Cheap Solar, Batteries and EVs Are Breaking Fossil Fuel Economics

Cheap solar, batteries and EVs are no longer merely cleaner alternatives. Their falling costs are undermining fossil-fuel economics, and leaders may be misjudging the speed of that shift.

My guest is Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University and a long-time IPCC contributor whose work has focused on cities, transport and automobile dependence. We examine how China’s manufacturing scale is turning clean technology from a policy ambition into mass-market competition, while tariffs and legacy planning risk slowing adoption elsewhere.

We look at why cities are the decisive arena: where renewable power, transit, density and affordable housing either reinforce one another or remain disconnected. We also challenge the assumption that EV charging will remain the infrastructure problem, and ask when petrol and diesel networks themselves become the constraint.

Listen now to understand how clean-technology economics is changing fossil-fuel risk, and what cities, businesses and policymakers need to get right before the shift accelerates. 

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Transcript

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Peter Newman: 0:00

You can say, oh no, we are not gonna do that. We're gonna favour our petro industries, which are gonna last forever. No, they're gonna collapse. And, and in 2040s you'll see most of those oil, gas, and coal companies just disappearing.

Tom Raftery: 0:25

The warning is stark, but Peter's case rests less on ideology and more on economics. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is Climate Confident Stories and Strategies at Cut Emissions episode 288, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. My guest today, Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University and a longtime IPCC contributor. He explains why cities are the decisive arena and why progress accelerates when cheaper clean energy meets clear direction and local delivery. Let's dive in. Peter, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Peter Newman: 1:11

Sure. I'm Peter Newman. I am a professor of sustainability at Curtin University and I have worked with the IPCC for 15 years as part of my role as a professor. I have also worked in government over various periods of time working on sustainability issues. And I have been an elected counsellor in the City of Fremantle, or where I still live.

Tom Raftery: 1:42

Lovely Fremantle is in Australia for people listening who might not be aware.

Peter Newman: 1:46

Yes, I am very Australian.

Tom Raftery: 1:50

Okay. And for someone coming across your work for the first time, what's the main problem you've spent your career trying to solve?

Peter Newman: 1:58

Well, I started out with a PhD in chemistry, knowing I wasn't going to work in my future on that. So I went to Delft in Holland to study environmental science, and that was the only part of the world that where you could actually study that in 1972/3. Then I went and worked with Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University. He was the great ecologist who had a, a very different point of view about the future than I now have.

Tom Raftery: 2:34

Hmm.

Peter Newman: 2:34

he was full of despair and really trying to show that we had very little hope. That time, there was a very important time for me because the first oil crisis happened. And I saw that cities like San Francisco just fell apart, whereas the city where I studied in Delft just sailed through it because they didn't need cars, they weren't dependent on them. And nobody could tell me or show me any literature on how that was happening. Why were some cities different to others in how they used cars and how they depended on oil. So I then set to to become expert on that. And with my PhD student, Jeff Kenworthy, we created a book called Cities and Automobile Dependence in 1989. It took us 10 years of data collecting, going to 32 cities to collect it personally.'cause this is pre-digital. Nobody had the data. And put it all together and showed that there was a massive difference and that there were all kinds of practical things you could do to change your city. So if you wanted, one thing to say that I've committed my life to it is to overcome automobile dependence. And that became the theme of our second book, Sustainability in Cities Overcoming Automobile Dependence, which was written in the US after teaching at the University of Pennsylvania there for a number of years. And then finally a third book in the trilogy called The End of Automobile Dependence and how cities were going beyond Car-Based Planning. So I've been part of that transition and it's been a very positive thing and very practical, and I've been in the thick of the politics of that in my own city and in other cities around the world. We've taken our message of hope to cities everywhere. That has been my contribution and why I was made the Chair of the Transport Committee of the IPCC to enable that process to filter into IPCC things. And so I've had a global role but very much coming from local and state-based politics where I got involved and found that hope worked. If you came up with a hopeful solution, you could win. And I, I'm writing a memoir now called Can We Dare to Hope? Well, yes we can.

Tom Raftery: 5:37

Okay, fantastic. And where does the opposite of hope, where does fear stop being useful and how do you keep hope honest?

