I can’t be that important as I didn’t fly by private jet to the Australiasian Transport Research Forum to talk on climate action.

A privilege to deliver one of the keynotes today at the ATRF in Perth on the day that COP28 gets underway with three UK elites arriving to it separately in private jets to rub shoulders with fossil fuel lobbyists.

I presented from my home in the UK to the audience physically at the conference. My thanks to Sae Chi for having me & to Leigh Dalwood for chairing. Good to see Graham Currie FTSE & Paul Scott.

Thanks to delegates who got involved with the opening chant of ‘what do we want?’ – ‘climate action’ – when do we want it?’ – ‘NOW!’. As I warned people, “you may find my presentation either irritating, disturbing or inspiring, we’ll see”.

I used Menti again to ‘take the temperature in the room’. It’s important (results in the slides).

Some great questions from the floor, including:

What can we do to make more of a difference? The answer is personal to each individual. If you believe peaceful protest will make more of an impact than writing a couple more academic papers & you’re prepared to run the risk of arrest, then that may be the course of action for you. You may conversely believe you can exert more influence from ‘inside the tent’.

What does all this mean for what we ask of our modelling & analysis? The emergence in 2014 of Decide and Provide from consideration of Peak Car in New Zealand reminded us, even before the pandemic, of deep uncertainty. We now need to be vision-led, not forecast-led. Our models will continue to be wrong but they can also continue to be useful if we can prioritise being approximately right rather than precisely wrong. Exploring more what-if scenarios to both consider exogenous uncertainty but also help identify plausible policy paths to vision realisation.

Isn’t technology going to fix all this? If you were a gambler rather than a steward over the future then ‘maybe’. Politicians get seduced by the siren sound of technology. It holds the promise of solutions, jobs, economic growth, posturing opportunities on the world stage. We need technology to help address improving motorised transport when it needs to be used. But we need behaviour change policies that help avoid the need to travel as much & shift travel onto more sustainable modes.

When asked today “If you were betting on what the future has in store in terms of the climate emergency, which one would you pick from these possibilities?”, the audience response via Menti was this:

Too little, too late, too bad – 32
Greened business-as-usual in the nick of time – 13
Shocks & system change – 38
Wasn’t humans fault after all – 3

Let’s hope the COP28 President can square the following: “We need solid solutions for a 43% cut in emissions by 2030, because that is exactly what the science is telling us” he said. His oil company plans to increase capacity by 600,000 barrels a day by 2030 & is spending $150bn in the process.

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