This is a PDF paper from B.W. Robinson, B.J. Fleay and S.C. Mayo called, The Impact Of Oil Depletion On Australia [pdf]. It is from the "Sustainable Transport Coalition". I am not mocking them. I am sure they have good intentions, but their solutions wont be politically acceptable, wont be socially acceptable, wont be culturally acceptable and will just end up penalising those who are the most fiscally vulnerable.

If this is the best that those who are committed toward a reduction in oil consumption can come up with, then it will have to be a disruptive technology that replaces oil. People want their cake, and eat it too. Unless the replacement is advantageous, cheaper, and sexier - people will not do without - no matter the long term damage. The singularity will be reached at 5 litres to the 100 kms.

Several interesting statistics from the paper in relation to Australia;

• About 80% of Australia's petroleum liquids use is in road transport and 10% for aviation.
• Australia uses about 0.74 million barrels of oil products each day
• Australia is still about 60% net self-sufficient in oil, but our imports are currently about 85% of daily usage.

The paper's solution suggests that government should;

• Issue repeated credible warnings that oil shortages are approaching us.
• Engage the community, through participatory democracy, to create practical, equitable options and countermeasures, and to select preferred steps.
• Dismantle the many "perverse polices" [10] that subsidise heavy car use and excessive freight transport.
• Instigate policies, taxes and pricing regimes that encourage frugal use of fuel, and disadvantage profligate users.
• One novel policy would be to set up a Smart- Card personal fuel allocation system.
• Recognise the psychological and social dimensions of automobile dependence as well as the physical aspects, and implement the cheaper people oriented solutions as well as technologically based alternatives.
• Implement nationwide "individualised marketing" travel demand management campaigns.
• Divert infrastructure funding to less oil dependent urban structure and transport options.
• Priority access to remaining oil and gas supplies must provided for food production and distribution and other essential services.
• Promote through the United Nations a Kyoto like protocol to allocate equitably the declining global oil production among nations.

Another of their solutions is to increase tax, which theantix argued for on HuSi, and Scrymarch did here. From their paper;

A fuel tax escalator such as that introduced by the UK Thatcher Government in 1988 is a proven example. Australian fuel taxes should be incrementally raised to European levels to reduce usage, and to provide funds for improvements to health and education and for the needed sustainable transport infrastructure.

Provide funds for improvement to health and education? Aren't our income taxes supposed to do that? This is why I am against raising of tax on petrol. It just assumes that it goes into the great fuzzy belly of government, and that government requires an inexhaustible, and unquenchable supply of tax.

Their solutions are nice, but none are really concrete. They also avoid the fact that petrol is cheap to extract, refine and distribute. Petrol is cheap because we pull it out of the ground in millions of barrels a day, transport it across oceans and seas millions of barrel at a time and then distribute it to millions of petrol stations at a time.

Petrol is cheap. They attempt to artificially create scarcity through increasing taxes and allocating petrol like water is under drought restrictions. I don't see that working, it will probably only cause frustration and create a black market as petrol is remarkably cheap, as I have mentioned several times.

Petrol is a problem because combustion engines are so inefficient, and produce noxious by-products. Another issue is how batteries have not followed Moore's Law like most other technologies have. Batteries are largely unchanged from fifty years ago, don't maintain their charge, and are slow to recharge.

So we have the problem of a responsive energy generation system that is inefficient. We also have no means to store created energy efficiently in a way that can be used in decentralised transportation.

A reliance on oil is not acceptable in the long term as it is a pollutant which contributes to global warming. Yet despite the high taxes every nation has on petrol, not alternative technology has stepped up to the wicket to take automotive power from the combustion engine. The best we have managed so far is to mix the technologies of combustion engines and batteries. How 20thC.

Is that the best we can do?

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Tony Abbot writes , "Rudd's real test won't be how he handles consorting allegations. It will be explaining how it's possible to tear up workplace agreements and halve greenhouse gas emissions without sabotaging the economy." I am with Al Gore on this one, solving global warming is an opportunity to grow an economy.

The standard attack against global warming and the uncertainties of a complex interdependent system is to argue that it will cripple the economy to enact any policy to curb carbon emissions. It is a false choice.

I watched An Inconvenient Truth on the weekend. It didn't really tell me anything new, and the bits inbetween the powerpoint presentation were emotive and designed to tug at my heart strings, but it was presented well and in an empirical fashion with plenty of graphs and photographs.

The important part was in the conclusion. Gore attacked the problem in the standard American manner; it isn't a loss, it isn't a whipping from the environment so that we have to go back to our mud huts and fish by hand - to Gore it was an opportunity. It was a chance for America to take the lead in new technologies, new investment, new solutions, new industries and new ways of living.

It isn't, as Abbot suggests, going to kill the economy because we will find new technologies and new ways of supplying energy and being aware of our carbon production. I was at Home Depot a few weeks ago paying a premium for CLF lights bulbs which are %300 more expensive than the old inefficient light bulbs. Some company has worked out how to sell me a light bulb for four times the price I would normally pay? That is an economic opportunity if I ever saw it.

Same with all the other technologies that companies come up with. I will probably pay a premium for them. A few weeks ago my wife looked into buying green power - which we will probably pay more for than we would coal generated power.

I own iPods when I could buy a cheap run of the mill mp3 player which is indicative of consumer behaviour. It will be the same with the new technologies that come out to wean us off carbon based fuels. This will probably be the next spurt of economic growth as companies create disruptive technologies, that can be sold at a premium, and change whole markets.

It is an opportunity to grow jobs, technologies and the economy - it should be stated as such. Abbot is on the wrong tack here.