2020-2025

When it comes to a greener future, the vehicle we choose to get there really matters.

In July, amid Lockdown Five in bitterly cold Melbourne, I went online and made a very aspirational purchase. A brand new pair of boots were set to become mine, as I looked forward to making an entrance into my first in-person university class of my degree.

Of course, we all know how that went. The boots arrived… at the beginning of Lockdown Six.

I promise you there is a broader point to this, because I don’t want to discuss the boots – even though they’re very good – but rather how they got to me.

The boots were made (if the label is to be believed) in Portugal. But by the time I ordered them, they were in a U.K. warehouse of a notorious fast-fashion company, because yes, I am part of the problem.

Australia Post took it from there, “manifesting” my parcel from the warehouse and driving it to the airport. My boots arrived in Australia 36 hours after take-off. The next stop was a sorting centre in Melbourne’s north, and from there they were driven to another hub in the city’s south.

There’s just one problem with that: they drove my boots past my house.

This isn’t a jab at postal workers, who are working under incredibly difficult circumstances right now. Nothing went wrong here, because I do live closer to the destination hub than the origin.

People who finished high school in Queensland should understand the issue Australia Post faces: questions asking students to find the most efficient route through a network of hubs are part of the Queensland Core Skills test.

The more specific the destination, the greater the challenge becomes. Originally, my parcel just had to make it onto a plane to Australia – benefitted by economies of scale. By the end, it had to be narrowed down to my house.

Those economies of scale also come into play when considering the environmental impact of my parcel. This impact matters to Australia Post, who buy offset credits to make their deliveries carbon neutral, offsetting over 200 thousand tonnes of emissions since the program started in 2019.

But the best carbon is the carbon never emitted in the first place. So, let’s look at the energy it took to get my parcel from the U.K. to my house.

At the beginning of its journey, the fuel consumption of my parcel was shared across all of the other packages on the plane. By the end, there were less parcels to share that same fuel burden across.

That means despite planes using so much more fuel than a parcel truck, the plane flight from the U.K. to Australia was more energy efficient than the truck drive between sorting centres.

And this isn’t theoretical thinking or a guess. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. conducts regular studies comparing the fuel efficiency of various modes of transport – from planes to cars.

They compared the total fuel consumed by all the trips of a given transport mode against the total distance travelled by each passenger. Here’s what they found:

Intercity rail – that’s trains that travel between cities – were found to be the most efficient mode of transport. Close behind is transit rail, comprised of both “heavy” and “light” rail – think the New York City subway or Melbourne’s tram system.

Surprisingly, motorcycles and planes are about equally as efficient. That’s because motorcycles are very light and don’t require much fuel, while the higher fuel needs of planes are dispersed among hundreds of passengers.

Cars are in the middle, followed by commuter rail. Confusingly, it’s defined as having “usually only one or two stations in the central business district” – so not quite on the scale of intercity travel but larger than a metro rail system.

One reason why commuter rail could be less energy efficient than its intercity and transit counterparts could be the energy it uses in the first place. Unlike light rail, which uses electricity, Oak Ridge say “most” of the 25 systems they analysed rely on diesel power.

Another gas guzzling mode of transport? Light trucks – think the Australia Post parcel truck used to cart my boots around Melbourne. In fact, a plane passenger can travel 14.23 miles further than a light truck passenger using the same amount of energy.

That’s 22.9 kilometres – more than a half marathon!

Diesel is also part of why buses are less efficient than cars in this analysis, which may surprise you. But the much bigger reason buses are less efficient than cars is that they have less passengers.

The U.S. Department of Energy explains: “Transit buses are not very efficient at their current ridership rates, where, on average, a given bus is less than 25% full.”

Let’s go back to the Oak Ridge report and look at the real numbers to see what impact that has on efficiency. In 2017, transit buses used 91.6 trillion British thermal units (Btu) worth of energy, compared to the 6,339.3 trillion Btu cars used. 

