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Cate Blanchett was born in Australia. I mention this fact because I’d forgotten it, somehow, so her manner of speaking – upbeat, front-footed, Aussie-accented – comes as a surprise. And I’ve spent quite some time hearing her talk over the past couple of days, as she has a new podcast, Climate ChangeShe hosts the party with Danny Kennedy, another Australian. Kennedy is the CEO at New Energy Nexus, an environmental non profit, and also runs the California Clean Energy Fund. As you can see from the title, their podcast is about the climate crisis. But before you come over all world-weary and what’s-the-point, before you get tetchy about preachy celebrities telling us stuff we already know, you might as well stop. Blanchett has been there.
“You can recycle up the wazoo, Miranda,” she says (told you she’s Australian), “but it can just make you feel more cross and isolated and panicky… I get that. What we’re trying to do with the podcast is to turn the magnet towards optimism in these incredibly pessimistic times.”
We’re talking via video link, but Blanchett has her camera turned off. Kennedy, who’s in his office in Oakland, California, hasn’t and he wanders around, showing us the view from the window (just some more offices, really). Blanchett’s location is a secret, due to heavy-handed PRs and her natural privacy, though I’d guess she’s in the UK (she lives in Sussex).
Their location doesn’t really matter, of course, as they’re talking about a worldwide problem. The climate crisis is very real – we need to halve the world’s carbon emissions by 2030 – and becoming even more so for those living in Europe, with our reliance on Russian gas. It is easy to panic if you think too hard about it.
Blanchett says she does. In the first episode, she chats into the mic as she drives her electric car towards London and discusses how overwhelmed she can feel by the “tide of bad news”. She describes herself as a “mother of four” (the oldest is 20, the youngest seven) and an “optimistic pessimist”, and confesses to range anxiety as she forgot to plug in her car to charge last night. Her role in the show is to represent the listener, really, which is weird as she’s globally famous. But Blanchett’s everyday attitude is similar to many: she wonders aloud if making an effort, when it comes to the environment, is worth it. If the tipping point is so close, and the people in power still rely on fossil fuels, why bother recycling?
Kennedy and she made Climate ChangeThey recorded the video in an east London studio earlier in the year. They have some strong guests: Adam McKay is the director of Don’t Look UpPrince William and, make an appearance to talk about their respective lives. Earthshot prize. (He explains it very well, actually; it sounds much more interesting than I’d realised.) Still, at the start of the series, in common with many climate emergency podcasts, the discussion can feel rather broad, with smudgy chat about tech and innovation and the “disruptive decade”. At one point, someone says: “We are the stories we tell ourselves”, which might be true but doesn’t help that much with the gas bill. In episode 2, however, the show focuses on real-life problems and these are certainly encouraging. We meet a Filipino woman who’s designed a clean energy lamp that local fisherpeople can use; the Londoner who’s brought gardening to train stations; the designer of living sea walls that encourage plants and fish to thrive. OhmConnect, a California company, has such an innovative idea about reducing electricity consumption at home that I want to sign up. But it’s not yet available in the UK.
What they’re trying to do with the podcast, says Kennedy, is appeal to people like me. To show tired recyclers the solutions to environmental catastrophe are already available. “I think the choir has heard the doom and gloom song for a long time,” he says, “and sung it from the song sheet, like a good choir would. What they haven’t been taught is the song about solutions and the fact we’ve got them.”
“A lot of people are feeling fatigued,” says Blanchett. “I think we need a sense of, ‘No, don’t worry, these changes are happening.’ Because they are.”
Blanchett met Kennedy in Sydney in early 1990s. They were part of the same social circle – Kennedy wrote a play with Andrew Upton, now Blanchett’s husband. Blanchett, Upton, and their co-artistic directors, Sydney Theatre Company, were appointed in 2008. They decided to make the old timber-and glass warehouse as eco-friendly as possible. Kennedy was enlisted to assist. He brought in consultants – “one guy called Gavin Gilchrist: Cate, if you recall, the fellow who did the toilet flushes” – and helped redo the insulation to make the building “tighter and better, even though it was a pretty old, leaky, wooden construction”.
