Tim Flannery is the godfather of Australia’s climate community

Welcome to a transcript of Founder Stories, an impactable.news podcast!

Tim is an author, explorer, conservationist, and former Australian of the Year whose work spans from discovering new mammal species in Melanesia to founding critical environmental organisations like Australia’s Climate Council. According to Wikipedia, he is a palaeontologist, environmentalist, conservationist, science communicator, activist, and public scientist. He is the author of dozens of books, including The Future Eaters, which blew my mind when I read it on my first trip to Australia in 2003, and The Weather Makers, which scared the shit out of me when I read it in 2005. 

He’s also the author – with his daughter and fellow scientist Emma – of a bunch of brilliant books for children that my son absolutely adores, including Weirdest Creatures in Time, Deep Dive into the Deep Sea and Creepiest Crawly Critters.

His book Sunlight and Seaweed: An Argument for How to Feed, Power and Clean Up the World – which I read last year – explores innovative solutions to our climate crisis, which brings us to today's conversation. Tim, welcome and thank you for joining me.

Tim Flannery
Hi Simon, it's great to be with you.

Simon Crerar
I've just got back from Adelaide where we both attended the Seagriculture Conference. This was the first time it was held in the Asia Pacific. And you sounded like you were pretty excited that it was here in Australia as well?

Tim Flannery
I really was. Australia has unique assets when it comes to seaweed. We've got the greatest diversity of seaweed of anywhere on the planet, particularly along the southern shores. We've got a great research capacity. Some of the most important recent discoveries about seaweed have been made in the country, and yet we've never hosted a seaweed conference, a proper global one. So I was very, very pleased to see that happen in Adelaide this week.

Simon Crerar
And the conference, to contextualise it, featured a whole bunch of different people in the seaweed space, including scientists, entrepreneurs, people from government, and included lots of Australians, but also people from as far afield as Norway and Iceland, people from north and south America, across Europe, and of course, lots of people from around Asia. So it was really very, very interesting to me to understand that this is a global industry with all sorts of amazing innovations. 

I was particularly struck by your enthusiasm about the potential of seaweed, particularly in methane abatement. So you could maybe just share a little bit about what excites you about seaweed generally in this emerging sector.

Tim Flannery
When I first started looking into seaweed, I wasn't aware at that point of just how incredibly genetically diverse seaweeds are. You know, they're more genetically diverse than the land plants, for example. You know, they've been around longer, they've been diversifying longer, and over their 800 million years on the planet, they've produced a lot of interesting chemicals, that's for sure.

So that is one aspect of it. The other is just the size of the oceans. The oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and seaweed grows very fast in the oceans. And with all of that genetic diversity, there clearly are potential applications for seaweed for a whole series of human needs. 

Now, the land surface is really overburdened with the demands we place on it as a species. So I think that seaweed might offer a bit of respite for that and also let's hope that seaweed aquaculture can be done sustainably.

Simon Crerar
In your keynote introduction to the conference you explored different types of seaweed and their various applications. So for the audience of diverse founders doing different kinds of work in the impact space listening, watching or reading this, maybe you could just talk us through the brown, the green, and the red seaweeds and just explain how they can come together to address climate challenges and other opportunities.

Tim Flannery
Well, look, those three basic kinds of seaweed, the brown seaweeds, the kelps that we're all familiar with around the coast, the green seaweeds, the little sea lettuces and things that grow a bit closer in shore sometimes, and the red seaweeds, which are a bit more mysterious, but you do see them if you look in rock pools. They're very finely branching quite often and a bright red colour. They have been evolving independently for, I don't know, 500 million years at least, probably longer.

And each of them is very different in its chemistry and the way it makes a living. And because of that diversification and that specialisation, they can be used or they have been used in industry for very different purposes. So just to start with the brown seaweeds, I mean, they include the kelps, which are the fastest growing of all of the seaweeds. They, know, the big Pacific bull kelp can grow, know, the best part of a metre a day, its fronds can grow. 