Peter Newman: 5:49

Well, they're very deep values that seep into all of us. Because we can go through periods of life where we're very hopeful and we think, oh, it's an easy but then things fall apart and fear sets in and we are not sure where to go, and we lose hope and despair sets in it can be very dangerous to your health and certainly to those around you. And when a city chooses not to hope, it can fall apart very rapidly and collapse. So the book Collapse was written about that deeper value. It shows that you need to choose not to collapse. You need to choose hope, and that that's a very strong historical message. And one that I picked up in theological writings as well. And I found that my understanding of biblical principles going way back 4,000, 5,000 years, cities were choosing either hope or fear, and there were prophets there who helped them come through that or to actually withdraw in the end because there was nothing good happening and the cities would collapse. So I've just been to pilgrimages in, in Malta and Sicily and then to Ireland as well as seeing many cities around the world where cities were on the edge of not being able to choose to hope. And it's a very sad thing, but when they come through it and choose a new kind of future and get there and find, yes, we can do this, it's a wonderful thing to see. America's going through the dark times now and there are many cities really suffering, but there are cities still there that are hopeful that they will come through this period. So, yeah, history is full of this hope and fear. We do need to choose it in our own lives. If we're gonna contribute to how our city and our nation, our regions, in fact the whole world can survive the problems that we are facing. And the reality is they're now very global with climate dominating that perspective. But we will never get there if we choose fear and despair and just try and scare people into the future. That never works. You have to come up with practical, hopeful solutions.

Tom Raftery: 8:43

Okay, and in your modelling it points towards a fossil free global power by 2035, what do you think needs to go right and what could break that forecast?

Peter Newman: 9:00

Yeah. the book that I've written, Net Zero Cities with Sustainability, which if I hold up for those who can see it is being held. This sets out what the approach was coming from the Paris Agreement, which was an extraordinary period of time in history because we had 20 COP meetings. The committee of the parties, they were the bringing together of nations to try and agree on what to do about climate change. In 2015 at COP 21 in Paris, 197 Nations signed up to net zero by 2050 with steps every five years and to do it with the sustainable development goals. And this happened because an amazing lady called Christiana Figueres ran that project. She's written a book about it, which is called The Future We Choose, which fits entirely with my values on this because she set out not just to go and convince the governments, because governments are very much dependent on who they're governing, and they're governing a series of groups of businesses and environmental groups in this area. She brought them together and with a, a guy called um, Rivett-Carnac, who was a a Native American was very, very good at running integrating processes that brought business and environment groups together. So she put him to work and all the big global environmental groups and the big global business groups got together and came up with a set of solutions, which were agreed on, and then gave them to Christiana, who presented them the 197 nations that were there and said, well, can we agree on these things? Because environment and business groups say this is doable together. So it's very hard for politicians to say, oh, we're not gonna agree when the major groups that cause politics to usually end up being a great fight have agreed.

Tom Raftery: 11:53

Hmm.

