Presented in Workshop 10: Ensuring Iraq is the last oil war - energy politics for a sustainable future, at the Now We The People conference, University of Technology, Sydney, 24.8.03


Dr Stuart White

[continuing from discussion about the previous speech]. I should say thanks to Leanne through gritted teeth. In the spirit of co-operation, it's actually everyone's responsibility to answer this question: there's no sandwiches until we do. And of course, I vote for option D, all of the above. So a big challenge, and I'm sure we'll all realise that and we certainly can't necessarily do it justice. And I'd like to acknowledge from Zoe Campbell from the Institute who's helped with some of this work, and who has an interest in the sustainable transport issue as well.

So just briefly, I wanted to use the theme of addiction: while structurally, economically we could consider all to be the societies we've created, and it's not just Australia, but most societies throughout the world, we've developed an addiction through the era of cheap oil, and that permeates the entire structure of our economy and it's something that we need to unpick and reduce. And that's quite a challenge. And obviously we need to look at why oil is such a special substance, we need to look at the characteristics of it that mean that it has permeated our economy in a way that other energy sources haven't, and other materials haven't. There are other materials and resources that are equally important - and I'd probably name water, which is one that we'd do well to work on as well, as one of those. But it's quite different, in the sense that it's location is different, as Leanne has pointed out. And the implications of that are that it's not just about the decline on the amount of oil, or what we think about oil in terms of scarcity, but even if there an infinite amount of oil we can't actually use it all for other reasons, which I'll talk about.

And then the big question: what to do about it, where I'm going to talk briefly about some of the sustainable transport, some of the questions around the use of oil, and then end on an issue which I think will fold back into Leanne's work and discussion from before, as I'm sure there is a lot of expertise and thinking about thes eissues from the floor as well, which is what we can do internationally. It's all very well to think about what we can do within Australia, within NSW, in Sydney, but of course we're talking about some fairly large global forces and I think we need to come to grips with some of those, as Leanne has alluded to.

So picking up this theme of addiction - I often think of the analogy with the Spanish Incas who plundered and raided South American gold, brought it back and made hay for a long time with that gold, and then of course their economy completely collapsed after it ran out. And in this, it's not a case of oil running out, it's a case of other constraints. I can also provide any of these references, if anyone's interested, both these overheads and the references that we allude to along the way.

So oil is providing a lot of our energy usage, and it's a very versatile fuel - I think that's an important point.

The main thing, as we know, is transport, and because oil has been affordable fuel it's quite a key issue in terms of our transport and that's that as Leon suggested, our economies have developed with that, and we know that if we were without it, those economies would collapse. We saw a taste of that during the 74 Iran situation and the embargo in 79, we saw what that did to the world economy, the shakeup that created, and we can see why there is so much effort to keep the price low.

So just looking at the transport sector - just a bit of background. If we include airplane fuel and LPG it's equivalent to over 30 billion litres of automotive petrol a year. And one thing that's often forgotten is that it's not just what goes in vehicles, it's also the life blood of our agricultural food, increasingly, as agriculture becomes more industrialised, effectively it's using more energy. And this is something there has been a lot of attention paif to in the seventies and eighties, I think it's very interesting. If we look at the research in sustainable energy and energy in general, there was such a boom in consideration of these issues in the seventies and eighties. And we've seen it change - of course, there is attention paid to these issues. But it's not in the same way. It's only recently we've seen people pick up on the oil and food issue. There's been a contested report out of the UK looking at the issue of oil and food, but there's nothing like the focus that there was during the seventies and eighties, and hopefully one of the perverse side benefits of what's just happened is that we will get more attention paid to analysing this issue.

I blame deregulation myself, which was the topic of the plenery this morning.

[Holding up a table of motor vehicles per thousand population in different countries] Australia always seems to just vie for top position in some of these league tables. We've seen our waste generation per capita, we've seen greenhouse gas emission per capita, we're always just up there at the top. And in this case, motor vehicles, per thousand population: I think some of you will have seen media stories in the Herald and the Guardian recently about China, in terms of car ownership and car use, and you can imagine the implications of this being as high as this [pointing at graphs].

So this is a very important and special substance, because it's versatile, it's transportable and there are few substitutes for it.

And if we now look at oil per capita: The US and Canada of course, their economis are heavily dependent on oil for heating as well, so if we separated out the heating oil Australia would probably be up there at the top of the league table again. We tend to rely, as does Japan, on coal for a lot of our industrial processes. I mean, in the US the era of cheap oil was much more amplified and much more magnified, and it was only in more recent times that they've had a move away from oil in power generation as well. So these results have to be taken in this context. But nonetheless, it shows a pretty clear picture, particularly in respect to the developing world.