Charles Darwin called that kelp forest the rainforest of the sea. Basically, the diversity sheltered in those forests is enormous. So that has been planted to use as a sort of bulk produce, really, for soil amendment, for anything that needs a large volume of material. You can make all sorts of things from it, just limited by the human imagination.

But really at the moment, a lot of it is that bio-stimulant which is for fertiliser. 

The green seaweeds are very different. They seem to have found a niche in terms of water purification. And around the world, we are struggling because our cities and populations are expanding and yet the water services that provide wastewater or that deal with wastewater for them are often many decades old.

Antique technology that needs an update and yet it's very expensive to replace those water treatment plants. So the green seaweeds have found a niche there for tertiary treatment of water and that I think is going to be tremendously valuable in years to come. The third group, the red seaweeds, well they sort of sprung out of nowhere on me at least a decade or so ago when a friend of mine and a colleague, Rocky De Nys,

just stumbled accidentally upon their extraordinary capacity to reduce methane in cattle. So that's their big niche at the moment is methane abatement, which is an urgent problem. Methane is arguably 60 times more potent than CO2 over the decade or two time periods. So we have a great opportunity there to really deal with climate change at source by using red seaweed.

Simon Crerar
Rocky is very involved in the Tasmanian company Sea Forest, where he is Chief Scientist. I'm joining you today from melukerdee country down in Tasmania. And Rocky was at the conference. When you live somewhere more regional, you get to go to the beach every day. Like there's amazing bull and giant kelp kind of on my shoreline here down in Southern Tasmania, particularly after big storms. 

There is green, green seaweed. Mostly wakame, which is an invasive species that originally came from Japan on boats several decades ago but is now being used by an amazing Tasmanian biotech company called Marinova to make a very premium kind of product for the beauty industry in north Asia. And then there's those red seaweeds which are obviously native to the waters here in Tassie and elsewhere in Australia.

I'd love to know what Rocky's light bulb moment was when he discovered this, maybe I'll have to track him down and find that out. But Sea Forest has found this way to address one of the biggest problems in climate, which is this idea of product market fit. 

And so how has that growing sector, the asparagopsis seaweed industry, aligning with the needs of the market? How are they commercialising that?

Tim Flannery
Well, I should just say, Simon, that those three examples I gave you of how the seaweeds are used are purely that. There are thousands of applications for all of these seaweeds and they keep multiplying every time I look, go to an expo or read something.

Simon Crerar
At Seagriculture you mentioned a conference you've been to in Korea where there was toothpaste, I think you said, seaweed toothpaste!

Tim Flannery
Toothpaste, deodorant, building materials, papers. It just went on and on and on. Foods, really lovely foods, yeah, huge diversity. But look, can I just take you back to what Rocky told me about the discovery of that asparagopsis, because it was totally fortuitous. He was at James Cook University in Townsville, north Queensland. 

Townsville is really the epicentre for a large beef trade. You know, all of the cattle come in from the hinterland and go out through the coast there. And methane was clearly an issue. So Rocky and a colleague just decided to run an experiment with a few different kinds of seaweed just to see what would happen in the presence of high levels of methane. And the result that he got with the red seaweed was so astonishing that he refused to believe it. He actually went back and repeated the experiment and repeated the experiment. Still getting 99% absorption of methane through this seaweed. 

So he finally convinced his colleague that this was real and they took it to the CSIRO, who've co-invested in it and now they are producing the actual product. They're not the only company doing this but they are a very important one. So the product goes into cattle feed. It can be dairy cattle, can be beef cattle in feedlots or even out in the paddock. And if you have just a small dose, I think the dose is something around 25 grams a day, which is not much, you get massive reduction in methane emissions. And the cattle either grow faster as a result or need less food. And they're finding that particularly in the beef cattle, they seem to just thrive on less food overall because they're getting all of the energy that would have gone into methane and be lost to them otherwise. So it's a truly revolutionary discovery, I think, that will change the emissions profile for a major sector of Australia's industry and the world eventually.

