Great article! Now we just need to have the politicians read it. Interesting how peak oil and the recent prediction of food prices rising three-fold in the next 5 years are nowhere on the election campaign radar. What will that do to housing affordability?!

“The defining issue for transport planning is peak oil, not traffic congestion.”

You bet it is!

It is simply insane to be pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into huge new road projects. The time for that approach is over.

Fuel prices could rise significantly at any time now, and the price of food, all other commodities and services along with it. Basic economics for the average person could change enormously in the very near future. This could have huge implications for employment and indeed for the coherence of our society.

We need to treat the issue of peak oil with the utmost urgency, in fact much more so than climate change (although there is a lot of overlap in the approach that should be taken).

It is well past the time when huge road-improvement expenditure should have by and large been redirected into peak oil and overall sustainability issues.

Peak oil can only become a defining issue once awareness and acceptance have occurred. When oil passes $US100/barrel then there should be more awareness about peak oil. Acceptance will occur once agreement occurs among the big oil companies and national governments.

Here is my story recently posted on the Oil Drum which might help increase awareness. Currently, oil, as total liquids including natural gas liquids and ethanol, peaked at 86.13 mbd in July 2006. In September 2007 production was 85.10 mbd.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3064

This article should be read as a statement of the obvious, about as enlightening as someone saying the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Sadly, I think the author is right. Peak oil is treated by many as another inconvenient truth.

But its effects won't just be inconvenient. It won't happen over a time span measured in decades. If it did it wouldn't be a problem - we humans can perform miracles in decades. Given decades we can move cities, re-route rivers and invent new technologies. Peak oil will hit very rapidly, over a time spam of 5 or so years. We can't even build and fill a dam in that time. In fact, it seems to take us 5 years to just to build a major road. It takes 15 at current rates to replace all the cars on the road - say with cars that don't use petrol.

In these circumstances, any head start we can get will be good - critical in fact. Head starts are meant to come from the people doing the planning. The thought that these people are still in denial about peak oil is more than a little disconcerting. They seriously need to get a clue, and fast.

Even George Bush has admitted America needs to kick its addiction to oil. That neither major political party in Australia has yet to even acknowledge that reducing our oil dependency is critical to our economy's security is highly disappointing. Worse still, Rudd appears to believe the that motorists need protection from high petrol prices. Only the Greens appear to have any handle on this, and while I don't seriously want them running the country, putting them [1] on the ballot paper is about the only option we have of sending a message that their policies in this area should be the priorities of the major parties too.

Even if the peak, or at least the end of the current plateau, is still 15 years off, there is every reason for Australia to avoid becoming like much of the rest of the developed world - completely dependent on unstable Middle-eastern regimes for their most critical energy resource. For a start, those regimes are rapidly ramping up their domestic consumption, and the evidence that they are able to ramp up production to match this is not good - ultimately that means they'll be exporting less and less, while Australia's own production continues it's gradual fall (despite a recent boost from the North West shelf). The average fuel economy of our vehicle fleet is going nowhere at the moment, unsurprisingly, given the warped government import tariff system and the petrol taxation structure. Even if the government did nothing at all but to adjust import tariffs to favour smaller vehicles over larger ones, introduce progressive petrol taxation (i.e. the more you use, the higher it's taxed), and remove the FBT concessions on private use of company cars, it would go a long way to getting Australians to start thinking about reducing their petrol dependency.

Toyne, I agree that awareness and acceptance must come first. You may or may not be aware that the Queensland Government just became the first state/provincial government in the world to go on record and concede that peak oil is real. See my commentary here - http://www.energybulletin.net/35743.html