Article: Report warns of oil woes

[ozbob]

From the Melbourne Age click here!

Report warns of oil woes

Report warns of oil woes
Andrew West
December 28, 2010

AUSTRALIA will be forced to rely on huge quantities of imported oil unless it radically overhauls its transport and urban policies, according to a major study by the Planning Institute of Australia.

The study - comprising a series of papers in the latest edition of the journal Australian Planner - warns that without urgent national action the country's trade deficit will spiral and many of the outer suburbs will become slums.

One of the study's authors, Professor Peter Newman of Curtin University, who is also an adviser to the federal government, said the most compelling finding of the research was that ''urban sprawl is finished''. He said: ''If we continue to roll out new land releases and suburbs that are car-dependent, they will become the slums of the future.''

Professor Newman, who serves on the board of the federal agency Infrastructure Australia, has already begun briefing the Council of Australian Governments on the need to test all future urban development against the potential for an oil shortage.

He said every state should duplicate a Queensland law that requires local councils to conduct an ''oil dependence study'' when approving new developments.

The study's co-ordinator, Dr Jago Dodson of Griffith University, forecast a grim future, with Australia's trade deficit, which was $9.3 billion in 2008-09, due to hit $25 billion by 2015, largely because of oil imports.

''Australia possesses huge energy reserves in coal and gas but only modest petroleum reserves, holding just 0.3 per cent of the world's oil,'' he said.

''With Australian cities so clearly exposed to the effects of depleting global oil supplies, our urban planning should now turn its attention to mitigating oil vulnerability and adapting Australian cities to an oil-constrained world.''

Professor Newman said the cost of building public transport to remote suburbs on the urban fringe would become prohibitive and Australian policymakers were ''about 30 years behind the times'' in solving the problem.