Six Aussies whose work could save the planet
While the climate bureaucrats debate targets and agreements, the work of these quiet Australian achievers could prove game-changing.
Environment
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The battle for Planet Earth is far from over.
Sure – we’re not winning it at the moment. The climate records are not just falling; they’re being completely obliterated, every month bringing with it a hottest-ever-this or wettest-ever-that. At the same time, the watchlist of species in decline has grown fat, with alarming new additions. And still global greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures are rising, despite all efforts to date.
But cometh the hour, and cometh the men and women who are meeting these challenges. These are some of the quiet achievers of the Australian environmental movement; the pioneers, practitioners, communicators and thinkers whose work may yet prove game-changing.
So move over, Thor. It’s time for some real planetary superheroes.
THE SOLAR ENTREPRENEUR: CAMERON KNOX
Twenty-nine year old Allume Energy CEO Cameron Knox is elegant living proof that the solutions to our climate crisis are not necessarily going to be delivered by Baby Boomers.
Six years ago, he set out to find anyone in the global energy industry who had found a way to make solar energy work for the owners and occupiers of strata apartments, and when he discovered nobody had solved this curly problem, he and his colleagues developed the software that did.
The result was the SolarShare, a metering device that came to market in 2019, enabling the residents of low-rise, multi tenanted buildings to access power from the sun, and share stored power from batteries.
“There are almost two million low-rise apartments in Australia,” Mr Knox says. “Obviously there are some which are really high-rise or in shaded areas or don’t have the roof space, and for those kind of buildings off-site solar often is a better fit. But the vast majority are not in that category; they’re suburban low rise or mid-rise apartment buildings, and in my opinion they should all have rooftop solar. It seems like such a waste if they don’t.”
While about one in four Aussie stand-alone homes now have solar – a world-leading figure – Mr Knox says the proportion of apartment buildings with panels is more like 0.7 per cent. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be getting to the same sort of penetration of rooftop solar on apartments that we do on stand-alone homes,” he says.
The company has started to make inroads in the Australian market, winning over one strata committee at a time with offers like no upfront fees for residents, but the vision doesn’t stop there.
“Over 40 per cent of Europe, for example, is in low rise apartments, and bafflingly there’s not a scalable solution even there for rooftop solar on those buildings – so we really have a big ambition to create impact internationally,” he says.
While climate change and global warming are “slightly terrifying,” Mr Knox says, he also says he is “more confident than most” that humanity will be able to tackle the problem.
“I do feel like we’ve proven that we can scale these technologies,” he says. “With rooftop solar, we’re there basically; we’ve got this magic panel that you can put into the sun and it makes electricity. It’s almost feels like a fictional device, but it really works, so I am optimistic that we can meet the challenges that we are facing.”
THE SOILS CAMPAIGNER: DR OLIVER KNOX
Dr Oliver Knox is on a mission to get Aussie farmers to soil their undies.
It’s not as disgusting a proposition as it sounds, although to be frank, it is still a bit filthy.
Since 2018, Dr Knox (no relation to Cameron Knox, above) has been encouraging land owners to bury a new pair of cotton underpants in shallow soil for eight weeks.
If at the end of that spell all that’s left of the unmentionables is lining and elastic, the farmers can rest easy, knowing their soils are rich, full of fibre-munching microbes. But if the grundies look as if they could still be worn after a good wash, it’s a definite sign the soils need a little TLC.
Adapted from a Canadian program, the Soil Your Undies challenge has now been undertaken by thousands of farmers, school kids and gardeners across the country, with Dr Knox and his colleagues at the University of New England using the experiment as a way to jump-start conversations about soil quality.
“Soil is a finite resource. The speed at which it develops on our planet is incredibly slow, but the speed with which we can spoil it can be incredibly rapid,” says the Associate Professor of Soil Systems Biology.
A transplant from Scotland, Dr Knox says Australia’s “ancient, weathered” soils “don’t have the luxury that they have in Europe, where the soils are new and fresh and higher in organic matter and nutrients.”
In some cases Australia’s soils have been further brutalised by 230 years of farming practices that seemed like a good idea at the time, but weren’t. This year’s State of the Environment report card confirmed our soils were continuing to decline.
