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VK2AAB > FUEL 11.03.08 07:37l 562 Lines 22124 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Minister Speaks on Peak Oil
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Hello All,
I will outdo David on this on. Because it is the only speach
by a Minister of the Crown or indeed any othe Minister in any government who
is responsible to do something about peak oil I thought it was worth while
using up the bandwidth.
73 Barry VK2AAB
=============================================================
Published on 9 Mar 2008 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 9 Mar
2008.
Highway of diamonds
by Hon. Andrew McNamara (Queensland MP)
Transcript of an address given March 4 to the Brisbane Institute
by the Honourable Andrew McNamara, Minister for Sustainability,
Climate Change and Innovation.
Introduction from the Brisbane Institute:
In the twenty first century the human race must finally confront
the reality that in the closed system that is planet earth, there
are limits to growth.
No matter how clever we are, there is no escaping the physical
limits of the world's resources of oil, wood, water and arable
land.
Andrew McNamara is a member of the Queensland State Parliament
and the Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and
Innovation in the Anna Bligh government. He comes to the role
with a reputation for confronting inconvenient truths and
conventional thinking.
Andrew was first elected as the State Member for Hervey Bay at
the 2001 election. Prior to his election he was a solicitor. He
has a long history of interest in issues of contemporary
importance such as peak oil, clean coal technology, and climate
change . He is also a strong opponent of whaling.
I'd like to pay my respects to the traditional owners of the land
on which we gather this evening.
I want to thank the Board of the Brisbane Institute for the
invitation to address this gathering.
Tonight I want to talk about capital S Sustainability.
By that I don't mean the usual narrow environmental concept of
sustainability in agricultural production and land use.
I mean the future of our society, our economy and our
environment; the structure of our cities, their energy and water
sources and demand profiles; the treatment of these sources of
our wealth; the imminent peaking of world oil supplies; our use
of finite resources like gas and coal; and the way we dispose of
those resources when we're finished with them.
I will begin by considering what sustainability means to me.
It's a word that means different things to different people and
is a word used in connection with everything from nappies to
mining companies.
I will look at sustainability in the context of today's hottest
issues - the crouching tiger of climate change and the hidden
dragon of peak oil.
We can't talk about sustainability without talking about waste
and resource efficiency.
We talk a great deal about becoming a more efficient economy, but
we really need to ask what we are becoming efficient at when we
throw away more and more.
And finally I want to touch on the problem of population
distribution.
Until we start talking about population distribution, we can not
honestly claim to have the whole problem on the table.
And that I suspect will well and truly fill the 18 minutes I have
left!
In 2002 the US national Academy of Sciences concluded that
humanity's collective demands first surpassed the earth's
regenerative capacity around 1980.
Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable
yield by an estimated 25 per cent.
That means we are meeting current demands by consuming the
earth's natural assets, setting the stage for decline and
collapse.
With a population expected to top 9 billion this century,
sustainability is the crucial social, economic and political
issue facing the world today.
With some notable exceptions, policy makers have been guilty of
allowing sustainability to be cast as a peculiarly environmental
issue, marginalised from the main game of economic development.
In 1949, Australia's greatest economist, Colin Clark presented
the keynote paper "World Resources and World Population" at the
UN Scientific Conference on Conservation and Utilisation of
Resources.
He noted that the "conservation of soil, forests, stream flows
and natural biological equilibria is certainly one of the most
important and urgent tasks which faces us today."
Sustainability is the ultimate whole of government - indeed,
whole of society - issue.
Pigeon-holing it as a narrow environmental concept has led us
down a path of accepting unsustainability in the name of jobs and
economic development.
But as the world is now showing us, we can not forever trade off
sustainability for short term profits.
Meadows and her colleagues in Limits to Growth (1972) defined a
sustainable society as one that is "far-seeing enough, flexible
enough and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or
its social systems of support."
Sustainability must be the foundation upon which we build
economic strength and natural resilience.
It's the beginning and the end of any discussion about society's
future... the purpose and the process for what we do... the aim
and the outcome of our deliberations.
Sustainability isn't something to be considered in isolation,
almost as an afterthought.
It must be central to our planning, thinking and acting as we
seek to live in harmony with the planet, and leave it in better
condition than when we arrived.
