Rudd gets a familiar grilling
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd got a very familiar grilling this week from ABCś Kerry O’Brien. It sounded so much like Jeanetteś grilling of Michael Cullen in the House, it was uncanny.
Kevin Rudd, if we can start with oil. You and Brendan Nelson are both arguing over very small savings at the bowser, although his small savings are bigger than your small savings, that’s if you have savings in the end.
But isn’t it time to look Australians in the eye and tell them the news is only going to get worse on oil?
It may get better in the short term, there may be moments where the price drops a little, but in the medium to long term, it’s going to get worse and that there’s nothing significant that you can do about it. Now isn’t that the case?
It is almost as if Jeanette was in the room. Ruddś answer was also very familiar:
It is a very murky future that we face. What we do know for a fact is that right now we have the greatest global oil shock in 30 years. We know for a fact that prices are up 400 per cent since the Iraq war, 100 per cent in the last 12 months alone. It’s led to protests and riots in the UK, Spain, France, as well as Indonesia and our own region and South Korea.
So this is a massive shock to the global economy. It’s happening across all economies at present. What we need to do is frame an intelligent, long term response to this, and Australia as of when we took over Government did not have a long term energy strategy, a fuel strategy.
We’re working on that, six months into office, and we hope to have something to produce later in the year on that score. Dealing with the long term channel, as well as being mindful of the impact on people’s hip pocket now.
The Rudd interview continued on, but it was little more than the usual bluster of politicians afraid to speak the truth. Only the first 7 or 8 minutes of this interview are worth the listen.
Unsatisfied with the Prime Minister, Kerry O’Brien followed up with an interview with Richard Heinberg. Readers here will be familiar with him as he visited here last year and I have posted some of his interviews on frogblog. His interview is best summed up with this quote:
I think what the oil consuming nations really need to understand is that this is not a temporary blip in the oil market.
What we’re seeing is a fundamental and permanent change in the global energy economy. We will be dealing with the fallout of this for many, many years to come as prices continue to escalate. Whole industries are going to have to restructure and downsize as a result of this. We’re going to have to rebuild our transport infrastructure in much of the industrialised world, because we built it on the basis of cheap oil, and cheap oil is going to be a thing of the past.
So, someone is willing to speak about the risks we face in a meaningful way. At least Rudd acknowledged that this is the worst shock the global economy has had in thirty years. When will the politicians begin to admit that it´s not a shock but a fundamental and permanent change? The Greens will wait with baited breath for that day…
Hat Tip: The Oil Drum
June 20th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
To be fair to Rudd, he has to take everyone along with him, so he can’t just burst out with the bare naked truth. Truth is people who can handle it and as any green knows, most people most definitely can NOT handle the truth. If they could, we would have seen big changes years ago on environmental issues.
Most of we humans are slow, dim beasts. Creatures of habit - in deed and thought.
The usual spectrum of denialists and don’t-wanna-knows will have to be incrementally dragged along the path of acknowledgment of the developing reality to the point where everyone, including them, agrees that fundamental changes must occur.
Then real change can occur quickly.
Otherwise, you end up where we are in New Zealand. The people who have been paying attention know what’s up and what needs doing. But the other 70%+ of the population don’t really get it even now…..and aren’t inclined to get it if it means they are worse off.
So though an ETS is long overdue, there is not popular support for it. People have not been brought along as they should have been. That’s because it was just one priority among many……and few pay attention.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Is the era of cheap oil really behind us, though?
I’m not denying this issue, as it appears to me to be a more real and present problem than AGW.
If it is real, then clearly we do need to act quickly. When will all politicians be fast tracking new electricity generation projects?
June 20th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
OutinFront said “population don’t really get it even now…..and aren’t inclined to get it if it means they are worse off.”
That’s human nature. If there’s no short term reward then they simply don’t want to know. Or if its a short term reward that they don’t care about, such as the 20% reduction in the road toll caused by high oil prices.
June 20th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Kevyn,
Have people started driving less, because of the high oil prices? The latest Listener magazine claims that we’re still consuming the same amount of oil as last year, its just consumption growth that has slowed, although perhaps we’ve cut down on driving and diesel use may have gone up due to the agricultural boom.
June 21st, 2008 at 10:53 am
BP: I’m not denying this issue, as it appears to me to be a more real and present problem than AGW
On that we do agree. Only the most batty of people believe that either there is infinite oil down there, or that it regenerates itself quickly enough to bail us out. The reality is visible today.
In my mind there is no doubt that climate change is an issue, probably the greatest issue of our time, but the effects of the end of cheap oil will be on us much more quickly, and will be far more disruptive in the short to medium term. There is very little time. The greatest optimists give us but a few decades.
What was, just a few years ago, the “peak oil nutters brigade” becomes more mainstream by the day. There is now a greater understanding that the issue isn’t actually how much oil is down there, but at what rate we can extract the oil. A hundred million year supply of oil isn’t terribly useful to us if we can only get say 10 million barrels a day, at least not unless the world adjusts to have just that amount of oil available.
Helen was (if not the first) one of the first leaders to mention “the oil peak”, Bush has hinted at it, and now Rudd.
The real problem is, how do you tell the world that unprecedented change is coming in such a way that the impact from the announcement will actually be any better than the slow jog towards the nightmare?
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Sleepy, it only needs a small reduction in recreational driving to produce a 20% drop in deaths. Compared with commuter driving, recreational driving is high occupant and high speed. So a a couple of percent reduction in rural driving could easily hide a continuing couple of percent increase in commuter driving.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
There is some movement towards recognition of peak oil with the Transition Towns movement - communities looking at ways they can support each other in future-proofing themselves. It will mean looking at ways to generate local power supply from renewables as well as supporting local business and production.