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The Forum > Article Comments > Peak oil and the lost message of the carbon tax > Comments

Peak oil and the lost message of the carbon tax : Comments

By Tom Holland, published 2/7/2012

Welcome to the world of the carbon tax.

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Good articile Tom.

I am a bit unsure of the figures I will use below but I think it is important for people to realise the following.

Australian crude oil production is approximately 450,000 barrels per day, currently declining at an annual rate of about 14-15%.

Crude oil consumption is currently at about 1M bpd, this is growing at around 5% per annum.

I do not know our exact costs vis oil imports, given the above, Australia's current/growing rate of oil consumption, falling production should be seen as a very important geopolitical weakness and a national security threat/issue.

Give China's and other emerging crude oil consumption markets, and their ability to pay what the market demands should be an alarm bell for our politicians, they need to wake up to the fact that we have a growing problem, particularly if the supply side of the equation becomes more problematic due to geopolitical issues.

My 2 cents worth.
Posted by Geoff of Perth, Monday, 2 July 2012 11:19:36 AM
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Two basic points.

* It is now blindingly obvious to everyone but the most extreme activists that an effective, enforceable international agreement to limit emissions will not occur in the foreseeable future. Or was I missing something from the recent Rio conference? To have a carbon tax at a price far more than double the European ETS, or any other of the few jurisdictions that are trying or will try to limit emissions, without such an agreement is absurd.

* Holland's comments on peak oil show that he has managed to overlook vast amounts of evidence that unconventional plus deep oil production is ramping up, but demand is subdued thanks to the currency crisis. No end in fossil fuels is in sight. There is no real indication that the rate of growth in the fossil fuel market has been affected by renewables, let alone the total market being cut back. In any case, the alternative energy sector is simply not capable of delivering the amounts of energy required.

Tom, this is extreme activist stuff, if not delusional. It is almost entirely divorced from reality. Time to go back to Google..
Posted by Curmudgeon, Monday, 2 July 2012 11:51:53 AM
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What a schmozzle of an article.

There is no evidence that CO2 is contributing to climate change; there is no evidence that there is climate change occuring above and beyond natural variability; it is problematic that the increase in CO2 levels is caused by human emissions; the reliability of the ice core records has always carried with it considerable provisos:

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/06/25/greenland.ice.may.exaggerate.magnitude.13000.year.old.deep.freeze

And see also the work of Professor Severinghaus, Dr. Huber, Professor Jaworowski and Ridley on the problems with extracting accurate information about the gas content of ice cores and then extrapolating to prevailing temperatures when the gas was trapped in the ice.

As a theory AGW stinks; it is a combination of ideology, ego and money.

The 'other' issue raised by this article is peak oil, an especially virulent form of the disease of "sustainability". It is a disease which features a preoccupation with exhaustion of resources, particularly the fossils. Like the rest of the AGW circus it is a bogey man tale.
Posted by cohenite, Monday, 2 July 2012 12:00:23 PM
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Nobody, other than a barefaced liar could ever propose, or argue for a carbon tax, as something with an ecological advantage, unless they argued for a complete cessation of all coal exports from Australia.

That Julia & company do so, simply confirms that lying is their basic response to anything, at any time, if they think they can get away with it.
Posted by Hasbeen, Monday, 2 July 2012 12:18:50 PM
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The connection between comments by Geoff and Hasbeen is that coal exports could be the defacto method of paying for oil imports. It does seem rather silly to have a domestic carbon tax to curtail emissions of 550 Mt when coal exports generate over 700 Mt of CO2.

Gas straddles both transport and power generation. We are exporting about 20 Mt of LNG but that is set to triple. I think if trucks, buses, tractors and maybe some cars (eg Honda Civic NGV) used gas fuel we could replace a lot of oil imports. That would cut into LNG exports and make the gas price too expensive for power stations, carbon tax or not. My suggestion is use nukes for baseload power and gas as a diesel substitute. I think this will become clearer in a year or two.
Posted by Taswegian, Monday, 2 July 2012 1:06:42 PM
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<< Nobody, other than a barefaced liar could ever propose, or argue for a carbon tax, as something with an ecological advantage, unless they argued for a complete cessation of all coal exports from Australia. >>

I wouldn’t quite call it bare-faced lying Hasbeen, but it does amount to incredible duplicity to be pumping out our coal at such an enormous and ever increasing rate.

Yes, we should be pulling back on coal exports.

And of course we should pulling right back on population growth as well.

The carbon tax and forthcoming ETS absolutely do NOT set within a holistic effort to deal with climate change or peak oil. Far from it!

However, they are still a whole lot better than doing nothing. Or they will be, if they are developed to a stage that really significantly gets us off of our utter addiction to oil.

Now, even if we can believe what you are saying about all these fandangled ‘proven’ new sources of oil and gas, what would be the price per barrel or whatever?

The stuff is getting progressively harder to access, and at a higher energy input and hence greater cost. And it will be this cost factor, not the shortage of supply, which will change our economics and our society.

This is the big concern with peak oil. Actual shortages of supply may never be a significant factor, because as the price rises, various other forms of energy generation will come on line, to the extent that by the time oil is in short supply, it will be so expensive as to be only minimally in use anyway.
Posted by Ludwig, Monday, 2 July 2012 1:31:02 PM
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