Simon Crerar
The CSIRO has played a significant role developing this product and sharing the IP with a number of different companies that are starting up in different parts of Australia. At Seagriculture we heard from Fremantle Seaweed and Sea Forest – where Rocky is the chief scientist. There was also CH4 Global, which is based in South Australia and is doing things at a very impressive scale. You chaired a panel which included their founder, who's based in the USA, and is clearly well placed to kind of take this and sell it in as a really great commercial solution for farmers. 

And my eyes were really opened. I've spoken to Sam Elsom, the founder of Sea Forest and interviewed him previously. But when I saw some of those slides that were presented at the Seagriculture conference, the possibility is gigantic. 

Obviously, you know, cattle are a huge part, methane emissions from cattle is a huge part of the emissions profile. And also there's something particularly unique about methane, which maybe you could briefly explain to people about how it gets into the atmosphere, which makes it particularly significant for a quick reduction of emissions.

Tim Flannery
Yes, that's absolutely right. is, it is a pretty much instantaneous reduction once you start feeding the cattle that, that, that material. So yeah, I agree with you completely. 

And CH4 Global, the thing that really set them aside for me in a way was their understanding of scale. You know, they come from very large industries, and they do understand the need for scale.  So in the brown seaweed space, Kelp Blue in Namibia is another company that understands scale. It was founded by someone from Royal Dutch Shell, within the petrochemical industry. He spent decades there, increasingly unhappy about the impact his business and his work was having on the planet.

And so he decided to just turn around 180 degrees and go into seaweed. And we see that a bit these days. People have a conscience and it's lovely to see them take up something immensely challenging, but potentially hugely rewarding.

Simon Crerar
That's right. I think some of the CH4 founders have come out of the petrochemicals industry as well. And I think there's that sense of like, you know, I met many engineers at this conference and also at Climate Action Week in Sydney earlier this month, who've kind of transitioned from that industry and they've got that skill set, they've got that understanding. And I guess at some particular point, they've had that moment of self-realization that maybe they would be better off going 180 degrees and trying to work in a more positive way. You know, all the petrochemical companies are trying in some kind of way to move to green energy, whether it's greenwashing or not. But some of these founders have kind of taken their expertise elsewhere, and it's inspiring to see that people are making those personal decisions.

Tim Flannery
It really is. And they are invaluable to these new industries because they do understand the concept of scale and what is required for these industries to grow to have an impact on the global problem. And I take my hats off to them. It's not an easy journey, but they've done fabulously well, those who made the change.

Simon Crerar
Great. So I just wanted to pull back a little bit from seaweed and just talk about, you know, the broader climate context. So you've been at the forefront of climate science communication for decades. And, you know, as I said at the introduction, you've had this amazingly varied career of being an explorer, and the discoverer of all sorts of things – and a noted author. 

How has your understanding of the climate crisis evolved over your lifetime? 

Tim Flannery
Yeah, sure. I first became aware of the climate issue when I was a zoologist in New Guinea. I was working on the high mountains of New Guinea and I noticed that everywhere I went, the tree line was rising. And I didn't immediately understand what that was about because my understanding of climate science back then was pretty rudimentary. But by the mid 90s, I'd realized that I had seen a sort of a global signal, really, of a really serious problem.

I'd spent decades documenting biodiversity on those high mountains and it didn't take me long to realise that unless I did something or something was done about the climate problem, all of those species we discovered were under threat. They would go extinct if the climate crisis progressed. So I decided to change my career path back in about 1999 and became more involved in climate science, particularly here in Australia.

I put my biology and palaeontology on the back burner, which I must say, I missed it. I've just recently come back to do some research, some primary research in those areas, and I love it so much. 

But anyway, for more than 20 years, probably 25 years, I put that aside. And I chaired the Copenhagen Climate Council during COP15 in Copenhagen. That was a big moment, you know, we realised we were desperate to get progress happening at that COP15 meeting because we realised it was the last time really where if we took action then we'd have a fairly easy glide path through to staying below 1.5 degrees. But I don't know whether you remember, Simon, but we had a climategate intervene and that was just a fraudulent pilfering of emails and then lying about their content. It seemed that Russia and Saudi Arabia played a big role in that. 

