Page 966 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 29 March 2011
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life as they wish. The Greens here, in their hatred of oil and their dislike of families, use things such as peak oil to limit the opportunities and freedoms that so many people in Canberra and around Australia do enjoy.
It is this mantra and these scare tactics which create uncertainty about oil as well, which indeed drive up the price of oil, which actually reduce demand, which prolong peak oil, if you subscribe to that theory at all. Really, there are so many reasons why this is not a legitimate matter of public importance for the good people of the ACT that I think we need to ensure that, when we are using this Assembly’s time, we do so on issues of real substance and of real importance to the people of the ACT.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (3.41): It is a real privilege to follow that extraordinary ideological outburst. This is, despite Mr Coe’s protestations, a very timely MPI and peak oil is an issue that we cannot ignore, either at the national level or at the ACT level.
The Greens raised peak oil through question time a few weeks ago and we did receive a very disappointing response. The government gave us a muted reply in the chamber and we still have not received any written answers to our questions. Combined with the fact that none of the ACT government strategies and plans even mention the words “peak oil”, it really looks like peak oil has failed to make it onto the government’s agenda in a sustained and serious way. Mr Corbell made a few observations about taking it into account in the planning system, but I was not left with a real sense of concrete commitment to action there, and this is despite the fact that the warnings on peak oil, even from some of the more conservative analysts, are becoming very urgent.
As an example, a recent report commissioned for the US department of energy concluded that “without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs” of peak oil “will be unprecedented”. That is the US department of energy—not exactly a hotbed of green ratbaggery. Even a worldwide emergency response “10 years before world oil peaking” would leave us in deep trouble. It concluded that to avoid global economic collapse we need to begin “a mitigation crash programme 20 years before peaking”.
Ms Le Couteur mentioned the revelations that came to light through the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks. These documented a senior Saudi government oil executive’s warning to the US officials that the kingdom’s crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300 billion barrels or 40 per cent of the previously stated reserves. The Saudi official predicted that the real crunch point of peak oil was likely to hit as early as 2012. Similar fears have been expressed before, for example in the recent studies that Ms Le Couteur cited, but they have never been admitted by a US official in public. Instead, governments have downplayed the issue in line with their longing for more business-as-usual behaviour. The candid information released by Wikileaks gives perhaps a more realistic picture and an insight into what people are actually saying behind closed doors.
The same picture is emerging from the inner sanctums of the International Energy Agency. Its official prediction of peak oil is 2030 and even based on this prediction it
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