Interview with John Blackburn

Blackburn spoke with the Bertelsmann Foundation in August 2022 about the need to foster resilient societies in a time of geopolitical and environmental upheaval, and about possibilities for the transatlantic partnership to work with Australia on a green energy transition. He highlighted in the conversation military tools and frameworks that could help strengthen the resilience of civil society.

About John Blackburn

Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn retired from the Royal Australian Air Force in 2008. He served as deputy chief of the air force after many years as an F/A-18 fighter pilot, test pilot and strategic planner. He has held since his retirement a number of consultancy positions, advising on issues including energy security. He became chairman of the Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER) – Australia in 2018 and has been an executive member of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group since 2021.

---

The war in Ukraine has forced Europe to reassess its dependence on Russian energy and sparked intense conversation about its overall energy security. Shifting priorities in the face of the conflict, and natural and man-made disasters, are pushing the EU, and the U.S., to revisit their short- and long-term approaches to energy and climate policy.

Blackburn spoke with the Bertelsmann Foundation in August 2022 about the need to foster resilient societies in a time of geopolitical and environmental upheaval, and about possibilities for the transatlantic partnership to work with Australia on a green energy transition. He highlighted in the conversation military tools and frameworks that could help strengthen the resilience of civil society.

Let’s start with the basics. What does it mean for a society to be resilient?

When you look at the formal definition, the United Nations says that resilience is the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of basic order.

There are some things we miss if we tie ourselves solely to that definition. What if we expanded our framework and looked at what the characteristics or attributes of a resilient society actually are? My organization, the Institute for Integrated Economic Research – Australia, looks at three characteristics.

The first is shared awareness and shared goals. If we’re able to be honest and open about the risks that we face, and have an adult conversation with our population, we can define a shared goal. This is the most foundational step. In the military, we define this as a shared situational awareness. If we don’t have this shared awareness and goals, then all we do is react to everything that happens.

If you have that awareness, the second characteristic you want is the ability to work as a team and to collaborate because you can’t solve these sorts of problems in a piecemeal manner. So, you have to build a team approach within the nation, but also with neighboring countries and allies. In the military, we refer to this as integration.

The third characteristic of a resilient society is the ability to prepare and mobilize. There is no verb for resilience. We can resile. However, stoicism is not resilience. You have to prepare and then you have to mobilize, whether it’s your country, your company, your team, whatever. You have to mobilize to get ready to deal with what happens rather than go, “There’s a flood. Can somebody get out the inflatable boat or something?”

Defense has preparedness concepts. It has readiness. It has pre-planning that does not exist to the same degree in wider society. The definition by the UN is not bad, but it’s mainly focused on natural disasters. We have to be equally ready for “unnatural” disasters. When we look at resilience, we address these three characteristics and ask how are we doing in these areas. And we can identify our weaknesses pretty quickly.

Do you see examples of these concepts in Europe or the U.S.? Are we building resilient societies?

The United Kingdom is a great example of the sheer lunacy of not having an honest conversation. It ends up with Brexit, a decision based on misinformation. Frankly, when I look at the United States, there seems to be an impossibility of having shared awareness or goals to collaborate given the state of the political divide in that country. In Europe, despite a somewhat naive historical approach to large-scale energy reliance on Russia, we can now see an ability and willingness for EU nations to address risks, and to plan and work together.

The discussion I see happening in Europe right now is about the immensity of the problem of the war in Ukraine, and the effect that dependency on Russia has had on energy security. I get the sense that Europe as a whole is looking at the system-level problem and is talking about how it could all cascade. That discussion is not happening enough in the Asia-Pacific.

Despite all the problems in the European Union, we can see some really good examples of how to work together to build resilience over time.

Are military operations good examples to use for introducing resilience to a civilian population?

We can learn some things from the military. Frankly, the military is good at the tactical level of operations, doing intelligence assessments, working on plans and contingencies, getting ready for them, and making sure they can be sustained in operations. But the bureaucracy layer that envelopes defense organizations, whether it’s in the U.S. or Australia, is immense. It’s not agile. The bureaucracy is not something you want to emulate.

All of the founders of IIER – Australia are ex-military. Our resilience work initially focused on our economy, energy systems and the environment as being three interlinked systems. When we came to the issue of environment, there was so much emotion and anger about climate. We decided to move the climate discussion out of IIER-A into a separate, climate-focused organization so as not to degrade our discussion of the wider national systems. We therefore created the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group. The ASLCG views climate change in a national security framework. We target our message at conservative audiences to reframe the discussion away from emotional arguments into one that addresses how we must prepare for the impacts of climate change on our society and our region. We know from the science that the climate impacts are going to get worse. So, we argue for a military approach. We have to prepare and mobilize.

Australia has a huge amount of uranium. At the same time, Europe and the U.S. are discussing green energy. What are our future energy sources? Hydrogen? Nuclear?

The answer is all of these. We are going through a major global energy transition.

Professor Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba does a lot of work on energy transitions. He talks about how long it’s taken to transition, and when you start thinking about how long new energies take to come on line, the idea that we could have an energy transition by 2030, or 2040, is not realistic. What we need is a complex mix of energies that will have to be integrated to provide a resilient and secure system.