But car passengers travelled 2.2 trillion miles, compared to just 20.2 billion (note the ‘B’ there) miles travelled by bus passengers. This means bus passengers used 1.44 per cent of the energy to travel only 0.92 per cent of the distance car users did. Ouch!

But bus users still have an edge over the least efficient use of energy by far: the somewhat murky ‘demand response’ category. Even if you’re not clear on what that means, you’ve likely travelled this way, as demand response includes taxis and rideshare.

They’re the least efficient way to travel because demand response drivers use energy in order to get to a passenger before actually transporting them. Buses may transport more refrigerated air than passengers in the U.S., but they spend less time completely empty.

So, there’s the numbers. The road travel leg of my boots’ journey to me was more logistically complicated and energy inefficient than the air travel leg. But you might have a question about that: why does it matter?

The unfortunate truth, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change informed us last month, is that humans have been having an “unequivocal” impact on the environment, and transportation is part of that impact.

And for the Federal Government, saving carbon means more money from continued foreign investment. On ABC TV’s News Breakfast, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg spoke about the importance of net-zero emission targets to Australia’s economy.

“I certainly see it in our interest being part of these global agreements,” said Frydenberg. “Financial markets have always factored in these significant structural shifts.”

But for now, the energy used to make our cars, planes, and trains go has to come from somewhere. And as we’ve already discussed, diesel is the source of energy for some of our public transport options.

Even electric transport – electric cars or light rail – aren’t as green as they could be right now. That energy, more often that not, can have an inconvenient source, too. We’re still a ways off from solar-powered trains.

But those numbers from the report we’ve just looked at, do show how public transport could be a big part of the planet’s journey to net-zero, as well as reveal a huge problem it faces.

Public Transport is Sooo Pre-Covid

We’ve actually already touched on the problem facing public transport. It’s those pesky numbers that show buses are more energy inefficient than cars.

That shouldn’t be the case; economies of scale should disperse the higher energy use of buses over the greater number of passengers they take. But in the United States, there aren’t enough transit bus passengers to offset the increase in energy use.

So, how many more passengers would it take for buses to tie with cars, not beat them? Let’s use that 25 per cent passenger figure from the U.S. Department of Energy as a starting point; they said it was less, but they didn’t provide any additional information, so as far as I’m concerned that’s on them.

We know that bus passengers currently travel 0.96 per cent of the distance car passengers do, but use 1.44 per cent of the energy. To make passenger miles match energy use, it needs to increase by 1.57 times.

That’s a passenger increase from 25 per cent to 39.25 per cent. To get there, every two current bus passengers would need to convince one friend to ride with them.

Of course, this would also make the bus heavier and use more energy. However, a 2018 study published in Springer’s Transportation journal shows overall energy efficiency increases as bus occupancy rises – the distance the new passengers travel outweighs their additional weight.

The study analysed the fuel efficiency of different occupancy levels of four different bus models, comparing the amount of energy used per passenger kilometre travelled. It found the average full bus used about a quarter of the energy per passenger kilometre compared to a 20 per cent full bus.

That’s a huge energy saving that would certainly put buses above cars, and maybe even planes, in terms of efficiency. There’s just one problem, it’s clear, at least in the U.S., that people don’t really like buses, or any public transport at all.

Back home, we face similar issues. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found 14 per cent of Australians used public transport in March this year, down from 23 per cent pre-Covid. One in six people who used public transport regularly before the pandemic haven’t used it at all since March 2020.

It doesn’t look likely public transport use will return to normal levels once restrictions ease, either. 61 per cent of people the ABS surveyed said they don’t expect their current habits to change.

For some who’ve stopped or reduced their public transport use, they may be working from home. But for others, public transport may not be an attractive option, and that may have been the case pre-pandemic.

It’s an issue that’s created some unlikely advocates. The Head of Public Policy for RACQ – that’s right, the car insurance company – called on the Queensland Government to act last year. Dr Rebecca Michael said “we need to do everything we can to encourage more sustainable transport”.