What the science of climate change is now demonstrating is just
how badly Australia's approach of "borrowing from its past and
its future, to sustain its current population and lifestyle"
(Foran, 2003) has undermined those systems of support.
Due to my self imposed time constraints I do not propose to say
too much tonight on climate change per se.
Let me assure you it is not for lack of interest or an
appreciation of the urgency of the task.
Global warming is a symptom of the problem of living
unsustainably. Consuming fossil fuels without considering the
waste is a sustainability issue.
Industrialised society's failure to minimise waste and emissions,
and neutralise those necessary for continued industrial
development in a sustainable manner has created today's
diminished environment.
Ice core records show that at the time of the beginnings of
agriculture and the development of the first cities 8,000 years
ago, CO2 in the atmosphere stood at around 280 parts per million.
The Industrial Revolution commenced in 1780, literally got up a
head of steam, and by 1930, CO2 in the atmosphere had risen to
315 ppm (May, 2007).
Lord May, the Australian born, former President of the Royal
Society (2000 - 2005) and Chief Scientific Advisor to the British
Government (1995 - 2000) makes the point that the rate of
increase in greenhouse concentrations is unprecedented in the
10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and if current
trends continue, we will see atmospheric CO2 levels reach "at
least 500 ppm" by 2050 (May, 2007, p7).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is made up
of the leading climate scientists from 169 countries concluded in
their February 2007 report that by 2100 we will see warming in
the range of 1.10 to 6.40, with the likelihood of settling at
2.00 to 2.80 (IPCC 2007).
It is worth noting that the IPCC's predictions have consistently
underestimated the rate of change.
What is still not widely understood is just how significant that
apparently small change in global average temperatures is in
effect.
As Lord May noted, "the difference in average global temperature
between today and the depths of the last ice age is only around
50C."
We are looking at a rate of extinction that is of the same order
of magnitude as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The challenge of climate change, or human induced global
catastrophe as it should be known, might be the clarion call that
heralds another threat caused by our careless consumption of
fossil fuels.
I spoke earlier of climate change as the crouching tiger; the
danger we can see. It is real, dangerous and imminent.
I suggest that we face an even graver threat, that is even more
imminent than global warming, and in response to which we have
chosen to look the other way for 50 years.
The hidden dragon I speak of is resource depletion; of the
peaking supply of those sources of energy that have enabled our
explosion from around 2 billion people on the planet in 1900 to
6.5 billion today.
This is truly the unseen threat that will confront us all soon
enough, whether we choose to see it or not.
I was here last year when Dr Roger Bezdek, one of the authors of
the Hirsch Report (2005) on peak oil written for the US
Department of Energy addressed the Institute on the topic of the
inevitable peaking world oil and gas supplies.
His is one of a growing group of voices predicting that sometime
between 2006 and 2020 the world will pass a point after which we
will never have as much oil at our disposal as we did the day
before.
What began as a whisper from Shell's chief geologist M King
Hubbert in the 1950s, is now a shout which can't be ignored.
The US CEO of General-Motors, Rick Wagoner, stated publicly in
January this year that in GM's view the world has now passed peak
oil.
Official world production figures released by the International
Energy Agency in its World Energy Outlook (2007) show that
November 2006 is firming as the possible peak of production, with
the world's daily average in that month of 85.5 million barrels
per day (mbpd) of oil and condensates not having been exceeded in
the 14 months since.
The high stakes humanity is playing for in the environmental
poker game where the chips come from our own declining resource
base were summed up by renowned astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, in
1964 in "Of Men and Galaxies" who declared:
"It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make
a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the
running. In the sense of developing high intelligence, this is
not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary
prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone,
oil gone, high grade metallic ores gone, no species however
competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to
high level technology. This is a one shot affair. If we fail,
this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.
The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them
there will be one chance and one chance only."
High stakes indeed.
Yet what have we done but draw upon the Earth's non renewable
resources as if they were limitless, and create an economy that
assumes - indeed demands - cheap energy to sustain the national
and international movement of food and goods and water and people
in ever greater volumes and numbers.
We have laid out our cities and built our suburbs and resumed
agricultural land as if it were our purpose to live as far as
possible from where we work and further than we can imagine from
where our food is grown.