Peter Newman: 11:53

And that process set in motion, the most hopeful process that this book shows is now rapidly accelerating. Now, this book came out in 2025. That's a long time ago now, because the last two or three years has been an acceleration in how renewables are being uptaken, batteries and electric vehicles. And these three technologies were taken on by China. To mass produce in their own country using the latest technologies. Sometimes those technologies came from other countries. Mostly it did actually because the Australian photovoltaics that were developed at University of New South Wales, they were brought there and the first billionaires made their money out of that, and one of them did his PhD on it at the University of New South Wales. So we had a process underway where China said, we are going to lead in this and we are going to do it putting it to work. We will mass produce, and bring the price down of all of those things. And we will do that in China. And then when we get it established there, we will be able to export it because it'll be a price that people be able to pay. that's what we've seen happening in the last few years. And the price of ion batteries and solar pvs have come down a hundred fold. They're now 1% of what they cost in 2014 or, or, or a little bit earlier than that 2010 maybe when it first started. Dramatic, unbelievable. And the fastest leap energy leap in history is now occurring because it's cheap and it works. It's very, very effective. So every country in the world is saying, okay, we can do this net zero stuff because it makes sense and it has really good economics to it. So the Christiana Figueres set in motion in this process. Many people haven't seen the historical period that we are in. It is extraordinary to see how climate confident we can be of this change. Now not everything is being fixed. Those three things are however, if you combine them, electrification is happening everywhere. And it is happening in a way that can be fully renewably powered because of the batteries and electric vehicles that enable that process. Now that process is going to be very quickly done, and by 2030 you'll see most cities really ready with those, and they're happening so quickly that you, you won't hardly even notice it. For example, in my own city, 50% of households now have solar. 25% have batteries. That happened in one year. The batteries, the federal government started a to help with it and bang, it just took off. The electric vehicles, Trump's looking after that for us by shutting off the Strait of Hormuz, and, and getting that whole process. So 50% of people are now wanting an electric vehicle. Whereas before it was around 10% at the most in some places. So that's taking off. The next phase after that is going to be how we get into freight. And the Chinese are now doing this. By the way, electric buses are everywhere now. They're happening and we, of course, we've always had electric trains and electric trams. So all of them are growing very rapidly. And when you have electricity that's renewable you have a very large part of the cities, but freight, the big trucks they're next and they're rapidly being upgraded to electric in China and across the major corridors, they are putting all the recharging facilities, battery, re swapping facilities, all of that's going in. So within the next year or two, they will be exporting them. So the exporting of big trucks is going to dominate that side. So diesel's gonna disappear from that market. And after that agricultural and mining machinery, which uses diesel, that is being taken up as well. It's happening as quickly as the freight in China. And you'll now find that is on the market. Now, the strange thing about this transfer is that the Chinese have markets everywhere that they can sell to. Some countries are saying, oh no, we are not gonna allow China to dominate these markets. We are gonna put tariffs on them. And a few have done that because they think that's gonna help their economy to pick up and make them all locally. Well, you're not gonna be able to do it. Anything like the price that China is doing it at. Fortunately, we don't make much in Australia. So we, didn't have any tariffs and it's, happening very quickly here because it's very easy to import from China and we have good relationships with them. And that process is well underway. After that, you move into the, third phase, which is about aviation and shipping, concrete, minerals that are processed. And all of those things are also being developed in China going beyond the R&D phase. They're going into commercial phases on all of them. That's why I can take the inflection points that we are now seeing in electrification. And saying, well, the same model is going to apply to these other sides of the climate story. Now, that's a pretty hopeful picture, but it's based on real practical change. It's not based on people suddenly having a dramatic insight into the future and saying, whoa, we've all gotta do it. And we've all gotta, it's not government based in the sense that we are gonna have to have massive subsidies or anything. We just need to open ourselves up to this new economy. And it's going to very quickly enable that. You can avoid it. You can say, oh no, we are not gonna do that. We're gonna favour our petro industries, which are gonna last forever. No, they're gonna collapse. And, and in 2040s you'll see most of those oil, gas, and coal companies just disappearing. They will not survive.

Tom Raftery: 19:38

Hmm. I remember speaking about this at a conference in 2015 and people were talking about what they called at that point, the infrastructure problem with EVs, that there was no charging stations. And I was saying, sure, that's the case now. But fast forward 10 years and you'll start to see a switch such that as more and more people buy EVs and the infrastructure is rolled out, suddenly the demand for petrol and diesel will start to fall. And so petrol stations will start closing and therefore you'll start to see the infrastructure problem flip. And it'll be harder and harder to find places to fill your internal combustion engine vehicle with petrol and diesel.

Peter Newman: 20:25

Yeah, I like that little picture you've just drawn because I think that's gonna happen. And at the moment, service stations, very few of them have chargers There were a few in Ireland I saw in the last few weeks when I was there. And I did come across a, an Irish farmer who had an electric vehicle, and he said he just uses his, capabilities with his phone to, to find out where the next places are that he can get his vehicle charged up and he can drive anywhere in Ireland. Well, that's the kind of thing that is happening. But also it was incredible to see he loves his electric vehicle. It is just so much better than what he had before. And he said, oh, I, you know, we're just, we'll never go back. And that is happening to many people now. They are seeing that it's actually a better future and that will drive it as much as not having very good service stations anymore with, with diesel, as you try desperately keep your, your old diesel car going. That I think will, it'll take over because people will say, oh, I've got a better vehicle now. This, runs so much better. Hmm.