Michael’s concern is the increased road congestion created by more drivers on the road. She’s advocated for an integrated public transport authority to be created in Queensland, which would tackle issues around service reliability, frequency and affordability.

But there’s another issue passengers face before even getting on the bus, and that’s getting there in the first place.

The Last Mile Problem

Earlier we discussed how the last leg of my online shopping’s journey to me was the most logistically complicated part of it. There’s a name for that phenomenon in the postal world: the last mile problem.

DFDS, a major European shipping and logistics company, says “the main challenge of the last mile is to handle low-density deliveries cost-effectively.” That’s because the last mile of a journey is by far the priciest; 53 per cent of delivery costs come from the last mile.

One of the causes should be familiar by now: the DFDS Scandinavia Vice President Niklas Andersson says “delivery trucks and vans are too often half-empty when they make their rounds”.

“The current situation simply isn’t environmentally sound,” he added. “We can’t continue to compete on price and delivery times without hurting the environment in the long run.”

But the last mile problem isn’t unique to shipping. The distance between a bus stop or train station and one’s home or workplace can also create friction for public transport users. For some, it’s a pain point that leads them not to use it altogether.

For example, unless someone’s lucky enough to have a bus stop or train station near their home, the walking distance could be a deal breaker. When you’re coming home from a stressful day at work, the last thing you want is more surprise exercise.

Former Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad was invested in this issue. She oversaw Brisbane’s Cross River Rail project, which involves building several new train stations around the city.

In March 2019, the locations for these stations were announced, including one near an investment property Trad had purchased a week before the announcement. Trad didn’t formally disclose the purchase to Queensland Parliament in the required time-frame, leading to corruption allegations from the state opposition.

The Liberal-National Party referred the issue to Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission in July. Three days later, Trad rang Commission chairman Alan McSporran to “self-refer” the matter.

“There’s no compromising my integrity, I didn’t feel as if I was being influenced or there was an attempt to,” McSporran said at the time. He later recused himself from any further CCC investigations into the matter.

In September, the Commission announced “no evidence … supported a reasonable suspicion of corrupt conduct,” and didn’t launch an official investigation. “However, as a general proposition,” they added, “failing to declare and properly manage a conflict of interest creates a corruption risk.”

Despite this finding, Trad was removed from the project by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk the next day. “The Premier has a right to expect the highest standards from all of her ministers and on this occasion, I did not meet those standards,” Trad told media.

Last year, Trad told Guardian Australia the matter – along with another CCC investigation into a different matter which cleared her of wrongdoing – was part of a campaign against her.

“There’s a concerted campaign against me because I guess I’ve stood up, I’ve stood up for the values my community care about and because there have been positive outcomes in that respect.”

Walking distance isn’t the only thing that can reduce the burden of the last mile. For people who live in outer suburbs where walking isn’t an option, adequate parking space can allow people to use public transport for a portion of their trip.

The train stations with the best carparks tend to be in marginal federal electorates, at least if former Infrastructure Minister Alan Tudge has anything to do with it. He oversaw the implementation of the Urban Congestion Fund, established in the 2018-19 Federal Budget.

The $4.8 billion fund included $660 million in funding for the construction of commuter car parks to ease traffic congestion. 40 sites for car parks were chosen in the first part of 2019, in the lead up to the federal election that April. Of those, 27 were selected the day before the election was called.

In June this year, the Australian National Audit Office released a report on the program. They found the selection process involved canvassing the MPs of 23 Coalition-held electorates, as well as Coalition Senators or candidates in a further six electorates held by opposition parties.

The result: 77 per cent of sites chosen were in Coalition-held electorates, with a further 10 per cent in the other six canvassed. 64 per cent were in Melbourne, despite the majority of Australia’s most congested roads being in Sydney. And most of Melbourne’s sites were in the south-east, despite most of the city’s congested roads being in the north-west.

The ANAO found the implementation of the Urban Congestion Fund was “not effective,” and criticised the selection process, calling it “not demonstrably merit-based”. 