Now moving along fairly quickly, even if oil were plentiful to the extent that scarcity wasn't a constraint, we actually can't use it all, and the reason we can't use it all is because of the impact of burning it in terms of greenhouse gases and carbon logic: the fact is, if we want to retain and pass on a stable atmosphere to our descendants, then we need to look at what the implications of burning that fuel would be, and that would imply the kind of changes that a one degree change in temperature, and sea levels rising 20 cm, so we don't lose Tuvalu or Kiribus and so on, that means we can only release 225 billion tons of carbon by 2100. And the problem is, as I'll just show you shortly, that's equivalent to burning just a quarter of the oil, not counting the coal, which is actually one of the energy sources that we depend on heavily in Australia.

There's another issue in Australia, as again Leanne's pointed out: our dependence. We often think of Australia as a relatively energy-rich country and in fact if we look at the increase in total use of oil, then we look at the local production in Australia, we can see that the total has grown but the local is staying pretty constant. So it's very clear that we're pretty much going to be in a position quite soon where we're importing more oil - we're importing over half our oil.

And that of course leads to the questions which was the substance of Leanne's talk, which is the issue of conflict over control. And it's worth remembering that a contract for the supply of oil is just a subset of a much broader range of conflict over resource use. There's been a very good paper produced recently by the Worldwatch institute that shows that over the world's fifty recent wars and armed conflicts, a quarter of them involved a struggle over natural resources. And these so-called 'resource wars' have killed more than 5 million people, and displaced a further 17-21 million. It's not just oil, it's also diamonds and so on. But obviously oil is a key one for the reasons that Leanne outlined. And the implications of that, obviously, that it's occurring in poor countries particularly, and it's often a particular ethnic group or economic elite to gain control over those resources.

So just to move fairly quickly through some of these key issues, as Leanne pointed out, the Middle East, in terms of the crude oil reserves, at the end of 2002 the Middle East have the lion's share of those. And we've seen an increased focus in recent diplomatic visits to West Africa - they weren't just about the goodwill, they were actually about the substantial oil reserves. But even with that, we're still talking relatively small volumes compared with the Middle East. And the same of course with Eurasia.

So that was the resource, now we're talking about who controls the supply. And we can see the Middle East is large here and the US as well in terms of controlling supply.

Where does it go? That's the next question. Where does the oil move? And we can see significant movements obviously from the Middle East to South East Asia, Japan, and so on. Again, I can make any of this information and the references available to anyone who's interested.

What's interesting is that in terms of Australia, the proportion of the oil that we get from the Middle East is about the same as the world average. So generally in the world people are receiving about a third of their oil from the Middle East, and Australia is pretty much the same in terms of our import of oil. So we're reasonable dependent and vulnerable, if you like, to that area of instability.

I just want to now start to talk about the ways in which we might start to grapple with this. Just to highlight the fact that those who were previously called Neo-cons, as soon as they got involved they realised that this was a serious issue. And as you probably know, Cheney was commission to develop a new energy policy for the United States. And that energy policy was designed deliberately to start looking at some of these questions of vulnerability, to start seeing how the US could improve their resource security. And most of you have been aware from the publicity about that energy policy, there was a very strong emphasis on nuclear and hydrogen, geoseperatration, which means burying carbon dioxide in the ground, and opening up the Alaskan oil fields, and so on. So this is what we've called a 'supply-side' approach - if we were to think in terms of paths, and many of you will be familiar from the seventies and eighties with the talk about soft energy paths, and the work that came from Amory Lovins and so on. In terms of achieving oil security, we actually have two paths that open up before us: to reduce our dependence on, say, Middle eastern oil, or oil from countries which are unstable, and we can do that through a supply-side strategy, which is to generate more supply from resources such as Alaskan wildlife reserves an so on, and to develop significant alternative fuel, Manildra comes to mind, and to look ultimately at a hydrogen economy.

Of course, there are elements of that are quite good, Manilda notwithstanding, alternative fuels in terms of ethanol and so on are important things to be considering. But I think it's really important to distinguish that there really are two different paths associated with this, because it's not just a question of the cost of this, and the cost of the Alaskan wildlife refuge and so on, it's also very important for us to be thinking about the greenhouse gas consequences associated with that. And also the fact that it doesn't necessarily solve a whole lot of the underlying problems. This issue is not just about the economy of oil, it's also about the impact of motor vehicle use on our cities, on our planet, on the social fabric of communities and so on. And of course, that's not news to anyone in this audience.

So it's easy for us to distinguish that the most important sources, the paths we need to look at will be on the demand side. This will be: how do we actually do this task, this thing that we need to do, these services we need to provide, which is providing communities' access to each other, to exchange and so on. And how do we do that with the least use of these products. And obviously that involves efficiency; we hear a lot about the importance of vehicle fuel efficiency. It's interesting that we have a situation currently where the average vehicle fleet - and this is true in the US as well as in Australia - is actually decreasing, and it's mainly a result of the use of larger vehicles, in the US SUV's, in Australia 4WDs, and so on. And that's quite a significant factor for the average fleet efficiency.