Tom Raftery: 21:47

Yeah, they are, and the other thing is, of course electricity is ubiquitous, whereas petrol and diesel not so much. So it's, and as you would say to your point exactly, we've been here in this house. We've been an EV only household since 2018. And, there's no absolutely no going back. There's so much more fun to drive such far, far superior vehicles. You mentioned you were in Ireland a few weeks ago. I'm from Ireland. As, as most people will know, even from just listening to my accent. I'm going there this week and I'm absolutely frustrated that the car rental companies in Ireland still don't offer an EV option or didn't when I was trying to book one back in April. And so I'm going to have to drive an internal combustion engine vehicle while I'm in Ireland for the week I'm there. So that's, that's annoying.'cause it's been so long since I've driven one. It's, anyway, that's, that's, that's a whole nother tangent.

Peter Newman: 22:51

Well, I had a similar experience because the, the particular company that I signed up for did have an EV option, and we, that's the one we ticked. But by the time we got there, they said, oh no, there aren't any around. I really wondered if they had any. And I ended up with a diesel. I have never driven a diesel car.

Tom Raftery: 23:15

Oh that's horrible.

Peter Newman: 23:16

You know, it worked all right. But we were just desperate to get around and see beautiful places in Ireland, which we did. And it, it was a great experience. But yeah, it would've been better if we'd had EVs.

Tom Raftery: 23:29

Yeah. Absolutely. Let's come back to the podcast. You mentioned cities and, and your thesis is that cities are the decisive arena for the next phase of climate action, correct?

Peter Newman: 23:45

Yeah, well, around the world, cities are the, where the growth is happening and, in many places they are the dominant part of the economy. But in history cities, even when they were not the dominant thing and they were agricultural regions with a small city, the city tended to be the place where change happened and drove change. That's where people met. And the business of cities was, and the politics of it were, what created the future. I've always found that if you could get cities to make the change, then the regional areas would quickly follow. That is what's tending to happen. And the early leaders in the regions the rural areas are already going electric on everything. We're getting more and more solar and wind in those areas. And of course, they have potential to have their own small power stations that run in a way that they will never go back away from when they get them up and running and all, their machinery can be run from it. And it's all there to help make stuff that is grown from the sun. But if you can actually drive the, technology from the sun as well then you know, you really, you're not gonna go back. And there, the, the changes that we will see more and more of.

Tom Raftery: 25:24

And is there a particular city or project that best shows the move from, let's say, demonstration to mainstream adoption?

Peter Newman: 26:01

Well, we tend to collect the best examples and they're growing. I would say there's no one city that's really pulled it all together yet. But it was interesting that I went to Manchester and Dublin to see what they were doing in this space, and both of them are pretty good. I mean, the, commitments to renewables are there, but the commitments to get rid of car dependence are now very, very clear. And the new tramway systems that have been put into both Dublin and Manchester are very, very popular. The cities are being built around these new kinds of of public transport. TOD, so Transit Oriented Development's been around for my entire career virtually anyway, probably 40 years. And that's now a number one agenda for any cities. And certainly Andy Burnham has done that in Manchester and massive redevelopment, regeneration of, of that city has happened around the trains and trams that they've put in. He's also extended out to the countryside around the city. And Dublin, pretty much the same thing is beginning there. And certainly the, new tram is, a very popular item and is, feeding and anchoring the development of, a range of new housing, affordable housing that is being built around it. So we've got TOD's, but we've also got RODs now Renewable Oriented Development.'Cos each of the precincts around stations can be built using renewable energy now in a way that saves massively on energy, helps create the value of that new development, as well as the fact that it's well located. Young people want will flock to it because they don't want a car anymore. They love to be able to get around and go and meet their friends in the streets around the, the city. And boy did we see thousands of young people in both Dublin and, Manchester. We went to Sulford, which was a city we lived in for a year in 1980, which was very, very poor and rundown. And that city has regenerated dramatically, s and RODs these days. There's more and more renewables going into these places, in both the commercial businesses and in the housing projects.