Alan Tudge denied any wrongdoing and said decisions were “made on the basis of need” in August. “33 of them were ticked off by the department before coming up for decision and we took those to the Australian people and the Australian people voted for them.”

So with bruised trust in both state and federal levels of government to tackle the last mile problem, the Brisbane City Council looked overseas for a solution.

Scooting to Net Zero?

“Please unlock me to ride me, or I’ll call the police.”

That was the threat made on many U.S. streets in 2018. The source: new e-scooters that quickly earned the ire of locals.

While these companies had launched before that, 2018 saw the rideable industry’s most rapid expansion. Scooter companies grew from five to 70 U.S. cities that year, entering the national conversation for the first time.

But not all of those conversations were good. The adoption of the “move fast and break things” philosophy of the rideshare industry by scooter companies put them in hot water with local governments. Four cities banned them altogether.

The business model of rideables also raised problems for disabled people. That’s because riders could leave scooters in the middle of footpaths when they were finished riding, making city streets harder to navigate.

This issue led to a lawsuit from accessibility advocates filed in 2019, who alleged the “uncurbed growth” of the rideables industry “comes at the detriment of the rights of all disabled persons … causing Plaintiffs injury, severe anxiety, diminishing their comfort and discriminating against them based on their disabilities.”

Four of the plaintiff’s claims were dismissed in 2020. A motion for class certification was denied in June this year.

In response to the poor initial entry in the U.S. market, European rideable company Lime took a different approach when entering the Australian market.

Brisbane was the first city in Australia to trial e-scooters in 2018, following consultation between the local council and Lime. When it comes to the last mile problem facing public transport, Brisbane City Council believes e-scooters could fill that niche.

In its draft e-mobility strategy, the council wrote “e-mobility options have potential to complement the role of public transport and provide short distance transport options within communities so people can conveniently access local services.”

“We could have said ’no’ to this technology, like other cities have done,” wrote councillor Ryan Murphy in the 2020 report, “but this would leave our residents and visitors worse off, with fewer options and less choice when it comes to getting around Brisbane.”

E-scooter programs have now expanded around the country, with trials now running in every state except New South Wales. State Transport Minister Andrew Constance ruled out a trial in March, branding programs in other states “a disaster”.

Constance’s claims aren’t entirely without merit. Last year, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found Lime failed to disclose safety issues to riders. That’s despite knowing about 50 incidents, some of which resulted in broken bones.

Lime conceded they broke consumer law in a written statement to the ACCC, writing: “We are a young company and while we don’t always get it right, we learn fast.” The company pulled out of Brisbane completely in June this year.

Brisbane’s rideable market is now served by Neuron Mobility and Beam, who both secured three-year contracts in May. Both companies introduced e-bikes to their offering in July, replacing Brisbane’s CityCycle scheme that was scrapped last year.

So, can e-scooters and e-bikes get people out of their cars? Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner is quietly confident, revealing in June that “between 30 and 50 per cent” of rideable trips were replacing car trips in the city.

For Neuron and Beam, their shareable business models appear to be safe for now. Personal e-scooters are on the market if you want to cut out the middle-man, but the lowest cost model is $999 from JB Hi-Fi. That’s around 22 months’ worth of monthly passes from Neuron.

As trials continue around the country, lawmakers and stakeholders are waiting to see if rideables can really take public transport users the last mile.

The sixth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not make for a particularly uplifting reading— You have probably seen headlines about “code red”, “unequivocal human influence” and 1.5C of warming by 2030. As Changemakers it’s up to us and the rest of civil society to turn the dread and horror from the report into determination, effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary commitment.

It would mean making profound changes in our societies, economies, our ways of doing things. But it is possible to do. And we know how to do it. Scientists, policymakers, and experts of all kinds know what the solutions are to reducing our global greenhouse gas emissions.

Perhaps the biggest obstacles that stand in the way of adopting these solutions are actually interconnected personal or political challenges. There’s a lot of money that goes into the fossil fuel industry, which is why there is so much resistance from leaders to changing the status quo. And without significant public interest and pressure in transitioning to a more sustainable future, there is little incentive for government or big business to do so.