For the past week West Texas Crude has been consistently trading
between US$100 and US$102 a barrel and we now stand on the
threshold of an upswing in global oil prices that will have a
significant impact on the economy of the world and for which we
are seriously unprepared.
Unsustainable consumption has a price, and we will soon pay it.
I am however not as worried about the impact on our economy of
rising oil prices feeding into higher transport, packaging,
pharmaceuticals and food costs - as serious as these will be - as
I am about the cause of these impacts.
Peak oil is not a theory.
Since commercial oil drilling started in Pennsylvania in 1859,
country after country has gone through the same depletion curve.
Oil, when first discovered, literally shoots from the ground, due
to the pressure built up in the reserve over millions of years.
As more wells are sunk, production rises exponentially, but
inevitably, when between one third and a half of the oil in the
field has been extracted the pressure drops away and the oil
stops flowing.
Oil can still be extracted but at much greater cost and much more
slowly. Once the peak of production is passed, it is
irreversible.
Australian oil production peaked in 2000.
There was a brief period in the 1990s when we produced 100% of
our domestic oil needs, Australia now is producing less than 70%
of our needs, and the balance of payments is showing the strain.
Notwithstanding our substantial coal, gas and uranium exports,
Australia is on the verge of becoming a net energy importer as a
result of our reliance on imported oil products.
The International Energy Agency in 2007 warned of serious global
supply disruptions starting in 2010.
Just as we have changed the way we view and use water, I suggest
that our current liquid fuel usage patterns are about to change
as well.
What both peak oil and climate change will impose upon us is a
requirement to use less energy, not just petrol but all forms and
carriers of energy, in order to produce less greenhouse gasses
and to allow for the greatest degree of energy substitution
possible.
We will need to live closer to work, schools and shops or the
public transport nodes that can link us to those destinations.
The town planning concepts that arose out of the justifiable
desire during the industrial revolution to not live next door to
what Blake described in "A New Jerusalem" as "dark satanic mills"
and which gave rise to residential urban sprawl 30 minutes drive
away from the so called "business park", have become redundant -
if not downright indulgent - in a world where energy efficiency
and restraint will be the guiding considerations for business,
its financers, customers and regulators.
Cabinet recently asked me to oversee the production of a
Queensland strategy to mitigate the impacts on the state of
severely reduced oil supplies.
The dragon is now out in the open with the tiger, and we are in
between.
We have the capacity with existing technology and intellect to
adopt more sustainable policies and practices to bring greenhouse
gas emissions under control through greater use of renewable
energy sources and mitigation strategies, and to reduce our
reliance on oil.
The Government has directed its attention to these issues already
with the ending of broad scale land clearing and forest
acquisition and restoration programs such as are underway in
Springbrook and the Daintree.
More sustainable lifestyles for Queensland families are being
supported by Transport Orientated Developments which my colleague
John Mickel is driving in the Transport portfolio, and new
programs such as the $100 million Renewable Energy and Smart
Energy Funds that I jointly administer with Mines and Energy
Minister Geoff Wilson, and the $430 million Climate Change Fund.
We face a huge task, one that Lester Brown in his "Plan B 3.0"
(2008) describes thus:
"The challenge for our generation is to build a new economy, one
that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has
a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and
recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed."
An economy that recycles everything is a long way from where we
are.
In Cradle to Grave, William McDonough and Michael Braungart say
that:
" Humans are condemned as the one species on the planet guilty of
burdening it beyond what it can withstand; as such, we must
shrink our presence, our systems, our activities.... The goal is
zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero "ecological footprint."
Queensland has a big backyard.
We have never thought of ourselves as being short of land in
which to dump stuff.
The idea of zero waste and extended producer responsibility is
something that has taken off overseas, but is only sputtering to
a start here.
Consequently, in Queensland we have among the worst rates of
recycling and highest rates of landfill in Australia.
We must do better, and we will do better.
This all actually presents a new opportunity.
It is a great opportunity to lead the world in new technologies,
new industries and new green collar jobs.
Looking to the horizon is not just about seeing the threats, we
can also prepare for the opportunities.
As daunting as the work we have to do is, there is however still
one piece of the puzzle not yet on the table.