Australia is committed to the acquisition of nuclear submarines, but we have no industry base to provide support. So, what we need to do is to have another discussion about a nuclear energy industry. We have around 30% of the world’s uranium. We add no value to it whatsoever. We merely dig it up and export it. There is a cultural and political blindness that prevents us from having a rational discussion about nuclear power options. In my view, nuclear energy is an important component of a future energy system, perhaps in the mid- to late 2030s.

Another problem we have is the fight among energy advocates. Some nuclear power advocates denigrate solar and wind. Some electric vehicle advocates denigrate hydrogen vehicles. An integrated resilient system needs collaboration, not just competition.

I was a member of the advisory panel that supported the development of the Australian hydrogen strategy. I am also an investor in a green hydrogen company. What particularly interests me is that hydrogen allows you to do two things. One is temporal. It can be stored for use directly in industrial processes or to produce electricity through a hydrogen gas turbine. The second is transformational. It can be transformed into ammonia for transport and for industrial production of explosives and fertilizers. In this way it is a different type of energy.

Australia is experiencing an energy transition similar to that facing Europe and the U.S. Are conversations in Australia around a “just transition” equally prevalent? Are there ways we can learn from one another? The energy transition is going to be full of compromises. It will take much longer than we originally assumed. It will be difficult, we will make mistakes, and it will be costly because transition costs money. The benefits, however, will eventually outweigh the costs.

What we’re finding with coal in Australia is the argument that “we produce such a small percentage of global emissions that it doesn’t matter.” That’s factually correct. But if we don’t team up with the rest of the world in this energy transition it will never happen. Every country has to do its share.

Another important player is commercial investment. Economic and commercial realities will drive coal plants to close down as we try to address our emissions reduction challenge. We need to look at what Germany did to address the needs of coal industry workers and their communities as we plan our energy system transition.

Australia is experiencing an energy transition similar to that facing Europe and the U.S. Are conversations in Australia around a “just transition” equally prevalent? Are there ways we can learn from one another?

The energy transition is going to be full of compromises. It will take much longer than we originally assumed. It will be difficult, we will make mistakes, and it will be costly because transition costs money. The benefits, however, will eventually outweigh the costs.

What we’re finding with coal in Australia is the argument that “we produce such a small percentage of global emissions that it doesn’t matter.” That’s factually correct. But if we don’t team up with the rest of the world in this energy transition it will never happen. Every country has to do its share.

Another important player is commercial investment. Economic and commercial realities will drive coal plants to close down as we try to address our emissions reduction challenge. We need to look at what Germany did to address the needs of coal industry workers and their communities as we plan our energy system transition.

Do you see Australia as a potential partner on energy issues for the EU and the U.S.?

We cannot solve the issues by ourselves. It’s impossible. It has to be a team effort. And the more coherent thinking I’ve seen to date, despite the scale of the problems, is in the EU. It is facing up to reality and working as a team wherever possible.

The division in the U.S. has got to such a point that it will become more and more self-absorbed, and the risk is that we will lose the most powerful agent for collaboration that we’ve had in the past. That is my biggest worry. Australia needs to focus the relationship with Europe on being part of a global team trying to address global problems.

We are so focused on reacting to what’s currently happening that we’re not preparing adequately for the massive challenges ahead. We will have to deal with this with a society that has a short attention span.”

What should EU, U.S. and Australian policymakers consider when planning the energy transition?

Our focus is always on how to meet growing demand by increasing supply. We don’t ask ourselves how we reduce demand.

I will use transport fuels as an example. We need to reduce our fuel import dependence. Currently 90% of all transport fuels are imported. We need to reduce transport emissions. There’s only one way you’re going to do this at scale, and it’s with electrification. That doesn’t mean everything becomes an electric vehicle. Electrification can also mean producing hydrogen for large vehicles and trains, as has been started in Germany.

In addition to electrification, we’ve also got to change how we do logistics. In Australia, there’s a predominant use of trucks. We need to change our logistics model to increase the use of train and ship transport to reduce energy consumption. There are significant challenges to doing this. We have a fragile electricity system that will need to grow by two or three times to be able to meet the demand. There is no coherent plan for this yet.

When we look at projected logistics growth, three constraints stand out: growing fuel import dependence, vehicle and component import dependence, and workforce. It does not appear feasible to recruit sufficient truck drivers to meet the projected increase in logistics demand if we maintain the current logistics mix.

What are the first steps to prepare for a more sustainable future?

We’re sitting on a beach right now, with a number of … economic and environmental tsunamis approaching. We are so focused on reacting to what’s currently happening that we’re not preparing adequately for the massive challenges ahead. We will have to deal with this with a society that has a short attention span. We in Australia are not unique in this respect.

A lot of what is now being done is good. Nations are thinking more at the system level. The EU has now realized that some fundamental strategic mistakes have been made. However, we have a common structural problem. We need to build teams that can stand back from the immediate problem and look over the horizon at the next tsunami we will have to deal with.

In the military, we have different levels of command for a good reason. At the tactical level, the immediate fight is fought. At the operational level, the military looks at the next phase of the fight and prepares for it. At the strategic level, the military focuses more on what is over the horizon so it can prepare for that challenge. We all need to ensure that we have some of that last capability so that we can prepare as well as react.

Print