Tom Raftery: 28:54

Brilliant, brilliant. And you mentioned, and Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Manchester, who led a lot of the changes you're talking about, he's now the incoming prime minister to the UK. I'm curious though, what about what Sadiq Khan has done for London. What's your opinion of that? Because he was told that the air quality improvements that he wanted to get through would take 200 years to come into effect. And he's actually done it in nine years. So, and that's with the Ultra Low Emissions Zone that he implemented around the city.

Peter Newman: 29:29

Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I haven't been back to London for some time. And it was really great to be able to walk around and have some experts take us to the places where you now have whole streets, where there are no cars. They have buses, bikes, and pedestrians, and they've widened the footpaths and they've enabled all this alfresco dining outside. So there's a lot more activity on those streets. When we first went to London. At the time we were in Holland in the seventies, there was almostmost nothing like that. They had the ancient train systems and, you know, the odd subway line and stuff. But these were run down and in the streets, there was just appalling emissions and it was just not a good place to be. And neither was it encouraged. There were no alfresco down dining facilities happening. Now we went through that same phase in our own town here in Fremantle because we had Italians a, a big proportion of the migrant population here. They came as the fishermen. And we have a beautiful old heritage kind of city that's quite walkable. And it's, it's got the highest heritage number of heritage buildings in Australia in one area. And this, place was where we came to live after having lived in both California and Delft and, and saying, well, we want something more like Delft. Well, we found it in Fremantle. And we bought into it at a point, which was very low in, its, in terms of economics. And it had to rebuild itself. I got elected to the council very early on. I was still in my twenties. We developed a process to say, we can build with these old buildings and make it something special, and really favour the walking and cycling rather than the cars that were being promised and the freeways that were gonna go right through the middle of the town in order to help it. And we stopped all that and we won that. And then the state government, the conservative government that was in control, closed our railway down. That really got me going.'cause I thought, oh, I gotta get involved in this. But nobody else wanted help, so I had to run the campaign. That's where I learned about politics. And we won. We won it. And in four years of campaigning, the government was thrown out. The labour government came in with a, a commitment to regenerate the rail system and to build new ones going out into suburbs that had never had one. We built seven new rail lines in that period since. And they are working extremely well. What we don't do well is to rebuild the dense, walkable precincts around the stations. That's the next agenda for us. We've done it in three or four places. They all work beautifully and everyone loves them. It is just not built into the whole planning and development system. That's my next big thing. And I'm talking about that this week at a big event, big public event, because now people want density. The English never wanted it. It, it was that low density was much better. And there's nothing wrong with cars and all that. Well, that's finished, isn't it? We've actually won that. And the whole processes of how we build cities are now about Transit Oriented Development and Renewables Oriented Development coming together. And we can integrate them. And we're certainly gonna be doing that in my own town as part of the future.

Tom Raftery: 33:46

And do you think that net zero is the destination or is it just the first stage of the journey?

Peter Newman: 33:53

Yeah, look, it's, it was a very good first stage because it was something the IPCC had set out and never expected to have it happen so quickly. Really, because there's so many people there don't understand the politics of things. And I had learned in politics that if you get a good vision and show how it can be done in steps, people will come with you and you'll win them over. The labour governments that I've helped to build these seven new rail lines have won election after election on that basis. And now the whole city wants it. There's just no way that any other political organisation can say, no, that's not what we want. And they're all very, very clearly wanting the renewables side as well. So it's a matter now of, getting a, a new way to do it. And I'm really proposing that the tramway systems should be brought back because we've got very fast effective rail going down the corridors. But we need to go across them to, bring people to those stations, and to unlock the value around the station precincts. That will enable us to build these, new affordable housing sites. That's a big issue of course as in anywhere you've gotta do affordable housing but it's gotta be well located. So that's the issue that we are dealing with next. And in a way that goes beyond net zero, it's, it's, it's really showing that you can create just a better city. It's overall a better city. It's sure, it's net zero. Yeah. I mean, we're doing that. Yeah. But it's so much more fun to live in. It's much more livable. And it's something that you, you wanna be proud of with your children and grandchildren. We will be avoiding climate change, in my view, because it's being driven by these very rapid, accelerating processes. But we'll do better than that. We will make cities that we can be proud of.

