How to Talk About Climate Change: Bob Carr in Conversation with Rebecca Huntley

Bob Carr:                 Well, what do Australians think about climate and why do they think it?  They’re things that people like me have considered on a lot of occasions, and how you shift people’s views.  Today we’ve got Rebecca Huntley who works at this full-time, has done it for a long time, and that is Australian attitudes towards climate and what shapes them.

Rebecca Huntley was former director of the Mind and Mood Report which was the longest running measure of Australian attitudes and trends.  Rebecca’s just authored a book called How to Talk about Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference.

Rebecca, I want your advice on this.  What did I get wrong when I did this?  A month or so ago I wrote to one of Australia’s very wealthy business leaders; someone who believes passionately in climate and works in that space.  I suggested that he buy a couple of thousand copies of a book you’re familiar with – you quoted here – The Uninhabitable Earth; a frightening book about where we stand on climate.

I suggested he buy these thousands of copies and get them out to every leading thinker, every policymaker, every political leader in Australia.  I didn’t get a reply, so what did I do wrong there?  What advice would you give me?

Rebecca Huntley:    Well, I think it’s a wonderful idea.  I’m not quite sure why he didn’t do it.  Even if he had done it, I can imagine that many of those leaders would have opened the first page and thought this is alarmism, and where is my opportunity to make a contribution or what’s the entry point?

Having read that book, I understand why – one of my friends joked and said it’s not the uninhabitable earth; it’s the endless scream or the endless despair.

Bob Carr:                 To be honest, I didn’t finish it.

Rebecca Huntley:    I read it mainly because I wanted to read the full spectrum of literature on this, and I keep it almost as a totemic thing in my office to say this is the extreme stuff at stake, but I think we know – and the research I do shows that that cannot be the beginning of the conversation.  Because if it’s the beginning of the conversation, what happens is you trigger a whole series of very ingrained and very effective defence mechanisms, whether that be anger, fear, people turn away.  They might feel an extraordinary sense of guilt and shame about what’s happening.  So anything that makes people turn away from getting into a conversation about climate, I try and avoid.

It may be that when – and we’re probably on the same – I know that we’re on the same page here – is that when you really get into it you have those moments.  You can read something like The Uninhabitable Earth and it really does make you reflect and think, but that is much further down the track.  I want to get people into the conversation as easily as possible and that’s not quite the way to do it.

Bob Carr:                 Yeah.  Has anything – in everything you canvass – the book’s very comprehensive and you’re looking at how it works – how the conversation works in America, not only in Australia.  But does anything stand out for you as a really successful way of getting people, who’ve previously been resistant or reluctant, to start talking climate?

Rebecca Huntley:    I think one of the – there’s a number of really interesting movements and in a sense they’re not wide-scale.  They’re often quite localised and specific.  It exists to some extent here, but also more effectively in America, which are Farmers for Climate Action.  I suppose what interests me about farmers or interests me about, for example, religious leaders talking about climate action, is that we do need to start to disrupt people’s notions of who cares about climate.

Because climate change has become so politicised – as you’ve noticed over the last probably 20 years, but it’s been a 30-year process – we get so used to the normal kinds of spokespeople on climate.  It’s Al Gore and it’s certain politicians and it’s certain kind of celebrity environmentalists.  People expect to hear about climate from them and if you don’t fit into their world view, or you don’t necessarily like them, then the climate message can fall flat.

So I’m really interested in any movement in rural and regional areas, particularly around farmers, because we normally associate them with conservative views, or they already have them, on climate.  I’m also really interested in notions of religious leaders talking about climate as well and how we can mobilise faith.

Bob Carr:                 Yeah, let’s take both of those.  I’ll start with the farmers.  Where does a farmer need to be to be open to arguments about climate?  What does he or she have to be thinking about?  Would it be their own soil resilience, for example, or a shift in the pattern of droughts?  What triggers it?

Rebecca Huntley:    I think what’s so interesting in the work that I’ve done and seen on farmers is that what they see – particularly if the land that they are working is something that their grandparents worked and their great-grandparents worked, so they’ve got a historical tie to the land – is they’ve seen that the things that used to work for their parents and grandparents don’t work so much anymore.

