because you've actually got to sit folks down and explain that the average Australian house is 1.5 stars on the energy efficiency rating, and how many stars we've got on these days.

AJ: 51:57

Well, I think we're up to you know.

Tim: 51:58

yeah, that's right. And for new homes the minimum is now seven stars in most states, yet the average Australian house is 1.5 stars. More Australians die of hypothermia and indoor cold related complications than do Swedes. More Australians are dying than people in Sweden from cold homes, from cold living spaces. So this is a really easy thing to get your head around.

Tim: 52:31

But how this translates to the modelling that's done around how much energy we need is enormously complex. And for folks that are trying to work out how much energy Australia needs, they have to have a baseline. They've got to just have a snapshot of how much energy we use as a country and for them to model several different scenarios where we might have more efficient buildings or our industrial processes might become more efficient, that starts to become much more complex and the modelling takes longer to produce and it becomes more expensive. And then meanwhile you've got people who aren't interested in us moving towards a renewable future looking for ways to exploit that modelling and it all just gets gummed up. And part of the reason it gets gummed up or perhaps the main reason it gets gummed up is this stuff just takes time to convey.

Tim: 53:25

It's really easy for the sole griffiths of the world to say electrify everything, and I take my hat off to him because he's very pragmatic in his understanding that people need a concept they can get at a glance that makes inherent sense. All of the detail behind electrifying everything can be sorted out later, as long as you get that buy-in. And we need the same sort of snappy, instantly understandable engaging tagline, or at least short, snappy couple of sentences that explain that Australia is an enormously wasteful country when it comes to energy. We can do so much better, but how do you explain that in a way where people don't get defensive? How do you explain that in a way where business doesn't take it personally that you are attacking them for their profligate use of energy?

AJ: 54:19

It's opportunity oriented, like soils, isn't it? It's opportunity oriented, so we've got the principles straight. It's still coming up with it. Is this some of what the National Conference coming up that you're hosting is going to be geared towards?

Tim: 54:34

in May, absolutely so. We have a conference every May, the EEC National Conference. This year we're bringing Amary Lovens out from Colorado, which we're all enormously excited about, the co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and the man when it comes to energy efficiency worldwide these days. But it is very much about getting industry and policy makers and academics together in the same room to really thrash this stuff out. That is exactly what we try and do, and there is, as you know, nothing like getting folks in a room together to talk this stuff through.

AJ: 55:09

Well, especially if it is facilitated with this mind, this view on things. You know, we've just been talking about plenty of rooms where people are still belted over their head or told what's going to happen. So this is what the sort of process you're looking to run you as a person charged with the language and the comms that goes out into the world. It's to derive it from the people who are going to be working in it and doing it. Is that your sort of outlook?

Tim: 55:36

Yeah, I certainly can't take credit for that. Our CEO, luke Menzel, has been CEO of the Energy Efficiency Council for a decade, and I'm enormously fortunate to have a boss who just inherently gets how important it is to convey this stuff in a way that's as understandable as possible to the widest possible audience, while also understanding that you just need to be giving the folks who are making these decisions really concrete ways forward that also work for their interests as well, and he's been doing his job for a long time, so he has this understanding and it makes my job as the comms guy enormously much easier.

AJ: 56:19

And especially when you observe in that context some of the fruits of Flux, labour, I guess, and others, of course, where things are shifting. There is that sense of a shift in the offing, if we can seize the moment, tim, to close up, is there a piece of music that's been perhaps synonymous with a part of your life, that's been transformative in some way or stays with you over time, or how it may even be in the moment, maybe hot right now, but something that you want to speak to for a moment, to take us out.

Tim: 56:50

It's certainly not something that's hot right now. What's hot right now? I get through my small kids and I wouldn't want to inflict that on anyone else, but the piece of music that I find myself coming back to is by an electronic music producer from Britain called Matthew Herbert, who's done all sorts of fantastic things, and I really couldn't enthuse about him more. I think he's absolutely wonderful, but he has a piece from 2001 called the Audience, and as well as just being a beautiful and very funky piece of music, it is about all of the things we've been talking about. It's about how special it is to be communicating with a whole group of people in a space. It is about the rare pleasure and I say rare because I couldn't imagine it myself, not being a musician to have that connection with a bunch of people and to be sharing something that you're creating in the moment. And there is a key change in that piece of music that gets me every time.

AJ: 57:54

Unreal because there are plenty of bad ones. I look forward to hearing this goodbye. It's funny because, being a muso and having experienced that there was actually nothing like post-COVID, the first wo-mad that happened, the World Music Festival in Adelaide, that's famous in Australia and the musicians, like almost everyone, was in tears because it was back. But I saw the same thing in those Claremont showgrounds with people in community, that finding community was the biggest outcome of that political campaign. It's a universal human thing. Here's to it, mate. There's the way through there somewhere. Amazing to speak with you, mate. The breadth of your experience and compassion is inspiring and so interesting. And to catch up with you in your backyard here with butterflies floating about us and so forth Wonderful, couldn't imagine better. Thanks for having me, mate.

Tim: 58:45

Thanks for the opportunity, AJ.

AJ: 58:48

That was Head of Comms at the Energy Efficiency Council, surfer for Climate and Deputy Chair of Psychology for a Safe Climate, Tim Fisher. For more on Tim and all of that, including the EEC's upcoming conference, see the links in the show notes. Before we part today, long-time listener and friend of 30 years, Kian, currently near Townsville in Queensland, sent an audio message in after listening to episode 185 with Jeff Goebel - the last episode last year and one of my favourites. So let's call this the new mailbag segment. Maybe you'll feel like sending comments in too and it'll become a thing. All kinds welcome. Don't hold back. Here's a couple of minutes from Kian, fittingly while he was cooking up a storm.

Kian: 59:41

Pretty amazing that your works kind of got you to this point. I think what was pretty rad in that podcast was the actual connection you made with Geoff and how seamlessly I imagine that you find this and have gotten better at finding this as you interview people. This synchronicity which I guess he would talk about, the behaviour, this kind of seamless synchronicity where you, I guess, align or you respect and understand where you the person you're interviewing and they being interviewed by you. It was really nice to notice that. I thought the way he said without over-explaining I guess that's part of what he's learnt, right, not over-explained, but when he said, oh, you know, but I am listening, I thought the subtlety of that joke was I really liked it.

Kian: 1:00:40

I just kind of showed where you guys were at and it was interesting the way you to me I guess it's the I'm going to say the quickest that you kind of compiled and it seemed like you were condensing. He would say something and you were like condensing it, synthesising it, and then, rather than asking an obvious question, you were kind of making four or five jumps ahead and going oh, what a? Then you know where are you on this thing, and then jumping ahead again to kind of I guess kind of pattern out all the things that he'd learnt. It was pretty rad. It was really rad and, yeah, really amazing what he's done and the results. And yeah, I agree it's a reminder of some discussions with people we've had where it's just the answers are always there, just here. Anyway, just want to share that and just say that's bloody awesome and well done. Well done on supporters having long term supporters.

AJ: 1:01:34

Thanks a lot, Kian, and interesting how the same themes were again so apparent in this episode with Tim. You've given me my segue to of course to express my great appreciation, as ever, to you generous listeners supporting the podcast for making this episode possible. If you have been thinking about becoming a member or other kind of supporter, please do join us. Just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts. Thank you. Thanks also for sharing the podcast with friends and continuing to rate it on your preferred app, or even every app. And the music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden from the film Regenerating Australia, and at the top you heard Green Shoots by The Nomadics. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.