The New Vehicle Efficiency Standards

A word cloud from the previous FES consultation

Yesterday the federal government has released an Impact Analysis paper on its proposed New Vehicle Efficiency Standards, and is seeking public feedback on it. I spent most of 2023 campaigning for this, so I thought I'd do a quick analysis of what they've put forward. 

Draft Ballarat Net Zero Emissions Plan

The City of Ballarat's Draft Net Zero Emissions Plan (via CoB)

The City of Ballarat has passed a motion to come up with a plan for the whole municipality to reach net zero emissions by 2030. This is an incredibly ambitious goal, and it's fantastic to see this level of ambition from the council. They've released a draft plan - so how'd they do? 

Clean Transport 101: Repower

In previous posts we've seen that our priorities should be to Reduce, then Replace, then Repower; and we've gone through some guidelines for how to do the first two. So how should we Repower? 

Clean Transport 101: Reduce, Replace, Repower

Transport is Australia's third-largest, and fastest-growing, source of emissions. If we're to have any chance of keeping climate change to 1.5°C, we have to urgently clean up our transport system - but how? 

Fact-checking The Australia Institute's EV Mythbusting

The Australia Institute has been very vocally opposed to Victoria's EV tax, and recently put out a video called Electric Vehicle Myths Busted with Dan Bleakley from Coal Miners Driving Teslas. While the video does a good job of calling out some of the myths that right-wing politicians and culture warriors have been circulating for years, it also repeats some of the myths TAI have been perpetuating throughout the EV tax debate - so I thought I'd quickly run through it and fact-check them. As I've said before, EVs are much better than ICE vehicles - but they're no silver bullet. 

Audrey Quicke & Richie Merzian from The Australia Institute

Is road-user charging for EVs a good idea?

Electric vehicles charging (via Joenomias)

Following South Australia's announcement a few weeks ago, Victoria has just announced that it will be the second state in Australia to introduce a road-user charge (RUC) for Electric Vehicles. The stated rationale is to replace fuel excise - EVs don't burn petrol, so this revenue source will disappear as we transition from Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs) to EVs. But critics say that this disincentivises EV ownership, and will slow down that transition. So is it a good idea or not? 

Primer: Should you buy an electric car?

Electric vehicle and charger (via Walter Baxter)

Knowing my keen interests in transport and climate change, people sometimes ask me whether they should buy an electric car for environmental reasons. The short answer is "it depends", and the long answer is annoyingly complicated, so to help others who might be wondering the same thing (and to help illustrate a point I want to make in tomorrow's blog post) I thought I'd summarise the key points here.