“I used to grow fields of 14 ton of cereal in the UK, and I know people here who get excited over two,” Dr Knox says.
The soil guru is full of praise for Aussie farmers, saying most of them do “incredible work” to improve their land.
“There is so much soils do. They are an incredible hive of biological activity and life, and they drive so many of our global processes. Some might say this is a corny expression, but we have got to stop treating our soils like dirt.”
THE HYDROGEN RESEARCHER: PROFESSOR JULIE CAIRNEY
Professor Julie Cairney peers at atomic particles under a microscope for a living, which is about as far from the antics of environmental activists as it’s possible to get. And yet her research into hydrogen will be absolutely pivotal if humanity is ever going to harness the incredible clean energy potential of the smallest and most abundant element in the universe.
Hydrogen could be a $2 trillion global industry, it has been estimated – but first we have to work out economically feasible ways to contain it and transport it, which is no easy task given the atoms are so small they slip through the walls of most materials, and the element makes steel brittle, and thus degraded.
Using a special microscope and techniques she developed, Prof Cairney is helping crack that $2 trillion problem, analysing how hydrogen atoms behave inside different materials.
“For hundreds of years we’ve known that steel in the presence of hydrogen becomes quite brittle, and that’s especially problematic as we come into an era when we’re talking about generating hydrogen with electrolysers, and pumping it through steel pipes and converting it into energy,” she says. “It’s more important than ever that we understand [hydrogen] and try to prevent it from making steels and alloys brittle. If we see where hydrogen is sitting inside structures, I can develop materials to help develop storage tanks and the kinds of things that are going to be needed for a hydrogen economy in Australia.”
Prof Cairney says there have been eras of “hydrogen hype” previously, all of which came to naught, but this time the push is on in earnest, with government, industry and academic support at “a whole different level”.
“I genuinely believe it’s different this time,” she says.
While she worries that even one accident with the highly-combustible element could set back progress, Prof Cairney says Australia is well placed to be at the vanguard of a globally game-changing industry.
“Australia has enormous potential to be a producer and supplier of hydrogen. We’ve got the right kind of environment to do clean production using solar, and we have the interest and the energy from industry to become net exporters,” she says.
“But (few) people are really thinking about the critical problem of equipment durability and hydrogen embrittlement. It’s a very important scientific problem we need to address and solve if we’re going to do this successfully.”
THE ALTERNATIVE FARMER: BRUCE MAYNARD
He’s a fourth generation farmer on his property an hour west of Dubbo, but Bruce Maynard’s farming practices are about as new-generation as it’s possible to get.
His cereal crops grow among existing complex grasslands, his cattle are “self-herding” and his approach to stockmanship is about minimising stress among the animals.
Sounds hippyish? Not at all, he says. It’s all about sustainability, and maximising production and quality. The crops taste better, and the animals live healthier lives, which leads them to reproduce more.
“Farmers have been peddling the bike faster and faster to be in the same spot,” he says. “If you take cropping for example, productivity has been rising, but inputs have been rising with it, and unfortunately profitability, community and the environment have been declining. We’re all about trying to run practical systems where the landscape provides the majority of the input.”
Mr Maynard has been spreading the word about his alternative farming methods for the past couple of decades, and he’s keen to foster the idea of provenance in the Australian produce sector.
“At the moment it’s just a mostly commodities-based thing: giant piles of wheat, and your wheat is the same as mine, because we’ve traditionally grown it in these monocultures,” he says.
On Mr Maynard’s farm, the cereals grow among native grasses, which get harvested along with the crop.
“If we grow crops in diverse circumstances, they’re going to exhibit a wider range of phytochemicals, and that’s the many thousands of compounds just naturally produced by the plant in that natural situation. If you grow them in a simplistic conventional system they express less,” he says.
Asked how his unorthodox approaches are received by other farmers, Mr Maynard wryly concedes that it “varies from area to area”.
“But I’ve been doing this for long enough that the whole area of regenerative approaches has really picked up in the last half a dozen years, so the reception now is very different to previously,” he says. “With small changes over millions of hectares with a handful of owners you can get really big changes.”