Most of those farmers who’ve had this environmental epiphany – and they’re certainly not the majority but they are really interesting people – they say look, we’re all noticing the climate changing and we’re all doing climate mitigation.  We’re all on our farms; we’re all having to change up what we do in order to be able to sustain the land.  Some people obviously can’t.

He said that the – but the thing is, those people who haven’t accepted the science almost there’s a cognitive dissidence.  They’re seeing things change and very, very few farmers in Australia and in parts of America would say that things haven’t changed.  They just can’t and don’t want to make that connection with climate.

So what those really effective Farmers for Climate do is they say look, we try and have those conversations over the back fence and the pub about it, but sometimes the resistance can be too much.  So in the end as long as we’re getting farmers to change what they do and change up what they do – and of course a lot of them are already investing in renewable energy.  They might not believe in climate change, but they’ve got water tanks, they’ve got solar, they’ve got wind and they believe in that.  So if you get them to do the actions, you don’t always necessarily have to push them into the belief of the science.

The difficulty of course is, at the political level, getting them to vote for anything other than the Nationals and Farmers and Shooters, especially in Australia, is quite difficult to do.  So that political behaviour is a problem.

Bob Carr:                 How do you explain that by the way?  I don’t want to be partisan but the gap between farmers, with whom you can have a conversation about these issues, and their political representation, the National Party, simply refusing to budge from thermal coal, is very real.

Rebecca Huntley:    It is, and I mean you would reflections on this as well, I mean having – in New South Wales – is this a question of policy or the sense of a cultural and social sense of loyalty?  I mean in the research that I do in rural and regional Australia a lot of those voters are very, very disappointed with the National Party on all kinds of levels.  This is why we’ve seen Shooters and Fishers do so well in New South Wales.

But the idea that they would vote for any other party – they still feel that the National Party has at least some interest in country people, so they vote reluctantly.  They might vote despondently but the options aren’t there for them.  So it’s a cultural and social thing.  It’s not necessarily a rational thing.

Bob Carr:                 Let’s take the issue of faith-based, embracive climate or rejection of climate action.  If one were a conservative Evangelical, perhaps a Pentecostalist, perhaps in Hillsong, would you see – are you bound to see climate as coming from the secular, left-leaning Liberal faction with whom you are at odds on so many other fronts, and therefore are you bound to say I can’t accept it?

Rebecca Huntley:    Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, and again this shows about how – what the damage of pulling climate into the culture wars and into this highly partisan environment has meant.

I mean what intrigued me when I started to look at this notion of faith and climate, is that all religions – peak bodies of all religions have spoken out quite strongly about climate, and in certain countries there’s very strong networks of climate advocates through faith-based organisations, and even amongst Evangelicals.  Not Pentecostals but Evangelicals.

There’s a very famous – she’s one of my favourite climate communicators – a women called Katharine Hayhoe in the United States.  She’s a climate scientist but also an Evangelical Christian.  Married to an Evangelical Christian pastor and she talks about her concern of climate is driven by her religious beliefs.

But I think you’re right.  I think that there are…

Bob Carr:                 She stands out though doesn’t she?

Rebecca Huntley:    She really does.

Bob Carr:                 She’s been mentioned to me as one of the spokespeople for the eco-right in America.  Someone who’s on every test a signed-up conservative, a Republican, but she embraces the urgency of climate action.

Rebecca Huntley:    Yeah, absolutely.  I suppose if you’re a genuine conservative you want to keep the kinds of institutions that have been around for hundreds of years, whether that be your church or whether that be your government or the local land that you love.  Then why you wouldn’t take climate seriously is beyond me.

Bob Carr:                 But you say here, at page 38, climate change scepticism and even denial in the US have become part of a cluster of beliefs, along with anti-abortion, anti-immigration, that are obvious markers of Republican allegiance.

Rebecca Huntley:    That’s absolutely right.  Then it means that if you decide to be – then there’s yet another barrier.  So along with all the cognitive barriers, along with all the other barriers about accepting climate change, there’s also a cultural, social, political, ideological barrier that you have to hurdle to get to a point that is, let’s face it – and this is what I realised when I had this shift in my personal and professional life towards climate – means you live with a constant level of uncertainty and unhappiness, which makes COVID look like a bit of a walk in the park to tell you the truth.

