Australia urged to become electric-car champion

BARRY PARK

September 28, 2009 - 11:00AM

An automotive industry-based roadmap says Australia could become a world authority on zero-emissions technology, writes Barry Park.

Australia should become a world authority for a new generation of zero-emission vehicles by 2020, a roadmap spelling out the future of the automotive industry says.

The Co-operative Research Centre for Advanced Automotive Technology paper, released today, urges the Australian industry to shift its focus from traditional car-making to providing zero-emission technology for the world.

The call comes despite minimal electric vehicle expertise to date, with automotive powerhouses from Japan, Europe and the United States leading the electric charge.

‘‘Australia’s automotive industry must achieve recognition as a strategic element of the global automotive industry to be attractive to global companies and their investors,’’ the paper says.

‘‘Australia must have a sustainable, profitable vehicle manufacturing industry with global reach that maximises opportunities in local and international markets.

"The industry must be bigger, more productive, and provide more jobs in the manufacturing and supply sectors. This can be achieved through leveraging existing strengths and building new capabilities,” it says.

The paper then suggests Australia could become one of the world’s leading designers and producers of competitive, large, powerful, zero-emission passenger vehicles.

‘‘This game-changing initiative will use Australia’s strategic strengths and capabilities, supported by investment attraction and focused government support, and will meet the identified and emerging needs of the global automotive market,’’ the paper says.

‘‘By leading development in this segment, Australia will own a greater portfolio of [intellectual property] and become the industry of choice for design, engineering and testing of globally desirable fuel-efficient and environmentally responsible products.’’

The roadmap was forged in a Victorian Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development workshop held in Melbourne earlier this month.

Those taking part in formulating the vision included representatives from state and federal government, tyre companies, unions, academics, scientists, car-parts suppliers, and local car-makers Ford, Holden and Toyota.

The roadmap is the first of six steps that the AutoCRC is taking to help the Australian car-making industry reinvent itself for the future.
Federal Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr said the roadmap was a ‘‘crucial first step in developing a roadmap that will drive innovation and continue to support high-wage, high-skill jobs in this vital manufacturing sector”.

Holden is the only local car-maker so far to hint at a future product featuring an electric drive system. The Holden Volt, as the car will be known, will use a petrol engine hooked up to an electric generator to get around one of the electric vehicle’s greatest challenges — its limited battery-only range. It can also be recharged in a regular powerpoint.

Holden has only so far hinted that the Volt could be made in Australia, with its underpinnings based on Cruze small car that will be built in Australia from 2010.

Meanwhile, Toyota brings out a locally assembled hybrid version of its Camry sedan early next year that uses an electric motor to help its four-cylinder petrol engine cut down on fuel use.

Ford says it plans to bring a battery-electric Ford Focus small passenger car to the market in 2011, although no mention is made of the vehicle joining showrooms in Australia.

Ford Australia recently dumped plans to build the Focus in Australia, instead focusing on a range of more fuel-efficient engines for its locally made Falcon sedan and Territory soft-roader.

The Automotive Australia 2020 project is expected to be completed by April next year

more people, more damage - ross gittings, smh

Population Explosion & Eco - Damage

You little beauty. Kevin Rudd's admission that the world's leaders are a long way from reaching an agreement on how to respond to climate change means there's no reason to get his carbon pollution reduction scheme passed by Parliament before the meeting at Copenhagen in December. And if the leaders can't reach an agreement then, we may need do nothing at all.

Wow. Off the hook. All the nastiness that was the emissions trading scheme - a new tax, by any other name - no longer needed. Some countries have all the luck.

Yes, I am being sarcastic. Listen to the Opposition and you'd think our problem wasn't that the world's getting hotter, the weather wilder and the sea level higher but that limiting those things may involve some unpleasantness. A new tax? Surely global warming can't be that bad.

The Government is little better. Of Rudd's 100 top priorities, responding to climate change is just one. He can't resist playing politics. He advances the most timid policy at home, then jets off to lecture others on the need for concerted action. And boy, doesn't Kev look worried about the planet as he mixes and mingles with the great and good.

It's clear the penny hasn't dropped. Neither our leaders nor we have any real appreciation of the severity and urgency of the problem we face. We can't focus on the problem for more than a few minutes. We can't stir ourselves to action.

Everyone (rightly) condemns economists for their failure to foresee and warn us about the global financial crisis but here's a climate crisis we've seen coming for years - and whose early effects we've witnessed - and we can't take it seriously.

Even the economists who brought us the emissions trading scheme don't adequately appreciate the problem we've got. They think all we have to do is switch to low-carbon energy sources (ideally by capturing all the carbon emitted by burning coal) and the economy can go on growing as if nothing had happened.