So what needs to change?

The solution to getting governments and big businesses here In Australia to start taking action, is to use direct action, strategic campaigning, and community organising and mobilisation tactics to shift the current power imbalance that exists— we want to shit the power to the people, and if enough people, put enough pressure on governments and corporations to act— they inevitably will… history has shown us this. From women’s suffrage to the contemporary feminist movement, From the civil rights to the BLM movement, and other ongoing social movements advocating and campaigning for the realisation of human rights by demanding action… they’ve shown us that we can only get decision-makers to start taking action to change what is considered to be “business as usual,” When there is enough political pressure on them to do so.

The thing that I actually wanted to focus on in this episode is less about the need for activism to demand climate action, and more about how we can bring more people into the movement— because we need to have more people taking direct action, pushing these campaigns forward to shift the power from these big corporations and government leaders, to the citizens, so that decision-makers will be forced to act. More people = more power = more pressure = more likely to act.

When you consider the magnitude of the issue of climate change, and how it will affect or already is affecting every single human and non-human animal on the planet, as well as the natural world, it seems counterintuitive that not every single person is willing to take action and demand change. The reason not everyone is willing to do so is that not everyone cares enough about climate change— not necessarily because they are bad people, but because for whatever reason they haven’t formed strong enough opinions about the issue that will compel them to act. So the challenge is, how do we actually get more people to form a strong enough opinion about climate change that they feel compelled to act?

Now there isn’t much to debate when it comes to climate change— the science is clear, and there is consensus from the overwhelming majority of at least 97% of climate scientists about the science behind climate change, so it’s not an issue of convincing people to believe in climate change— if people don’t believe the world’s leading thinkers on this topic, we have little chance as activists of getting them to believe the science.

What we need to convince people of, is the need to care about climate change enough to take action. Public opinion plays a significant role in how the government and other actors respond to demands for climate action. So, shifting public opinion is key.

Components of public opinion: attitudes and values

How individuals form opinions and the types of opinions they form depend on their immediate situation, more general social and environmental factors, and also their pre-existing knowledge, attitudes and values. Public opinion is shaped by 3 stratified factors held by individuals; opinions, attitudes, and values.

Most famously characterised in public opinion research by Robert Worcester; opinions are “the ripples on the surface of the public’s consciousness—shallow and easily changed,” attitudes are “the currents below the surface, deeper and stronger,” and values are “the deep tides of public mood, slow to change, but powerful.” According to Worcester, the most important concept in public opinion research is values, which determine whether and how people will form opinions on a particular topic; people are generally more inclined to form an opinion when they perceive that it aligns with their personal values. Values are adopted early in life, shaped by an individual’s upbringing, family and friends, and cultural context, and are not likely to change, but rather strengthen as people grow older.

Once an issue is identified, some people will form attitudes towards it, and as these attitudes are expressed to others by sufficient numbers of people, a public opinion on the topic begins to emerge. Not all individuals will develop a their own attitude about an issue, if they don’t care about it or know enough to develop an attitude.

Therefore, a seemingly homogeneous body of public opinion may therefore be composed of individual opinions that are rooted in very different interests and values. If an attitude does not serve a function such as one of the above, it is unlikely to be formed: an attitude must be useful in some way to the person who holds it.

Factors influencing public opinion

There are a number of factors that can influence and shape public opinion. Environmental factors play a critical role, and are key for the development of both opinions and attitudes— including their family, friends, workplace, religious community, or school. Individuals will often adjust their attitudes to conform to the most prevalent groups that they belong to.

Mass media and social media also play a role in affirming latent attitudes and ‘activate’ them, prompting people to take action.

Interest groups, such as NGOs, religious groups, or unions also cultivate the formation and spread of public opinion that might be of concern to their constituency. This can be done through mass media and social media, words of mouth, or through an organised advocacy or PR campaign.

Finally, opinion leaders can play a major role in influencing individual opinions— such as political or religious leaders.