But at the time, I was struck by the goodwill of all of these global leaders who'd come together to deal with what they thought was a big problem. But that climategate issue really made them doubt. And you don't need much for people to start thinking, is this just a beat up? And sadly, that was what happened. The will to do something at that meeting evaporated and with it, the hope of staying below 1.5 degrees in my view. 

So since then, it's been back and forth. We had the big meeting in Paris in 2016, where we had the target set, you know, 1.5 degrees, all the nations agreed. But that was late, very late in the day. And the action since then has not been sufficient. 

And in the last two years, we have seen really alarming developments in the global climate system that make me fear the worst, really.

Simon Crerar 
Yeah, things are really intensifying and like the worst case scenario has been exceeded really, I think is what the science is saying, isn't it? Which is obviously very scary.

Tim Flannery
Well, it's more than that. There's been a change in the climate system. We're seeing a level of warming that was just not anticipated. Some of my climate colleagues say it's as if we've had a decade's worth of warming in a couple of years. That's what it feels like. The global temperature hasn't dropped below 1.5 degrees now for the best part of two years. Will it ever drop back?

Simon Crerar
And that's been very noticeable, you know, anyone who's following the news in any kind of way can hear it's a record month followed by a record month followed by a record month. And it really struck me the way that you articulated that, you know, a decade's worth of warming in just a couple of years. 

So in your documentary, Climate Changers, you search for leaders addressing climate change. And it's a tremendous watch. I think you can find it on YouTube for people who haven't seen it. What examples of effective leadership have you found in the seaweed industry? Who are you inspired by?

Tim Flannery
My goodness, there's so many. But you know, just in my local circle here, Rocky De Nys, who has been such a pioneer and is such a genius, a scientific genius. He is really up there and a great human being. And of course, Sam Elsom, you know, who had a great career in fashion, and gave it up to do something for the planet and has been absolutely dogged in his pursuit of an asparagopsis solution to methane ever since. 

People like Daniel Hooft from Kelp Blue in Namibia, another one who's just given up everything to go and live in a remote community in Namibia and try to do something about this problem. So within seaweed, there are lots of people. 

There's Brian Tsuyoshi I think I've got his name right, from Norway, who's been trying to use sea urchins to allow the kelp in the far north to re-seed, to take back over, regrow, because the kelp forests have been destroyed there by warming and overfishing of some of the predators on those sea urchins.

Simon Crerar
I found that fascinating because in Tasmania we've got an issue where because of the warming seas we have sea urchins that have come from New South Wales that have caused issues as well in our kelp. At Seagriculture there was  a representative of the Tasmanian government talking about a new fishery in sea urchins. We can maybe get the sea urchins out in order to regenerate the kelp?

Tim Flannery
Absolutely, which would be a great solution. We also need, though, to put the predators back. And so, you know, in places like Norway, the wolf fish plays a huge role in terms of sea urchins. In Australia, it's the big crayfish. Unless we can protect the crayfish more, Simon, we're going to be fighting a losing battle. 

You know, what we really need, if I could just go off piste for a moment, is we need enormous areas of marine protection in the oceans. We need at least a third of the oceans to be protected from human efforts because if they can then act as the seeding areas to bring sustainability back to the rest of the oceans. 

But unless we do that, we'll be fighting an uphill battle if we keep on trawling and overfishing and, know, with our ever increasing technology, you know, and polluting and warming, you create a situation where we will face very large dead zones in the ocean or underproductive zones and that will have an enormous impact.

Simon Crerar
Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I've read many of your books – including Throwim Way Leg, your book about Papua New Guinea, which was incredible as well. And I was very struck by reading about some of your earlier scientific discoveries, how you went to Melanesia and you discovered so many species, 28 species, I think.

According to your publisher, you've discovered a total of 75 species, including obviously some ancient fossil species as well. How has that lifetime of discovery been as an explorer, how has that shaped your perspective on biodiversity conservation?