The biggest proposal was the installation of solar energy panels, which proved difficult to get past heritage rules and the general cynicism of Sydney’s county council. “We were met by a lot of internal scepticism and external opposition,” remembers Blanchett. “You know: ‘What has this to do with a cultural institution, what does it have to do with making theatre, why are we bothering?’ So we thought: ‘OK, we’ll be at the theatre company for 10 years and we have a whole suite of ambitions. And the solar panels will probably be the last one we achieve, if we do.’ And it was the first one we achieved.”
It took two decades. It took two years. Now, there are 1,906 solar panels that power lights, ventilation, and air conditioning throughout the building. Kennedy thinks that Blanchett and Upton’s theatre project was “a catalystic moment” that kickstarted a sense in Australia that solar power was viable and cost-effective; the country is now, he says, the biggest solar market in the developed world. Blanchett thinks of it as a “symbolic gesture” that, when added to an industry shift, “all adds up”.
Kennedy and Blanchett have known each other since childhood (Blanchett recently stumbled upon old photos of Kennedy’s children). Kennedy returned to Cornwall last summer to spend time with Blanchett’s family. They took him to Eden Project, which he enjoyed, and the podcast was created there. They visited “these old mines that are engaged in modern, clean-energy transition minerals and materials production – I’m a geek, I love that,” he says. For Blanchett, the show was “a much more primal urge. We kind of had to. I had so many questions.”
I asked her about celebrity and how it can be used to draw attention to important issues. “Look,” she says, “if you have your two minutes in the sun, you can highlight solar technology or you can highlight an underwear line. But I’m genuine when I say that there were a lot of questions, embarrassingly ignorant questions, that I’ve been asking Danny over the decades. And I thought, ‘Well, I can’t be alone.’ When you ask a question, however ignorant or ill-informed it may be, you’re asking to open a door to a deeper understanding.”
The public, with its simple questions (but Why? can’t we switch to wind or solar power?) When it comes to clean power, politicians seem to be often ahead of the people. The powers that be refuse to accept environmentally friendly solutions despite the fact that people want them. Kennedy agrees “100%” and describes a whole institutional mindset that needs to change.
“For a long time, we’ve depended on these big, stodgy, 20th-century utilities where reliability was everything,” he says. “And now we’re jumping to these disruptive business models, where you’ve got distributed renewables and lots of different loads, and assets in the grid, and you need a flexible business model that’s a bit more marketplace… and the regulators can’t even contemplate it. They’re just like, ‘Oh, no. The way we do it, one big central station at a time, you’re never going to build enough wind and solar that way.’ And we’re like, ‘Yes, but that’s not how we want to build it. We want to build it on everything; every house, every roof, every garage becomes a storage system,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s all too complex.’”
My gloom is returning. “Yes, but it’s just a challenge,” says Kennedy. “We live with institutions and cultural norms and bureaucracies that have trouble moving at the pace of change required, even though the technology and the consumer and the businesses are ready to deliver. That’s the tension. We could solve this.”
Blanchett also wants to encourage. “The solution to the overwhelm is engagement,” she says. “There’s not going to be one magic bullet; it’s going to have to be governmental change, policy shifts, as well as consumer shifts and massive industry shifts. The way we do business with one another, the way we travel, it’s all of these things. Engagement is the core of it all. In the last two years, there’s been a real emotional and psychological reckoning that we’ve all been through, on top of the environmental crisis. But out of that comes a chance for renewal and we’d be crazy not to take it.”
Perhaps Blanchett and Kennedy’s can-do attitude will rub off on listeners. Their dynamism, clarity and articulacy are making me feel a lot better. Blanchett reminds me that, for every horrible environment-attacking corporate move, there has been a pro-conservation pushback. Kennedy believes that these difficult times might turn out to be more favorable in the long-term.
“What if we take this opportunity of this very volatile decade and we come out the other end of it better off?” he says. “Cheap, clean energy in the hands of people, not in the hands of despot lunatics that fund wars with this stuff? It would be great! That’d be nice, right?” Right!
Climate Change Dirty Films made this film with Cate Blanchett & Danny KennedyThis is the official website. Audible Original podcast, out now