THE RECYCLING GURU: PROFESSOR VEENA SAHAJWALLA
There was a time when recycling and climate were separate strands of environmental endeavour, parallel lines of concern and activism. But increasingly, recycling, re-using and re-purposing products is seen as an intrinsic part of the move towards decarbonisation; something we are absolutely going to have to crack as we look for more efficient, less wasteful ways to live.
At the very forefront of the thinking and development of new processes in this area is UNSW Professor Veena Sahajwalla, who has devised ways to turn old rubber tyres into raw energy, and old textiles into durable ceramics.
It sounds like a sort of wizardry, but it’s science, carried out at the most molecular levels.
“I’m not burning tyres, I want to get that fact out there,” the Indian-born professor says with a laugh. “If you were burning tyres it would be game over. I’m liberating hydrogen molecules from tyres, zooming right in at that molecular level. A used tyre still contains all those molecules as part of its overall structure, so it’s about liberating those important molecules that we need in a whole new way.”
Part of Prof Sahajwalla’s work has focused on heavy industries like steel and aluminium, products that are literally the stuff of modern life, but which are traditionally made by burning coking coal, a major greenhouse pollutant. More recently, she’s also found a way to harness the energy potential from an even more surprising and ubiquitous source: the waste residue from coffee.
“Some people might say you don’t need to worry about organic waste, because it all goes towards composting, … but we only put a very small part of it, maybe less than 10 per cent, into composting. The reason I’ve been looking at the use of waste coffee is because at the moment we’re still dependent partially on coke, and steelmaking has to have a few alternative pathways,” she says.
Finding better processes for recycling e-waste and discarded technology remains a challenge, and one that Prof Sahajwalla says will get more critical over time as batteries play a bigger role in our lives.
“(Recycling e-waste) is going to be a big big challenge. On the one hand it keeps me super excited about what kind of solutions I need to develop, but on the other hand it also keeps me super scared, going ‘Oh my gosh, we need to solve that problem first, and we need to do that one first.’ There are multiple challenges and that’s why we need collaboration, particularly with businesses. We need to come together and collectively do this.
“Team Australia, right?” she says.
THE COMMUNICATOR: TIM JARVIS
From sailing and mountaineering to rewilding degraded farmland, campaigning for the environment and trekking across Antarctica, Tim Jarvis is a man with a singular set of skills. But you should hear him talk.
To attend one of the British-born, SA-based adventurer’s corporate-world presentations on climate change, working and weaving his different threads together, occasionally digressing but always returning to build his theme … it’s a bit symphonic, in its own way. Drawing on his own personal experiences and resisting the exhortations and theatrics of the likes of Extinction Rebellion, he’s a compelling and convincing communicator.
Where did he learn such a rare skill?
“The penny dropped with the communication piece early on in my environment career,” he says. “I studied and studied and studied and then realised that actually many of the findings that people were putting out were just being reinvented, regurgitated and not being effectively communicated, and at the end of the day, if you can’t change behaviour, what’s the point in continuously doing the research if you’re not using it to affect change?”
A decade ago Mr Jarvis retraced the Antarctic journey of Ernest Shackleton, and he says something about that experience taught him how the renowned explorer and survivor used emotional intelligence to motivate his team and make it against all odds.
It’s about finding common ground, he says.
“People often said to me, when Donald Trump was president, what would I have said if I had an elevator conversation with him? I could have said ‘Think of the planet, think of the children, how can you deprive them of this future’ … all the moral arguments … or I could have found a point of common ground, which is ‘Are you interested in energy security, jobs for America, and keeping your place in the ascendancy as a country? If you’re interested in that, I’ve got an opportunity for you, and it’s called renewable energy. I’d sell based on the economic benefits,” Mr Jarvis says.
Now working with health fund AIA to promote the manifold health benefits of time spent in nature, Mr Jarvis says his environmentalism stems from a “very acute” sense of our role as stewards of the planet. But not everyone thinks that way, he stresses.
“I think most people are now beginning to see things like extreme weather events related to underlying climate change, and are persuaded by the science and the moral reasoning, but for those who aren’t, you find something that works for them and you use it as a means to effect change,” he says. “You’ve just got to be pragmatic.”
Originally published as Six Aussies whose work could save the planet
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