In an energy-constrained world dedicated to massively reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, it's time we spoke its name;
population.
American biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote:
"The rampaging monster loose upon the land is over-population. In
its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical
construct."
Peter McDonald, from the Australian Centre for Population
Research, estimates that over the next 40 years or so,
Australia's population will grow to around 25 to 26 million.
Addressing the question of population sustainability requires
recognition of the fact that there are two Australia's in terms
of population.
There is the Australia in which 66% of the population live in
just five large and disbursed cities and there is the rest spread
out over a huge land mass, but even then, overwhelmingly clinging
to the coast line.
The Hon. Barry Jones (2003) referring to the unanimous House of
Representatives Standing Committee on Long Term Strategies 1994
report, "Australia's Population 'Carrying Capacity': One Nation -
Two Ecologies" and notes that:
"a serious examination of Australia's future population
composition needed to be based on geographical, environmental and
resource diversity."
The proposition remains as correct and as unstarted today as it
was in 1994.
In 1997, the then Premier of New South Wales the Hon. Bob Carr,
in opening the National Conference of Australians for an
Ecologically Sustainable Population said:
"I think people are ready to grasp the argument that the
unsustainable growth in population numbers is degrading our
planet and that Australia must begin to think of itself as a
country with a population problem. Let's throw away for all time
the notion that Australia is an empty space just waiting to be
filled up. Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation won't allow that
to happen without an enormous cost to those who come after us."
Half a generation after those wise words by Bob Carr, they remain
just as true and just as unacted upon as they were in 1997.
In Queensland my Ministerial colleague Craig Wallace, the
Minister for Natural Resources and Water is conducting a series
of water planning studies to map the reserves of our water
catchments and projected draws on those reserves over the next 50
years.
The Deputy Premier and Minister for Infrastructure and Planning
Paul Lucas is reviewing the State's regional plans to ensure that
there is adequate infrastructure provided for anticipated growth
up until 2050.
What is now necessary, however, is recognition of the fact that
while carrying capacity is expandable, it is never infinite.
Population is a topic for discussion at Kevin Rudd's 2020
discussion and I look forward to that debate.
The key to achieving a sustainable Australian population in the
21st century is population distribution - adopting policies which
encourage and support population growth in areas where it can be
supported sustainably, and discouraging it in those places where
it can't.
Population maldistribution increases the stress on available
resources and heightens the need for more stringent sustainable
living practices, such as water restrictions.
Developed countries have the double whammy of increasing
populations and rampant consumerism.
It's one thing to provide the necessities of life... quite
another to provide the trimmings demanded by affluence.
Population distribution, standard of living and sustainability
are linked inextricably.
They sit like three moons around a planet... separate, but part
of the one system; influencing each other, intimately connected.
A long term study pointing out the appropriate population
distribution for Australia, including modelling of the impacts
both of climate change and peak oil on our capital cities, our
regional cities and rural areas must now become a priority.
This will of course be controversial.
As Butler (2003) notes, no academic or political consensus exists
concerning the optimum population for Australia.
That is however no excuse not to start.
In the 21st century, the human race must finally confront the
reality that in the closed system that is planet earth, there are
limits to growth.
No matter how clever we are, there is no escaping the physical
limits of the world's resources.
The laws of physics trump the laws of economics every time.
What we need above all is smart growth.
Growth that is low carbon.
Growth that is low pollution.
Growth that is resource neutral.
We need growth that actually adds to the natural capital, instead
of destroying it.
The title of my talk tonight is "Highway of Diamonds."
The Bob Dylan tragics in the room might have recognised the
phrase from his 1962 classic, "A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall."
In the song Dylan poses the question "Oh what did you see my blue
eyed son?" and offers in part the reply, "I saw a highway of
diamonds with nobody on it."
It has increasingly struck me as a perfect symbol for the choices
we now face in dealing with climate change, peak oil and
population; what to build and where; road or rail; seaport or
airport; capital city or regional centre; balancing the enormous
costs of providing infrastructure now in a time of momentous
change against the undoubted costs of acting too late and in more
uncertain times.
We need to get it right.
No one will thank us for a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.
Thank you once again for the Invitation to address the Brisbane
Institute tonight.
I'd be happy to take any questions arising from my comments.
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