But if you really accept the truth of climate change into your life – and I’m saying it in a very religious way – but if you go well actually we don’t have all the time in the world – in Australia there are so many – we’ve gone to and fro and to and fro on this issue.  You feel time ticking.  You feel that in your children’s lifetime this is going to be an enormous concern.  Then you live with a level of constant uncertainty.  So I get why people don’t want to hurdle all those cognitive, social and cultural hurdles to get to a place of discomfort, because it’s not fun.

Bob Carr:                 Is young Greta Thunberg a barrier or a help?

Rebecca Huntley:    I think there’s absolutely no doubt that she sparked a global movement of young people; almost defying the way we characterise young people these days – as an Instagram generation, only concerned about their mobile phones.  All the terrible clichés we say about young people.

She sparked a movement that defied our views about them and got them out on the streets in peaceful protests saying, what’s the point of going to school and learning about science and doing well if you haven’t created a liveable future.

I think about that.  My daughter is 12 and my twins are five, and if I’m to take what the scientists tell us about the small window of opportunity, 10 to 15 or whatever years, to really genuinely turn this around, my children won’t have even – my youngest won’t have even approached the HSC.  So I think that this quiet but powerful protest from children has been incredibly important.

Now what happens of course is that movements throw up heroes.  We always tend to want to personify a movement in an individual, and no matter what she does – if she decides to get angry or she decides to scold adults or she decides to do whatever she does – she’s going to be a lightning rod for right-wing criticism absolutely, but also some discomfort from the middle thinking, oh I don’t know how I feel about this.  So I think she’s…

Bob Carr:                 There’s something unearthly about her…

Rebecca Huntley:    Oh absolutely.

Bob Carr:                 …and it’s as if she could play Joan of Arc very well.

Rebecca Huntley:    Couldn’t she and it didn’t end well for Joan of Arc did it?  No.  But when I look at somebody like – I mean I was – luckily last year I was trained by former Vice-President, Al Gore.  He came to Australia and did some fantastic training.  So much energy; so much passion.  We have some very prominent environmentalists who have been incredibly effective and then sometimes start to turn people off.

The solution is not to continue to attack them.  The solution is for us to throw up more spokespeople.  As diverse as we can have the movement and people talking about it, the better it is.  You might look at Vice-President, Al Gore and admire him, but if you’re a conservative who’s never voted for him, didn’t like him, you really need somebody else talking about this issue to you in a way that you identify with.

So that’s what I advocate.  Not sidelining those people but surrounding them with even more – with different kinds of people.

Bob Carr:                 Yeah, it is a challenge.  I’ve looked at the evidence on the eco-right in America and you do get breakthroughs.  For example, an article in the respected Foreign Affairs magazine, jointly authored by James Baker and George Shultz, two former Republican Secretaries of State, saying, climate is real; it’s an international security issue; it’s geostrategic in its implications.  Actually saying we need cooperation with China on this front and then coming to the hard policy choice saying, the simplest thing to do would be a carbon tax with all the proceeds being returned to the American taxpayer.

I did notice that there are some on the eco-right – a former Republican congressman, who pushes this line very strongly – the simple elegance of a carbon tax with all proceeds being returned to American families in tax cuts – but none has emerged as a national spokesperson.

I would love to have a leader of climate action from the right, or to go back to what we touched on a moment ago, someone from one of the faith communities, the conservative wing of a faith community.  Not a progressive Uniting Church [for you], but a conservative Evangelical.

Rebecca Huntley:    That’s exactly right.  So I suppose the – I mean let’s think about it in the Australian context.  To what extent does the way in which the conservative right in Australia and in the United States allow for somebody like that to emerge?  They would have to be at such a level of authority to be able to make that shift that nobody could knock them down.

Now we would have thought Malcolm Turnbull could have been at that point in Australia, and there was…

Bob Carr:                 They didn’t allow him.

Rebecca Huntley:    They just did not allow…

Bob Carr:                 They threatened his leadership were he to push hard.