Tim Flannery
Well, when I started that career in Melanesia, I thought I might be lucky to discover just one new species of rat. It felt to me as if everything had been done, you know. But, you know, years later there were five new species of tree kangaroos discovered, which is amazing. They're big animals. How could they have remained hidden for so long? And they're very obvious. They're not like they're just slightly different. They're very different. A species of echidna, long-beaked echidna, I named for David Attenborough. How had that remained hidden for so long? 

You know, I feel so immensely fortunate to have lived the life that I've lived. And those people in Melanesia have taught me a very, very important lesson that should be evident to everyone in our own society. The lesson they really taught me was that what we call the economy or the sort of exchange of goods is really just a little bit of froth on a gigantic cake, which is what we call human kindness. It's all the work we do for each other which is unpaid, whether it's the love of parents or siblings or partners in a marriage or just what we do for our community around us. That is the bedrock of everything. And if we destroy that, we will destroy our productivity. So that was the lesson I came away from.

I must say, I've had a bit of a classics education and I re-read [English philosopher] Jeremy Bentham over the years and realised that that very great man was absolutely right. Everyone, no matter who they are, where they come from, what their sexual orientation, anything else, deserves respect from us. Unless we respect each other, our society will fall apart. And in New Guinea you see that laid out very clearly. And you see the way accommodations are made and the way that people. value each other.

Sorry, I'm rabbiting on a bit.

Simon Crerar
No, no, no, no, you're not. I haven't read Bentham since I was an undergraduate and I've been thinking a bit about my Hobbes and my Locke and those treaties on human societies – way before our most incredibly advanced human society.

It was really interesting hearing at the Seagriculture Conference about some of these companies who are working with farmers, seaweed farmers, particularly in Indonesia and the Philippines, whose way of working has not changed by the sounds of it centuries, and who are very much, you know, collectively a huge, huge mass of people who potentially could be empowered by being part of a more global supply chain than they currently are. And I think that some of the, you know, some of the connected thinking that was going on around this – that seaweed is also an economic opportunity for people in other parts of the world – is really interesting. That was one of the innovations in APAC in particular that I thought was most interesting.

Tim Flannery
It's true. And I do think they have a lot to teach us. You know, the simple joy that exists in those societies, the level of happiness is enormous. If you have people, I've met people in New Guinea who may have elephantiasis, they may have malaria, they may be facing very short lives. Their children die at unacceptably high rates and they have a hard life in some ways because they often go without. But they are full of joy.

And the joy comes from each other, the games they play together, the times they spend together. We sit in front of our screens counting our money and no wonder we have a fairly high level of discontent. The real capital that makes the whole world run is very short in Western society.

Simon Crerar
It really is. And I think about this a lot as a parent of an eleven year old and a five year old. And I'm very grateful actually that almost despite my best efforts, my son is not particularly interested in sitting in front of a computer and playing games. He's much happier with a printed book in his hands, which is rather wonderful. And, you know, it's still an amazing piece of technology, a printed book. 

If you were advising a young person who's particularly interested in actually learning aspects of science in order to have an impact on climate, what guidance would you offer them about a career in that space?

Tim Flannery
Well, look, I think the first thing I'd say is that anyone, no matter what their interests, can have an impact. Whether you're a social worker or an accountant or a scientist, an atmospheric physicist, everyone can have an impact because this is a problem we are all trying to work towards solving together. It's the only way we can do it. It's a common problem. So I would say to the kids doing that, just continue what you're doing, but with climate change always in your back pocket. 

Whatever you do, throw it into the balance of what the decisions you make. But you have to follow your sharpest tool. You have to follow your own interests, really. Don't become something that you won't be happy with just to try to solve a problem. Be true to yourself. I think that's Hamlet!

Simon Crerar
Well that's really good advice. I personally had something of a midlife crisis last year. I turned 50 and I was very lucky enough to walk the Three Capes in Tasmania, which my wife sent me off on my own, which was really, really wonderful.

