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transport

Up up and away

April 2005:
Petrol price 114.0

September 2005:
Petrol price 134.9

May 2008:
Petrol price 154.9

June 2008:
Petrol price 169.9

Richard Heinberg:

“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.”

Hope you’re paying attention to this, Mr Rudd, Mr Brumby.

By Daniel Bowen

Transport blogger / campaigner and spokesperson for the Public Transport Users Association / professional geek.
Bunurong land, Melbourne, Australia.
Opinions on this blog are all mine.

8 replies on “Up up and away”

Commonsense and logic….sadly anyone with half a brain could have seen this coming even 12 months ago, thus proving most politicians are defying science and are surviving with less than half a brain.

Actually I think the politicians are worse than stupid. They know exactly what they are doing, they just have other priorities. The kind of short term priorities that has them scrambling to score points against each other instead of finding proper long term solutions.

I fell into a lifestyle based entirely on cycling, public transport and eco-crushing long haul plane flights by accident as a grad student. It now looks like the unexpected financial boon of not owning a car will be wiped out by rising food prices and increases in the occasional plane fare to see family. I’d like to be a smug cyclist, but it’s hard to identify any short term winners. (Other than possibly local stores that were being driven under – no pun intended – by mega-cheap edge-of-town supermarkets.)

There’s no use blaming polititians it’s the public they are pandering to, people don’t want to be told their easy lifestyle will need to change so they vote for who ever promises that there is no real problem.

Now Kev is getting ready to make hard desissions about climate change and every self interest group are crying no fare, that the pain should be someone elses.

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