“I think our crucial job now is to be accelerators of the change that is already underway. It’s about building and building those ways of change. It’s about speed, it’s about scale, that is matching up with the speed and scale of the crisis that we are facing.”

At IX Summit Sydney 2021, Amanda McKenzie, CEO and Founder at The Climate Council spoke about raising our climate change ambition and how getting emissions “plummeting to at least the 75% mark and going onwards to Net Zero” is crucially important. Here are the excerpts of her presentation.

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We’re meeting today as the global talks are underway in Glasgow. And I was thinking back over the 30 odd years of these meetings and how clear it is that action is absolutely rapidly accelerating all around the world. In Glasgow, the US has committed to half the emissions by 2030.

The UK is planning to slash emissions by 68% by 2030. And hundreds of governments, thousands of companies and sub-national jurisdictions have committed to getting to Net Zero, or other commitments like 100% renewable energy that Dermott was talking about, or more than that.

So it does feel like this is irrepressible way of building. And I describe it as a way because I like to think of the millions of water molecules that are building that way of just like the millions of people like us right around the world that are building that way for change.

And nation states tend to be the ones that follow behind communities, behind business, behind the smaller jurisdictions, states and territories, or local governments. And each of those actors, if you like, are demonstrating that action is possible and it’s desirable.

So, we are on the right track. But at the moment, we’re going to arrive too late. And too late spells disaster. As you probably well know, scientists have told us for many, many years that there is no safe level of global warming, but staying below 1.5 degrees and certainly below 2.0 degrees is critical to avoid catastrophe.

For instance, most coral reefs on which more than 500 million people rely for their sustenance, cannot survive beyond that level. Those temperature limits were enshrined in the Paris Agreement in 2015. And already we’ve seen, in Australia, the consequences of just over one degree of global warming. We’ve seen mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef repeatedly, and the mega fires of black summer only a couple of years ago, where 80% of Australians were affected by the bushfire smoke. And we saw so many animals and people perish.

If the scientists have told us so repeatedly that 1.5 degrees is of grave concern. We are hurtling towards that level of global warming. We expect to hit it early in the next decade. So it underpins just why the action is so crucial. But why Net Zero in 2050s, 30 years down the track, is way too late?

And getting there too late accepts that there will be massive changes to our global climate and the associated human and economic consequences.

I think our crucial job now is to be accelerators of the change that is already underway. It’s about building and building those ways of change. It’s about speed, it’s about scale, that is matching up with the speed and scale of the crisis that we are facing.

We know that we will decarbonize. I think that’s the exciting piece of the puzzle that sort of come together in the last few years. We will get there. The question is: “When and whether that will be too late?”

Our scientists at the Climate Council have crunched the numbers. And they’re some of the best scientists in the world. And they’ve said that Australia needs to get to a 75% reduction this decade.

And whether you believe their numbers or others that have put out numbers as well, there’s differences on what the exact number is, but it’s clear that the lion’s share has to be done this decade.

So how do we do it when we’ve had a scenario where we’ve had the climate wars over the last 15 years? And you’d be forgiven for wondering if our federal parliament can tackle this challenge? Can the federal parliament be capable of leading the change? And the way I think about it is that we probably won’t see leadership on the scale required from the federal parliament. But what we need to do is to ensure that the federal parliament can be led in the right direction.

The government’s current commitment to Net Zero that happened just before Glasgow was influenced by so many other players, whether it was from the BCA coming out personally, whether it was from scientists and the global community putting pressure on. And I think that’s what we can anticipate from the federal government.

And I think about it like an on-ramp - how do we make it easy and desirable for either side of federal politics to dramatically accelerate climate action? And on-ramp means that we’ve changed the public communications on climate change. We know that it’s a big issue. The community is on board. And we know that the solutions are actually so beneficial for Australians that the opportunities that will be discussed at this conference are known far and wide, that the solutions have been trialled by states, by territories, by business, by local governments. And then they’re at the point that they can be replicated and scaled in other jurisdictions.