And I did a lot of thinking and basically decided that, you know, I'd spent 25 years working in media, apart from one year working for Friends of the Earth after I'd come back [to London] from Australia in 2004. I basically had a moment where I decided that life is too short not to optimize for impact which is really why I've left media and I'm working on Impact&ble. There's a chap local to me in Cygnet in Tasmania, a guy called Paul Gilding who you may know, who's a tremendous fellow.

Tim Flannery
I do very well, lovely man.

Simon Crerar
In June 2023 I went back to Scotland with my family and it was very, very hot. And I came back and told Paul: “I've never been to the Isle of Skye when it's 30 degrees”. It was scarily warm. And Paul said, you know, it's going to get a lot weirder.

And as you've said in this conversation, the data is showing that we have all sorts of frankly terrifying things going on.

And he [Paul] said, yes, it's the most terrifying time, but also that the solutions are there, that the opportunities for getting ourselves out of this exist, the technologies exist, the seaweed technologies, the amazing climate technologies are there. 

You're a parent and a grandparent, you're a huge leader, a massive leader in this space, but what are your strategies for personal resilience? How do you stay motivated when it sounds like you're kind of terrified as well?

Tim Flannery
I guess I've come to the realisation that we need, you know, if you're working in climate all the time, you can get worn down very quickly because it is a juggernaut and trying to make change is very slow, you know, manifesting in the system. 

So I've always tried to do something else, which for the last 20 odd years it's been working with the communities where I discovered these mammals in Melanesia and trying to give something back to them, trying to give some community development back that allows them to protect their forests and flourish. And it's been really successful. We've had one project running in Papua New Guinea that Jim Thomas, a friend of mine, has been running now for 25 years, which has changed the lives of tens of thousands of people. There's another one we set up in the Solomon Islands just six years ago that's doing exactly the same thing there. And I'm just in the process now of doing one in West Papua in Indonesia, where it's had a very sorry history of frontier wars and all the rest of it, much like Australia.

But doing that, as hard as those things are, you do see progress on the ground. You see change. You see a smile on someone's face. You know, it's kind of wonderful to see that, you know, see that happen. So I keep on going with the big picture stuff, the climate stuff, but I also need to do something that gives you some jollies. 

I always envy women who can wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, put on some lipstick and they look great. Us men struggle to do anything that is immediately as gratifying as that. And for me, my lipstick is going to those Melanesian communities and doing things that make it better for people there. So that's kind of my strategy for dealing with this.

Simon Crerar
Ha. That's fabulous. Well, your beard also looks pretty neat. So you're also doing your own version of the lipstick!

Book recommendation from Professor Flannery 📚

The last thing on this podcast is that each time I ask my guests to recommend a book that you think people listening or watching this might enjoy. So I wonder if there's a recommendation?

Tim Flannery
Sure, well look the book that changed my life over the last 10 years is a book called Against the Grain by James Scott, it's an account of the first civilizations, the first cities really to be inhabited by people and it was so enlightening because it shows us very starkly where we went wrong. I was just there night after night reading this and it was as if the scales fell from my eyes. I now understood the way the world worked. And it's so important, I think, that that message particularly gets out, because it is about equality. I mean, one of the things he talks about is, you know, why did these ancient cities have walls? Everyone assumed that it was for defense, but the evidence is not pointing that way. It's pointing more towards the fact that these were walls to keep the citizens in. That foreign invaders had come, captured people, corralled them like they did their cattle in a pen, and then forced them to work for them, to build the great ziggurats of Ur and everything else, all of that extraordinary stuff that we look at in the archaeological record. I can't look at the Statue of Liberty or the Sydney Opera House without thinking this is an echo of the same thing.

Simon Crerar
Fantastic, that's really, really great. I moved fairly recently to regional Tasmania. I know the importance of fences to keep things in, chickens in our case, but really important! 

Tim, thank you so much indeed for your time and your insights. Your work really is so inspirational and it continues to inspire people to take action and search for solutions to address the climate challenges.

Tim Flannery
Thank you, Simon. It's been such a pleasure. Wonderful. Enjoy Tasmania.

Visit climatecouncil.org.au to learn more about the vital organisation Tim founded.