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Ode to ClimateWorks (To the twang of a bluegrass banjo) Come and listen to a story about a group named ClimateWorks, A poor think tank, barely kept its family fed. Then one day it was lookin' for a carbon plan, And up through the ground came a bubblin' crude.
JUST saying those responsible for writing the oil-addicted chapter on transport in ClimateWorks' Low Carbon Plan sound inspired by The Beverly Hillbillies, or worse, deferred too much to Shell Australia chairman Russell Caplan.
In the report launched this week, Mr Caplan, among others, is extended "sincere appreciation" in the acknowledgments for his "highly constructive and relevant input".
The timing of the report's release in the same week that anti-oil crusader Sir Richard Branson arrived in Australia must be as embarrassing as the TV program's dunce hillbilly, Jethro.
You see, just a couple of weeks ago, the Virgin group founder threw his weight behind a different report, called The Oil Crunch, and it makes the ClimateWorks transport recommendations look as if they are stalled in the same timewarp as the Texas tea barons of the popular '60s show.
The UK report, the second instalment from the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, warns the British Government of an economic upheaval on the scale of the recent credit crunch if they ignore that supplies of "cheap oil" are diminishing.
"The next five years will see us face another crunch -- the oil crunch," the report says.
Peak oil, the controversial point at which volumes of production begin to decline because the world's accessible reserves are finite, has been inching closer.
In December, the usually conservative International Energy Agency assessed that if no big new discoveries were made, the output of crude would plateau and begin declining in 2020. More worryingly, last month three scientists from Kuwait, one of the world's top 10 oil producers, declared global reserves were estimated to peak in 2014.
Despite ClimateWorks' admission that Australia's road transport sector produces four times more carbon emissions per person than the world per capita average, the measures it suggests for reducing fossil fuel dependence are lame beyond belief.
In the same breath ClimateWorks recommends mandatory fuel efficiency standards of 140g of CO2 per km by 2020, it reveals this standard was introduced in Europe in 2008 and will continue to be adjusted downwards there over the next two years.
A ClimateWorks author flippantly wrote: "(Australian) customers consider many criteria when choosing a car -- safety, comfort, aesthetics, price -- and fuel efficiency is only a small part of the decision process."
What utter claptrap.
The Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil predicts fuel imports could cost our economy around $100 billion each year within the next decade. This could equate to paying five times more for petrol.
In warning that the next UK government may need to steer the economy through a period of unusually high oil prices, Sir Richard's report recommends policymakers wean transport from its dependence on oil and promote technological developments such as hybrid engines and vehicle electrification.
Amazingly, despite the growing push around the world to roll out hybrid and electric vehicles, the ClimateWorks report barely mentions them as a solution for Australian drivers. When it does, it is to understate their appeal.
BNW asked electric vehicle guru Evan Thornley, of Better Place, who is also among the sources acknowledged by ClimateWorks, what he thought of the report's low-voltage endorsement.
Thornley said: "We disagree strongly with the analyst's conclusions on EVs. The report says that assumptions about battery costs and the availability of charge networks has a big impact on the analysis of the role of electric vehicles. Unfortunately, these assumptions are not correct."
It's obvious ClimateWorks' scheme to "reduce (Australia's) emissions by 25 per cent below 2000 levels, without changing the mix of businesses in the economy, and at a low cost to society" is a thinly disguised effort to help the fossil fools squeeze every last drop of profit from a diminishing and polluting resource.
In addition to transport, nearly every industrial process relies on oil today. For ClimateWorks to ignore an inevitable transition to alternatives is reprehensible.