Rebecca Huntley:    Absolutely, and as much as you – and this would know – there’s many, many critics outside the tent and people constantly criticising him for being not brave enough and all the rest of it.  I just think it was an extraordinarily difficult task, and in the end the system around him wasn’t going to allow him even an inch to move on that question.

Bob Carr:                 Again, it’s something I’ve just had difficulty understanding.  If one were a conservative wanting to conserve institutions, to minimise disruptive change, surely it’s a logical step to say, I want to conserve this battered old planet of ours, with its landscapes and its ecologies.  Even if you’re a faith-based person to say so redolent of what god gifted us.

Rebecca Huntley:    Exactly.

Bob Carr:                 This is god’s – the natural world – these are god’s cathedrals.  Let’s save; not to spoil it.  So I think it continues to be a mystery, this conservative resistance in the face of scientific evidence.

Doomers – you spend some pages on a small movement embodied by an American novelist, Jonathan Franzen, arguing it’s impossible to see humanity responding to this.  We are, for better or for worse – we’re living with it.

Rebecca Huntley:    Yes.

Bob Carr:                 Fatalists.  Fatalists, yeah.

Rebecca Huntley:    Fatalists.  Absolute fatalists.  I think what’s interesting – and I think we’re going to see numerous splinter groups as they always are at difficult moments of time – there are people who come from the – Jem Bendell – he wrote a book on – and he inspired – Extinction Rebellion – who said that – look, humanity will survive but in a very, very dramatically different kind of environment.

Bob Carr:                 Degraded, compromised.

Rebecca Huntley:    So let’s start to prepare for that now.  Whereas doomers actually think we’re done for and there’s something very – there’s almost a joy in the destruction; like a euphoria in it.

Bob Carr:                 Yeah, [unclear], ending the world.

Rebecca Huntley:    Exactly, and a disregard for anybody who thinks otherwise.  I think that there are those people who look the full science in the face, look at also the human response, which has been so patchy and reluctant, although it is getting better, and recognise that but also say, we need to continue to try.

So I think within that spectrum there are those who completely give up and the people who are well let’s prepare for what is going to happen and let’s retain what we can retain.  I think there’s a significant difference between those two.

Bob Carr:                 Yeah, and there’s a great motivation you settle on – reproducing that famous recruiting poster from World War II: youngsters at their daddy’s armchair, daddy what did you do in the Great War?  I imagine that there must be some parents at least contemplating the question being asked by the youngsters, hang on in those decades when we had the opportunity to make a difference what did you do, because now in 2030, 2045 we can see where we got to?  What had you been doing back when a difference might have been made?

Rebecca Huntley:    That’s right and that was the biggest motivation for me, which is that I think it’s quite likely with three children that they will – although they grow up with a real understanding of climate change and an environmental awareness that was even not something that I grew up with.

But part of – there’s so many layers to my commitment to this, but there is a bit of a preparing myself for when they say, what did you do?  I’ll say, well I took the thing that I was best at, which was understanding people, and telling organisations of all kinds whose job it is to persuade those people whether to vote, do something, buy something.  I spent every moment of my intellectual – of my time and all of my intellectual effort into understanding why people feel the way they do and helping persuaders persuade, and we got a compost bin [laughs].

I did my best and in a sense I think that’s all we can do.  We can look at – not necessarily all join Extinction Rebellion.  Think about what is it that I’m good at, what profession am I part of, what network do I have and how can I make a contribution through that?

I think it’s a lot to ask people to dramatically change their life or their profession, but no matter what we do there’s always a contribution we can make, beyond voting and beyond education.  That’s what I hope out of the book anybody who might pick it up, no matter what they do, will feel inspired to do that a bit more in their work.

Bob Carr:                 I even constructed this [conceit] in a little book I wrote, Run For Your Life, a political memoir – of being alive in 2050…

Rebecca Huntley:    Yes, I remember that piece, it’s fantastic.

Bob Carr:                 …and being called to account by the Australian branch of a wide-ranging international inquiry, UN inquiry, and being called to account about what I had done – being able to point the world’s first carbon trading scheme and conservation of forests and a range of other things – but I think if you accept the notion someone one day might ask you – that’s a powerful reason to settle on what you’ve said, and I think that’s a useful formulation too – given my skills, what should I be doing now if I’m going to have to account for it to my kids?