Tom Raftery: 36:19

Alright. And for any city managers or organisations listening to this, where should they begin tomorrow morning?

Peter Newman: 36:30

Yeah I, I think that great cities, which is the phrase I'm tending to use these days, not just net zero, but great cities, the great cities are very much bottom up meeting the top down. The top down sets the strategic direction. So unless you've got a very clear vision of your future, it's not gonna happen. But it also not gonna happen unless you've got these bottom up processes where you get business and communities to agree on what they want, and you start doing placemaking that builds this character of the future that people want. They can see themselves what they want, but it's fitting within this overall net zero. But with, less and less dependence on cars, less and less dependence on fossil fuels and just getting more and more of the human dimension, as well as of the technologies that work and make it very functional.

Tom Raftery: 37:46

Great, and I've got a left field question for you now, Peter. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional as a champion for evidenced-based climate hope, who would it be and why?

Peter Newman: 38:05

Hmm. Well, the interesting thing that comes to mind straight away. The two books that I use at the start of my Net zero book which are in many ways conflicting. One is Tim Winton's Juice, and the other one is Abundance by Klein and Thompson. And the thing about Juice, Tim Winton, by the way, lives in my street, he's a very famous Australian novelist, and this book is his most despairing book he's ever written because he looks to the year 2100 or so, and we have not achieved climate goals and people are living in underground areas and caves and it is just appalling what's happening. And the very, very wealthy fossil fuel company people have got their, idyllic kind of, places that are often underground, but they're in inside mountains and so on. They're, they've got a and they're living off their wealth. Now that's not a great picture. It could happen. Now, if Tim Winton came around to see that we can do this and that there is hope, and that he could write the next book about how we do it, then that would be a massive thing.'cause he's, he's a great author. He's very popular. And it's something that would follow the kind of book that I say Abundance is. Abundance is the book that Klein and Thompson wrote about how we build a better future. And it starts off in 2050 saying, we've done it, we made it, how did we do it? And they go back through a series of examples of how people get together and work together. So I would love that Klein and Thompson could actually get together and say, oh wow, this is happening in ways that we didn't even see when we wrote this book, because the stories were all you know, they were very American. There were a few examples from around the world. But they certainly have helped people to see that you can do things and there, there can be productivity gains, affordable housing built in our cities, and they can be net zero. But we are gonna have to get going on this quickly. Well, we have, so I would like to see a follow up Abundance 2, which says, gee whiz, that happened a lot quicker than we thought. How did that happen? What are the, the signs of this happening? Now maybe they can't see that even because they're stuck in America with all the hate and, and serious ridiculous things that are going on there. But I think give 'em a few years come out the other side and they'll be positive again. So that's a start. And there are certainly, heroes I've got in the planning area like Peter Calthorpe, who has continued to have a positive agenda. He invented the Transit Oriented Development concept. I took him to Fremantle. He says, yes, here it's is, it's here. This is what I want. And yeah, he's been doing it around the world. He's got a plan for a affordable housing or several million houses that would follow how you convert the El Camino Real, which is the long route that was built hundreds of years ago is now a terrible, awful six lane highway. And he, he wants to convert that into a series of Transit Oriented Developments, all based around renewables. And to do that with trackless trams, which are the new Chinese development in this area, which I love as well. So, yeah, look, he, he could well write a book about how that happens. If he pulls that one off he should be given more than a Knighthood a medal of bravery in America.

Tom Raftery: 42:29

Super Peter, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast here today, where would you have me direct them?

Peter Newman: 42:39

Well, the Curtin University website has all my details on it. And certainly you can give my, email out to people and I'm very happy to talk to anyone about this. I love doing events and particularly now with these kind of zoom potential ways of doing it. I'm very happy to talk to book clubs or anything that people get together and to try to give them a bit of hope. And I do have some pretty amazing PowerPoints because the data is so, so dramatic to show that. It helps to bring people around. So if you want to have something on how to get hope, not despair, in the climate future, I can help and I'm very happy to help.

Tom Raftery: 43:36

Fantastic. Peter, that's been amazing. Thank you so much for coming in the podcast today.

Peter Newman: 43:41

Thank you.