Being economists, they see us as all living in an economy, with this thing at the side called the environment that occasionally causes problems we need to deal with. As usual, wrong model. In reality, the economy exists within the ecosystem, taking natural resources from it, using them and then ejecting wastes, including sewage, garbage, pollution and greenhouse gases.

The global economy grows as the world's population grows and as material living standards rise. The problem is that the human population and material affluence have grown so much over the past 200 years that our economic activity is putting increasing pressure on the ecosystem that ensures our survival.

On the one hand we're chewing through non-renewable resources at a rapid rate and using renewable resources faster than their ability to renew themselves. On the other, we're spewing out wastes faster than the ecosystem can absorb them.

Global warming, an example of the latter, is just the most acute respect in which global economic activity is undermining the healthy functioning of our ecosystem.

We're destroying the world's fish stocks, farming practices are causing acidification, desertification and

erosion of land, dams and irrigation are destroying our rivers and human ''progress'' is destroying species.

All this is happening with only about 15 per cent of the world's population enjoying high material living standards similar to ours.

Now consider what happens to the global economy's use of natural resources and generation of wastes when China and India - accounting for almost 40 per cent of the world's population - get on a path of rapid economic development to raise their citizens' standard of living to something approaching ours.

Since the rich countries are reluctant to countenance a decline in living standards, to put it mildly, and the poor countries most assuredly won't abandon their quest for affluence, there's one obvious variable that could be used to limit global economic activity's deleterious impact on the ecosystem: population growth.

Limiting population growth in the developing world and allowing population to continue on its established path of decline in the developed world wouldn't be easy but it would be easier than trying to prevent rising living standards among those already living.

Hence my dismay when Wayne Swan's announcement last week, that Australia's population in 40 years is now expected to be

6.5 million greater than was expected just three years ago, was received without the blinking of an eyelid. Ho-hum, tell me something interesting.

From 21.5 million today, our population by about 2050 is now expected to reach not 28.5 million but more than 35 million. That's growth of 65 per cent rather than 33 per cent. The revised estimate is driven by ''a greater number of women of child-bearing age, higher fertility rates and increased net overseas migration'', Swan explained.

Even at an upwardly revised total fertility rate of more than 1.9 births per woman, we're still well below the long-term replacement rate of 2.1 births. So it's likely that most of the upward revision comes from higher immigration, which would also increase the number of women of child-bearing age.

You might think that, once people have been born, it doesn't matter to the global environment what country they live in.

But if they move from a developing to a developed country - as in our case most would - their standard of living (and thus their use of natural resources and generation of wastes) greatly increases.

Our apparently universally approved determination to maintain high immigration greatly increases the difficulty we'll have reducing our carbon emissions, puts a lot of upward pressure on house prices and raises questions about whether we're exceeding our Earth's ''carrying capacity''.

But never mind all that. Did you know Our Kev had breakfast with the great Bill Clinton? Bill had an omelet but Kev had fruit salad.

Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.

Dolphin hunt now going ahead..depsite 'the cove'

Japanese Dolphin Hunt

Japanese town starts dolphin hunt

Updated: 14:27, Friday September 11, 2009

To animal rights activists it's a cruel and bloody slaughter; for Japanese it's a long tradition: this week fishermen in a picturesque coastal town embarked on their annual dolphin hunt.

Every year crews in motorboats here have rounded up about 2,000 of the sea mammals, banged metal poles to herd them into a small, rocky cove and killed them with harpoons, sparing a few dozen for sale to marine aquariums.

But this year the small southwestern town of Taiji was shunted into the global spotlight with the release of the hard-hitting US-made eco-documentary 'The Cove'.

In the film, years in the making, a team of underwater cameramen, free divers and other experts used hidden cameras and other technical devices to covertly capture the hunt in graphic detail.

The film shows angry confrontations between residents and the lead activist, Ric O'Barry, who in the 1960s trained dolphins for the US hit television show 'Flipper' but now argues the animals should be free to roam the oceans.

The film won numerous international prizes, including the Sundance Festival's audience award and last month led the Australian city of Broome to announce it would cancel its sister-city relationship with Taiji.

'Dolphins are a large-brain creature,' O'Barry, 69, told AFP during a recent return visit to Japan.

'They are highly intelligent. They are self-aware, like gorillas and humans. I nursed them, I watched them give birth.

'And for me, to kill them, is extremely, extremely...' He paused, then simply added: 'I don't see the purpose.'

In Taiji, where about 3,700 people live, the global uproar stirred by 'The Cove' has met with equal incomprehension - and anger.

'If it's cruel to kill dolphins, it's also cruel to kill cows and pigs,' Hiromitsu Taniguchi, a 41-year-old house painter, told AFP during a recent interview as several of his friends nodded in agreement.

'I can never understand those westerners' argument. They eat cattle, pigs and chicken. We eat dolphins and whales. That's it.'