Tag Archive for 'petrol prices'

Bait and switch

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Economics, Energy, Environment and Markets
. Closed

dk.au’s quite right that from a policy angle, the ETS Green Paper is highly problematic. In the short term, politically, obviously what Kevin Rudd is doing is stealing Malcolm Turnbull’s clothes on petrol, adopting his proposal of an excise cut. This snookers the Libs on petrol, but then, they were hardly getting any political traction on that issue anyway. It’s a missed opportunity in more senses than one - it plays to the populist narrative and avoids the much more important task of communicating why an ETS - and a rigorous ETS - is necessary. You can’t do short term populism and long term policy at the same time. Ross Garnaut made that point effectively last week. The government might have done well to take note.

More broadly, I think the context for this is that Labor is looking to cut the Greens out of the Senate equation on emissions trading. Continue reading ‘Bait and switch’

Fuel demand is elastic - Australian edition

Published
by
Robert Merkel
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change, Energy and Markets
. 52 Comments

There’s been evidence, previously reported on LP, that demand for petroleum is dropping substantially in the United States. But, unfortunately, there aren’t any public, timely statistics on Australia’s total fuel usage that I’ve seen yet. But Steven Long at PM has dug up an interesting proxy for it: total petroleum imports, which are sinking like a stone, despite a gradual declining trend in Australia’s domestic petroleum production. From the transcript of the report:

CRAIG JAMES: What we saw in May is that the amount of petroleum that we’ve imported 28 per cent lower than what it was a year ago.

Thais is the biggest fall that we’ve seen in over four years. And it certainly shows that the higher prices are having an impact on people’s behaviours.

STEPHEN LONG: And disabuses people of the notion that basically demand for petrol was non-elastic that people kept on demanding petrol no matter what the price.?

CRAIG JAMES: Well that’s right. It certainly has hit people right squarely between the eyes this time around. Most consumers, motorists would have been used to seeing a $1.40 at the petrol sign boards, but all of a sudden it becomes a $1.50 or $1.55.

Continue reading ‘Fuel demand is elastic - Australian edition’