Should banning petrol cars and going electric be Australia's next light bulb moment?
ABC News
May 25 2021
A close up of a large round lightbulb with a string of others behind it.
It became illegal to import the traditional pear-shaped globes from February 2009.
In 2007, Malcolm Turnbull turned off an industry's life support without blinking.
The industry made light bulbs, of the traditional kind — so energy inefficient they lost most of it as heat.
"A normal light bulb is too hot to hold — that heat is wasted, and globally represents millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide that needn't have been emitted," he explained.
From February 2009 it became illegal to import the traditional pear-shaped globes, while from November that year it became illegal to sell them.
It was a world-first, announced by Turnbull as environment minister and sanctioned by his prime minister, John Howard.
The European Union followed, and then, some years later, China.
Malcolm Turnbull's light bulb policy was a world first and sanctioned by Prime Minister John Howard.
Globally, electric lighting generated emissions equal to 70 per cent of those from cars. Australia's switch cut emissions by an estimated 4 million tonnes per year.
Turnbull was able to do it because Australia no longer made light globes.
There was no domestic industry — and no jobs — to protect.
Can the car industry make the same shift?
Australia stopped making cars in 2017. The thousands of workers who used to assemble cars in Australia no longer have those jobs.
Which means there's no car industry to protect.
We have the opportunity to do to traditionally powered cars what we did to incandescent light bulbs.
And the need. We've all but committed ourselves to net-zero emissions by 2050.
In a landmark report released last Tuesday, the International Energy Agency said the path to net zero by 2050 was narrow and extremely challenging, requiring governments to "take action this year and every year after so that the goal does not slip out of reach".
Many of the 400 or so milestones it set out are challenging for Australia, among them no new coal mines or mine expansions from this year, and the closure of almost all of Australia's coal-fired power stations by the end of this decade.
But one of the milestones ought to be easy.
It's no new sales of internal combustion cars by 2035.
A small grey electric charge with charger nozzle attached.
Is no new sales of internal combustion cars by 2035 achievable policy?
The rest of the world is racing ahead
As a step along the way, the agency wants two thirds of all new cars sold to be petrol-free by 2030.
Australia, with no vehicle production industry to care about, ought to get there sooner.
Norway has promised no new petrol car sales by 2025; Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland and Israel by 2030; and California and the United Kingdom by 2035, a target the UK has brought forward from 2040.
In addition, the European Union is imposing manufacturer-specific emissions targets, which will force each one to either sell a greater proportion of non-petrol vehicles or make the ones they do sell much more efficient.
Manufacturers are getting in early. Honda says it will sell only electric and hybrid vehicles in Europe starting in 2022, three years earlier than previously planned. Volvo says 50 per cent of its worldwide sales will be fully electric by 2025 and the rest hybrids.
Like the transitions to colour TV, automatic car windows, automatic transmissions and transistor radios, the shift will be one way. When production lines are retooled, there will be no turning back.
Moving quickly would do more than help Prime Minister Scott Morrison produce a credible roadmap to take to Glasgow climate talks in November.
It would enable us to avoid becoming a dumping ground for the dirtier, more polluting vehicles that can't be sold elsewhere while the changeover is underway.
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