Changing public opinion

The greater a person’s level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more likely he or she is to be exposed to and comprehend political messages concerning that issue. People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they posses the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and their predispositions. Given that these existing predispositions cannot be easily changed, any effort to influence opinions must be done in a way that aligns with and engages their deeply-held values to motivate concern and action— through values-based messaging. Values-based messaging uses clear, compelling short narratives that connect a person’s existing values to an issue.

The 6 principles of persuasion, which were first put forward by Robert B. Cialdini in his 1984 book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” are 6 principles that have been used for decades by businesses, politicians, and marketers alike, to influence people to do or care about something. The first principle is similarity, which is about trying to connect with people (as authentically as possible) in a way that they can relate to and identify with— this principle is all about safety in numbers, because people feel validated and are more influenced by something or someone they observe to be relatable or similar to them. The second principle is consistency: people want to commit to things that are aligned with their values, and people have a deep need to be seen as consistent. Once we have publicly committed to something or someone, we are so much more likely to go through and deliver on that commitment… and do it again. This can be explained, from a psychological perspective, by the fact that people establish a commitment as being in line with their self-image. Third, is authority: people really do have a tendency to believe someone they trust, or people who have authority. Whether it’s their mum, a local hero, a celebrity, or a politician, the average person will accept what a trusted figure of authority says without really questioning it. The fourth principle is consensus: put simply, people want to be part of the majority, not the minority. When we are surrounded by people who are all doing something, we want to reflect that. This is how trends spread so rapidly, especially in the age of modern technology and social media. Principle 5 is reciprocity; human beings are wired to basically want to return favours and pay back our debts and treat others as they’ve treated us. Finally, the 6th principle is scarcity: when people believe something is in short supply, or that they must act urgently, they want it more.

Storytelling is also a powerful tool to influence people’s opinions. Facts and figures are a great way to let people know about pressing global issues, and to help quantify the scope or depth of a humanitarian problem. But when you are trying to motivate people to care about an issue or take a specific action, telling a single story will have a far greater impact than any statistic. Evolution has wired our brains to be more receptive to storytelling. It has been one of our most fundamental methods of communication since the first cave paintings were discovered over 27,000 years ago. The science behind storytelling is pretty simple. Stories are, in their simplest form, a connection of cause and effect, and this is how humans think. When people make a decision about donating money or funding a project, most people do not rationally calculate the benefit they can expect from their contribution, they make intuitive decisions based on affective reactions. There are various studies that have explored what makes people act most generously, and the research has all confirmed that feelings, not analytical thinking, drive people’s generosity and compassion.

Mother Teresa once said, “if I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’’ When a story is told with an identifiable victim, it is much more likely to generate voluntary action than a number of unnamed “statistical victims.” This is referred to as the Identifiable Victim Effect. People pay greater attention and have stronger emotional reactions if they are presented with a case of an identifiable victim. People by nature are far less inclined to engage with a cause when they are presented with statistical data about multiple similar victims that are caught up in the same system of need.

As the climate crisis continues to worsen, and we begin to see climate change in the news more and more, it’s not unlikely it will be an increasing topic of discussions with colleagues and peers. However, despite the overwhelming information available, there is also a lot of mis-information out there, and climate change remains a touchy subject for some.

We recently sat down with John Cook, founder of Skeptical Science. Skeptical Science is considered an authoritative resource by the climate scientist community for rebutting climate misinformation, and is often listed by media sources alongside authoritative sources such as NASA and the IPCC.

John studied physics in his undergraduate years, before leaving science to do graphic design cartooning, and website programming, but he started getting into arguments with family members about climate change, which dragged him back into science. He started researching and reading climate papers, eventually building a database of all the most common myths about climate change and what the preview science data about each one. After realising this was a resource others would find useful, he started Sceptical science in 2007. Becoming a prominent figure in public communication about climate change, this gradually brought John back into academia, completing a PhD about cognitive psychology and climate denial.