So one side of that is that we do need to improve the efficiency of our vehicles, in a whole range of ways. One of them is changing the type of vehicles, but another is to improve fuel efficiency generally. And the other is that we need to actually work out ways to achieve our goals with less use of high fuel use vehicles at all. And that involves also significant investment. It's not just a question of people waving fingers and saying 'thou shalt not use your vehicles much, but it's also a question of appropriate investment in structures to enable the community to do so. And that's something over which we should have control. It shouldn't be left to Michael Costa - I'm sure we'd all agree. Do we trust him? No

And I just want to throw this in as an interesting strategy: during the time of the energy discussion of the seventies and eighties, a technique was developed - and there were several people developing it, the Swedes' Secretary for Future Studies were looking at it in terms of energy policy for Sweden, Amery Lovins was using it in his work 'Soft Energy Paths', and a number of others - which is to say, and it was partly a backlash I think against the forecasting strategies from the likes of the Rand corporation and so on. And it was this notion that as a community we need to engage in a process of 'backcasting'. And there's a fantastic translation from the Dutch the term, which is trend-bridge. So instead of forecasting we stand here and say 'what are these likely futures?' There are several likely futures that we have, and they're all starting from the assumptions of where we are now, of what's our current circumstances, our current institutional lines and so on.

With backcasting, we think: "what do we need the future to be?" What do we need it to be, what do we want it to be? In the case of greenhouse gas emissions, that's pretty clear. If we want to pass on a stable atmosphere to our descendants, then wee need to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2030. So that's something we can think "OK, that's what we need to so, and now let's work backwards to see what needs to happen in order for that to be the case." We can say that in 2028 we will have needed to have done this, in 2025 we will have needed to have done that, and so on. So we work our way backwards to the present, which says "OK, we'll need to break some of our assumptions, challenge them." That's why we need academics, isn't it? And others.

So backcasting takes this desired future and works back to the present, considering what would need to change. And there is an interest in it. A lot of this has been looking at anti-greenhouse, we've had a PhD student looking at Australia's potential greenhouse obligations working with the Australian Conservation Foundation. But you could do this obviously with transport, with Sydney's transport, because you actually have a target for reducing vehicle kilometres traveled in Sydney, but it varies - there's not exactly what you'd call a whole-of-government approach to this. But there could be, and there could be pressure applied specifically to making sure that those agencies and ministers were kept honest in regard to that particular target.

But in this case, there's an example from Europe, called "COOL" - working for a reduction in CO2, which did deal with transport, and it was looking at some fairly supply-side options, they also realised that that wasn't enough, and looked at some demand-side options. You can see that there is a range of re-using cartridges and so on, and obviously that means an investment in alternatives, in methods for people to have the exchanges they need.

These are big changes, so the investment is significant obviously, and one of the important things - and this is something that came up at the end of the plenary session - is the extent to which there is a significant investment in our current strategies, in terms of freeways, in terms of investment in the supply side, and that we don't attempt to shield that by talking about private-public partnerships, which is just a way of shuffling the books. And that's not including the impact, in terms of social and health impacts of that path. So when we look at these and say "wow, they're really difficult" what we don't realise is that we're taking an active policy position now, in an alternative.

So structural change is needed to reduce that dependency. I just want to briefly end on a point about the potential for several things at the international level, This is all very well for us to do in Sydney, and NSW and Australia, where in principle we could have some more control over our destiny, but what could we do internationally? This is where I'd like to come back to an interactive discussion with Leanne and others about the potential role of non-violent action, and … the extent to which non-violent action has been successful in terms of creating change. And when you collate all those together, you can see quite a picture emerging that it's the hidden approach. And I'd like to talk in our discussion about the way those methods can be applied in the Middle East or are likely to apply. For instance, what's happening in Iran at the moment is of course a key there.

The other one is, and we've all heard George Monbiot lately, and I'd say that some of you have come across Peter Singer's recent book 'One World', which looks at the potential reform of international institutions. If we combine that with, again, Dr Carson's work on participatory methods, then we have quite a powerful resource of reform and change. And then if we also look at NGO networks, and the fact that we have a lot of good examples, such as the movement against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the way that the NGO network was quite successful in preventing that. The role of Australian NGOs in East Timor, since 1975, I think is a key example of where local NGOs working with NGOs in other countries, and local resistance groups has been quite powerful and effective.

So a group of strategies internationally which can help reduce power blocs. I'll leave it there so we can come up with some discussion.