And of course, an on-ramp means that we’re working not just in electricity and energy, but across the 46 sectors of the Australian economy. When you look at where emissions are going up and down, we’ve obviously seen a decline in emissions from electricity. But most of the other sectors are sort of paddling along in the same way, or some of them, like fugitive emissions have been increasing.

It’s imperative upon all of us to be thinking about not just climate change solutions in the electricity/energy space, but also across the whole economy.

This event is exciting for me, because this is about getting speakers and participants, the ones that are going to make that wave build and build together, inspire each other, and get us to the point where we can push that sort of change in the Australian community, build that on-ramp for a federal government to replicate those solutions and scale their solutions.

I wanted to just touch on what is the leadership, I think, we need in this scenario. I talked about a wave. And I think it’s about building the wave rather than surfing the wave.

I think it’s for each of us to think about our work and say, “Are we surfing that wave of change? (So we’re just participating in it.) Or are we genuinely building it? Or we bringing the new water molecules into that wave making it bigger and bigger over time?”

And I think that requires being out of our comfort zone. It requires being in a space where we may be criticized. I remember when we established the Climate Council in 2013. The Climate Council was previously a government body called the Climate Commission that had been abolished. In 2013, we had a prime minister who was a climate denier. And it was a very difficult period were we’ve just gone through this sort of carbon tax debate, climate policy was being gutted. And I think I look back and think about how far we’ve come in Australia in that time. And I feel proud of the work we did at the Climate Council to be brave and stand out there and say, “No, this is an issue we need to be dealing with”, even though it wasn’t popular at the time.

The opportunity we have now is to be really ambitious to bring those goals and to constantly revisit and recast those ambitious goals and say, “Are we underestimating how fast we can possibly do this?” Because we need to do it just so fast. Because the alternative needs to always be in our mind, that if we’re not going fast now, that’s accepting greater levels of climate change and greater damage into the future.

We need to build, not surf. We need to be delivering and coming up with ambitious goals that are constantly revisited. And then we need to be sharing that success.

What I think has been really positive in the last few years, is that people have become a bit braver in sharing their story. Seeing local governments right around the country sharing amazing work that’s happening on the ground, whether it’s a floating solar farm in Lismore (New South Wales) or whether it’s community purchasing opportunity in Northern Victoria. There’s lots of different ways that local government, for instance, is getting with the community, bringing the community along, but also sharing those stories of opportunities.

Businesses are doing the same thing. The businesses that are signing up to RE100, for instance, that are just sharing how they’re going about getting to 100% renewable energy. The more that we can share, it builds a sense of momentum, it makes it possible, and it shows how desirable it can be to make this change.

But ultimately, for me, it’s all about being courageous. I think when we look back on our lives, there’s never often a moment where we regret being courageous. But we regret where we weren’t courageous, and we had the opportunity to do so.

I think it’s where we’re bold and brave enough to do that building work - which is often out of our comfort zone - to take those ambitious goals, to revisit them, to make sure that we’re recasting them in every opportunity to say, “How can we go harder here? Where are we underestimating ourselves?” And then sharing that success and bringing others along with us, and using it as an opportunity to say, “We can all be part of this together.”

I come to you today a week back from maternity leave with my six-month-old. My three-year-old is just going back to childcare. And I often reflect that by the time they’re in high school, the course will be set for a lot of the rest of the century in terms of climate change, the course for our collective future. They will not have a say in. And it’ll be up to us how we engage the battle this decade to get emissions plummeting to at least that 75% mark and going onwards to Net Zero, so much earlier than 2050. For Australia, it should be 2035.

The Impact X Summit Sydney 2022, happening in Sydney on 9-11 November 2022, brings together industry leaders, climate tech innovators, and government and business decision makers who share a common passion: to tackle this generation’s greatest challenge – climate change. 

Register now to be part of Australia's global climate summit:: https://events.humanitix.com/impact-x-summit-sydney-2022

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