Page 956 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 29 March 2011
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choose to go shopping, go to work, take kids to school, attend doctor appointments, visit family? It is very hard to see what they can do.
At the supermarket, grocery prices will have skyrocketed. Most of Canberra’s food is trucked here from interstate or flown in from overseas. With the price of oil, and consequently the price of transport fuels, escalating, the price of our food will too. What about growing the food? Major food production systems use diesel to run the machinery and they use oil-based fertilisers and pesticides. They use oil-based pharmaceuticals to treat dairy and meat animals. What will the cost of food be when all of that is factored in?
These things that I talk about only touch on some of the ways that peak oil will impact on our lives. We are an economy which is dangerously dependent on oil but little is being done to arrest this dependence or even to make us resilient to the troubles which will inevitably strike as oil production declines.
Recent work by Australian academics specialising in sustainability and city planning has analysed some of the threats facing Australian cities due to global peak oil. These include sudden critical supply interruptions, volatile price fluctuations and drastic reduction in mobility—particularly automobile mobility. The Greens have long fought to bring the issue of peak oil into the policy foreground. However, incumbent governments have continued to ignore it and are finding the status quo too attractive and the possible changes too demanding.
In February this year I asked a number of questions of the government about peak oil and the answers received were very disappointing. Mr Stanhope took the majority of them on notice and shed no light on the government’s approach to peak oil. Obviously peak oil is not a concept that is very high on the agenda. Peak oil, in fact, is not even mentioned in any of the government’s major strategies or plans.
Members may remember that the Liberal Party scoffed at the Greens’ questions about peak oil. Mr Coe yelled across the chamber sarcastically and said, “Yes, my constituents are always asking me about that issue!” And Mr Hanson returned to the issue later in the day casting scepticism on the idea. He said that the Greens bang on about peak oil and commented that people have been talking about peak oil since 1970. The fact that the idea was around in 1970 does not prove that it was wrong.
Today I will be listening very closely to the position on peak oil from both the Liberal and Labor parties. For members’ benefit, I will refer briefly to some of the evidence about the issue of peak oil. Although the exact date is of course unknown, peak oil will be upon us in the very near future, if in fact it has not already occurred. There are people, of course, who think that the reason for the global financial crisis was in fact hitting peak oil. But what is more critical than pinpointing the date is accepting the facts and taking the necessary action.
A number of recent and significant analyses have placed peak oil as occurring in the next few years. The UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security predicted a crisis in the next few years. Lloyds and Chatham House predicted the oil crunch would occur around 2013. The joint operating environment report from the US
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