Skepticism is a GOOD thing…

Skeptical Science is based on the notion that science, by it’s very nature, is skeptical. But skepticism and denial are not the same. On this, John shared that,

“Scepticism is actually a good thing. And by Scepticism, I mean, basically just taking an evidence-based approach to understanding the world before coming to a conclusion. Look at all the evidence first and then go where the evidence points to denial is the polar pit of that. It starts with a conclusion and then it cherry picks the evidence that supports that conclusion and denies any evidence that contradicts that conclusion. So skepticism in the genuine scientific skepticism meaning of the work and denial polar opposites of each other.”

Climate Denial Trends

Since beginning skeptical science, John has noticed trends in both the reasons people deny the science behind climate change, and also the trends of which arguments are most common.

“Firstly, why do people deny climate change? Over the course of my PhD, which was around 2013, I would have said the biggest driver of climate denial was political ideology, people’s political beliefs. And there is research to support that. One study called it ‘solutions aversion.’ People were people dislike the proposed solutions to climate change, like regulating the fossil fuel industry and so not liking the solution meant they denied it as a problem in the first place. And so I think that political ideology is definitely a big factor.”

In 2017, John moved to the US and saw first-hand the power of tribalism during the Trump administration. “Everyone believes things. But even deeper than that, we belong to tribal groups or social groups. And I realised that while political ideology is one of the strongest predictors of climate police, political affiliation is even stronger, and they seem like the same thing.”

But they’re quite different— it’s about what someone’s political beliefs are, versus what political tribe they belong to. John thinks that one big trend in climate change denialism is that while climate change has become more tribal, and more polarised over time, it’s now so polarised now that political affiliation is the biggest predictor of people’s climate position.

John has also identified a clear trend that has seen a transition away from science arguments to policy and solutions-based arguments.

In other words, climate deniers are arguing less and less that global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t causing it, and they’re arguing more and more that the solutions won’t work. The point of any of those arguments is the same… it’s always “therefore we shouldn’t act on climate change.” They might say, ‘global warming isn’t happening, therefore we shouldn’t act,” or “humans aren’t causing it, therefore we shouldn’t act,” or “solutions won’t work, therefore, we shouldn’t act.” It’s always the same conclusion, they are now just using different arguments to support their conclusion. And because science now has become more and more untenable as the evidence accumulates, the transitioning is like a strategic transition from science denialism to solutions denialism.

How can we de-politicise climate change discussions?

“I mean, it’s an interesting question is it because how can the behaviour of carbon dioxide molecule be political right? Carbon and two atoms of oxygen are not they don’t vote left at a vote right. It should have nothing to do with politics. And yet it has everything to do with it because of the social implications. So there are a couple of different ways to answer that question. One is what communication researchers called nonpersuasive communication. In other words, it’s basically lead with the facts. Do the talking for you so you can communicate the facts of climate change without having to discuss what are the social or policy implications.”

One solution that John thinks can help us combat the misinformation and denial of climate change has come from some of his psychological research. He has been running experiments testing how to ensure there’s less vulnerable to being misled by misinformation, and what he found is it is an approach called logic based inoculation has been incredibly successful. This approach basically means you can inoculate people against misinformation by explaining to them the logical fallacies and the rhetorical techniques used to mislead them. If you expose ‘the magician’s tricks,’ and explain the techniques used to mislead people, that neutralises that messages, because across the political spectrum, whether people are at the left end of the spectrum or at the right end of the spectrum nobody likes being misled, so if you can explain these tactics you can potentially depolarise the messages.

How can we move forward in climate change discussions

Interestingly, the proportion of the population who deny climate change is only a very small percentage— a study by the CSIRO found that only 7% of Australians deny climate change, yet the when you ask the average person how much of the Australian public do you think deny climate change, the average response is 21% which is 3 times bigger.

What John has identified as a bigger challenge is not climate denial, but the “psychological distance” that people perceive between them and climate change. They see it as something that will happened far into the future, or to people in other parts of the world, and thus they don’t feel compelled enough to take action. John believes that localising the issue, by providing people with stories of climate change that are happening in their local community through community news, and tapping using highly trusted authoritative figures in local communities like news weather forecasters to spread messages about climate change in people’s local area, will help close this psychological distance.