Rebecca Huntley:    That’s right.  I think the other really common thing that came out from all the activists I talked to – and there was a real diverse range of activists in the book – and all of the psychological studies, is that we can think about what can we personally do, but it only makes real sense and is really fortified by that sense of collective action.

Even the most powerful amongst us – a former premier or a former prime minister – there’s a limit to how much you can do individually if you don’t bring the group of people around you with you, whether that’s your cabinet, your political party, your profession, your community.

The one thing that I hope we get a bit from COVID, particularly if we manage to survive it – at current taping it feels pretty horrible what’s happening in Victoria – is that people understand that unified action, collective action, clear political leadership with at least some basic trust in government and some basic systems of government that are functioning, can do a lot.  Can save lives, protect the healthcare system, protect communities, keep the economy ticking over, and hopefully we have a renewed sense and confidence of how critical those things are to our everyday life.

Bob Carr:                 It’s the current Australian political leadership, state and federal, feeling its way; getting some things wrong, but retreating from that; trying to make it good.

Rebecca Huntley:    Absolutely.

Bob Carr:                 People seeming to reward that.  This is a model for a conversation between elected leaders and their publics about solving a big problem, and it resonates when we talk climate.

Rebecca Huntley:    That’s exactly right, and I think, as lots of experts in – amateur experts in epidemiology these days – but the role, for example, of chief medical officers and other experts who say look this is – and spokespeople like Norman Swan, rather than the usual commentariat who have a theory that we shouldn’t – we’re overreacting and all the rest of that.  In Australia we are starting to see that expert opinion about this is how it spreads; this is what the consequences are; these are the things you can do.

So I think that I’m excited that that’s happening and hopefully that flows through to climate ongoing.

Bob Carr:                 In my early days as party leader I’d given a speech – a total failure – to a gathering in Parliament House, and a Catholic priest who used to write for The Australian came up to me, and he gave me some very potent advice.  He said, Bob, there were some good things in your speech, but – he said, just think of the way our Lord did it.  He did it through parables, through telling stories.

I thought of that encounter, 30 years ago, when I looked at your strong recommendation here – win the argument with stories.  It’s not bad advice.  As soon as you tell a story you get attention.

Rebecca Huntley:    Yeah, absolutely and I think that understandably for a long time the climate conversation started with the science.  We needed to – we actually did need to get the community across the science to some extent, but there were limits to how much the science can get us further along.  It’s these stories of transformation, of recognition, that the climate is changing and this is what I’m doing, this is how I’m making this happen.

Bob Carr:                 A story about a farmer, for example, changing their practices as a result of undeniable evidence of a change in weather.

Rebecca Huntley:    Knowing that their neighbours might not agree with them, but also knowing that those changes that they’re making prepare their land to be able to be farmed by future generations.  So we also need to tell some of the glimmers of hope as part of that story.  Not necessarily just the this is really happening, and it’s rocked my world.

So I’m fascinated by really, really good storytelling.  The other thing I only delved into a little bit in the book but is coming out a lot in the research I do, is the power of images to change people’s view.  When they see something happening or when they have a kind of experience.

I mean there would be people who saw some of the images of the bushfires who were already concerned about climate that pushed them towards the alarm category.  Other people who thought it had nothing to do with it, but there was something about seeing the images of people – for me, as somebody who was already concerned – but seeing images of people huddling on a beach – there was that particular image of that woman with her children in the water clinging to a jetty.  I thought wow, these almost feel like wartime images and people driven into the sea because there’s just actually nowhere to go.  Very powerful.

Bob Carr:                 Well, Rebecca Huntley, thanks for spending time talking about this.

Rebecca Huntley:    Thank you for reading the book.

Bob Carr:                 Good luck in promoting it.  It’s called How to Talk about Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference.  Something that many of us have thought about.  Rebecca, it’s a great book.  I strongly recommend it.  Thanks for being with us once again.

Rebecca Huntley:    Thank you, Bob.

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