The 2020 Summit - will Rudd’s children forgive him?

The relative dearth of scientists in the “Population etc.” group was pointed out before the summit by an article at the Larvatus Prodeo blog:

One thing that did stick out rather strongly in the list was the number of experts on water policy - water scientists and administrators seem to be a dime a dozen, compared to experts in, say, sustainable transport policy or geosequestration. … we haven’t even started to grope towards environmentally sustainable urban transport solutions. And, as previously noted, Australia’s greenhouse policy still amounts to a massive bet on carbon capture and storage; wouldn’t it be kind of useful to have more than a couple of people in a position to know whether it’s a goer or not?

Amazingly, despite the presence of so many water policy “experts”, the summit report included nothing on our dying Murray River.

A transport engineer I cited previously is worth hearing again:

I find the list of attendees frustrating in several respects. There are some very good economists (e.g. Garnaut and Quiggan) and some genuine climate experts (e.g. Pearman) but a lot of political figures … and virtually nobody with a technical background in transport. I'm not saying the world should be run by engineers and scientists but this is a technically complex problem and yet there are virtually NO technical experts on infrastructure in that whole group in my opinion. They seem to assume that the only possible solutions will be economic policies which achieve political support.

The lack of expert opinion at the 2020 Summit has had telling results. Scratch the surface of their “innovative ideas” and we find the past’s mistakes repeated. As the transport engineer now notes:

… the stuff I have seen so far will change nothing as far as transport is concerned. That recommendation about having everyone within 800 metres of public transport is completely pointless. The problem with public transport is not lack of route coverage, but their frequency, reliability and speed. (Much harder to fix.) You can put a bus route within 800 meters of a lot of people if it snakes around enough back streets. But it will be so slow nobody except pensioners and non-car owners will catch it. The ineffectiveness of approaches like that has been known for decades … In south east Queensland they tried to introduce a policy to have 80% of urban areas within 400 metres of public transport services in the mid 1990s. Yet it achieved nothing - public transport mode share continued to fall! In more recent times higher fuel prices and efforts like the Brisbane Busway and the Perth-Mandurah rail line (both offering frequent reliable services) have worked far better. But they cost real $ to implement.

The true tragedy of the 2020 Summit is that it has poisoned the intellectual well for the ideas it did not discuss. The Summit was presented to the Australian public as:

… bring[ing] together some of the best and brightest brains from across the country to tackle the long term challenges confronting Australia’s future -challenges which require long-term responses from the nation beyond the usual three year electoral cycle.

The implication is that if 1,000 of our “best” minds did not identify an issue as important then it is not worthy of future consideration or discussion. How can we now get the public to take seriously our peak oil concerns (let alone act on them) when these have not been rubber-stamped as “valid” by Rudd’s Summit?

In the past fortnight the Russians effectively declared their oil production to be past peak while Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah announced that the kingdom would conserve some oil reserves for future generations rather than maxing production to make life more affordable for Australian motorists. Oil is now over US$110 per barrel but, for Australia, the future of oil is not important (at least not for the millionaire Rudd family).

Kevin Rudd does not “… want to have to explain to my kids, … that we failed to act, that we avoided the tough decisions, that we failed to prepare Australia for its future challenges” but by ignoring peak oil at the 2020 Summit he reminds me of the UK’s Agriculture Minister John Gummer. In the midst of the mad cow disease crisis in 1990 Gummer sought to allay his nation’s fears about the safety of eating beef by feeding his daughter a hamburger. Today, 18 years later, over 160 people have died from eating British beef. Will Rudd’s children forgive their father’s inaction as their rosy futures disintegrate in the next decade?