John created Cranky Uncle, a great resource for young changemakers that uses cartoons, humour, and critical thinking to expose the misleading techniques of science denial and build public resilience against misinformation. To explain why and how some people reject scientific evidence, he created the character Cranky Uncle, the family member we all have who thinks he knows better than the world’s scientists, in the book Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change, and the Cranky Uncle game.

Hayley Payne is a multipassionate changemaker who is currently working as a research assistant, doing her masters, and is the co-chair of the QLD Red Cross’s Youth Advisory Committee— amongst many other things. We recently sat down with Hayley, to discuss her journey as a changemaker into the social change space and her multiple passions, “disastrous dinner” the disaster preparedness Red Cross initiative she co-created.

In our recent podcast episode about Climate Justice, we discussed the difference between climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. Climate change mitigation efforts are about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the root causes of climate change. Climate change adaptation efforts, by contrast, are about making changes that will allow humans to cope with the challenges presented by a changing climate.

Climate change can increase disaster risk in a variety of ways – by altering the frequency and intensity of hazard events, affecting vulnerability to hazards, and changing exposure patterns. Disaster preparedness is an important climate change adaptation effort. Disaster preparedness will not prevent the effects of climate change, but can drastically reduce the impacts upon people and communities, by allowing people to be prepared for the increase of natural disasters that will come with climate change.

“I’m currently working as a research assistant in peace and conflict and I’m doing my masters in development specialising in climate change and disaster resilience, but then on the side and kind of involved in a few different projects in the climate change space, especially on a youth leadership basis…”

After finishing university and getting a job in what she thought would be her dream graduate program, she realised that it was not what she wanted in her life, and after what she described as a “quarter-life crisis,” she left her job and went into studying development. She volunteered with a range of development and humanitarian organisations like Oxfam and Oaktree, before she began volunteering with the Red Cross where she is now the co-chair of the Queensland Youth Advisory committee.

Hayley’s proudest achievement and impact in the social change space, is co-creating the Red Cross’s new Disastrous Dinner project, which has allowed her to create a practical, solutions-focused resource to help Australians prepare for disasters.

“I studied communication in my undergrad, and the courses that I liked the most with a crisis communication course, and is a very strange thing to say I’m a very introverted person and don’t like being in high pressure situations, but I really really like kind of solving problems. So I did that and then in the graduate programme that I was talking about earlier, I actually got placed in the Fire and Emergency Services here in Queensland for the first six months of the rotation programme’s listing and it was of definitely the funnest part of my experience and I think I kind of saw how we’re getting introduced into disaster preparedness in that space… and I don’t know I also think about it holistically and then I think for me when I says not realising that I wanted to do more with my life, I think that was the point when it was happening… And at the same time I was realising that disasters were kind of something that affected people out of nowhere and could affect anybody and they were like often the lowest point in a person’s life… but then I also really became interesting climate change around the same time, and just seeing that yet disaster resilience and disaster management often wasn’t included in those [climate change] conversations quite as much as it needed to be, and I suppose that’s probably where it came from.”

The idea for disastrous dinners started back in 2020 when Hayley had just joined the Youth Advisory Committee. The Red Cross already does so much in the disaster preparedness space and the organisation has a huge portfolio working with different levels of government, but she noticed that at the grassroots level people could be doing more to get prepared. After reflecting on the 2019-2020 bushfire season when her family’s home was 100 metres from being affected by the fires, she knew that it was important to start conversations and getting people in the community to get prepared.

The Australian Red Cross already has a great app called “Get Prepared” to help people come up with a disaster preparedness plan, but not a lot of people knew about it. So Hayley and co-creator Nataya came up with an interactive activity called Disastrous Dinner, where people can work through the app while holding a light-hearted dinner party.

If you’re keen to host your own dinner, you download the Red Cross Disastrous Dinner Host Guide