Oil bogeyman approach won’t reduce emissions

AUSTRALIAN motorists have been frightened into greenhouse submission. A shocking CSIRO report issued earlier this month warns of petrol prices of up to $8 a litre by 2018.

There are few buttons hotter than petrol prices to get public attention on the future cost and availability of transport energy.


The eye-watering projection of a 500 per cent increase in petrol prices is based on one small section of the Fuel for Thought report, which models a doomsday scenario of imagining if the exhaustion of the world’s oil reserves peak oil was already upon us.

This headline-grabbing analysis by the CSIRO curiously eschews mainstream oil demand and supply information, instead relying on data from Peak Oil Netherlands Foundation, which predicts a peak in oil supply in 2010 and a subsequent 3 per cent decline in supply every year thereafter. PONL describes itself as a group of citizens concerned about the effects of peak oil.

The subsequent modelling is relatively partial in its scope and does not consider the broader economic effects of skyrocketing energy prices.

Long before petrol prices could reach $8 a litre the cost of energy would almost certainly drive the global economy into depression and stabilise the market by collapsing demand.

The Australian