Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemSustainable energy in Australia: an analysis of performance and drivers relative to other OECD countries( 2009)How sustainable is Australia’s pattern of energy supply and use? What are the major factors explaining Australia’s sustainable energy performance relative to other countries? This thesis explores energy supply and use in Australia during the 1990s and 2000s and examines major drivers such as policy decisions, economic structure and trade profile. Performance and drivers in Australia are compared with other OECD countries. To address the questions posed above, it is first necessary to explore the concepts of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainable energy’ and consider how best to measure sustainable energy performance. Alternative sustainability frameworks and models are examined, with the ‘strong sustainability’ model adopted for this thesis being distinguished from other models in three principal ways: i) it places biophysical constraints on economic activity; ii) it regards certain critical natural capital is being non-substitutable; and iii) it places roughly equal emphasis on intra- and intergenerational equity. The strong sustainability model is operationalised into a series of principles and objectives for energy sustainability, which in turn are used as a basis for systematically developing a suite of sustainable energy indicators. This approach is preferred over other approaches to assessing sustainable energy performance given the study’s focus on measurable objectives and outcomes. The second part of the thesis is devoted to measuring the sustainable energy performance of Australia and other OECD countries against twelve indicators. Some of the indicators selected are ‘standard’, being quite commonly used in other contexts. A number of the indicators though, are unique or have unique features that increase their validity as measures of strong sustainability. Initial results of the performance assessment suggest that Australia is amongst the weakest performing OECD countries, ranking last of all OECD countries against two of the twelve sustainable energy indicators and in the lower quartile of OECD countries against a further six indicators. Further analysis, combining and weighting indicator scores and country rankings across the 12 indicators confirms Australia’s poor performance. Australia ranks 28th of 30 OECD countries by two different ranking methods and 15th of 16 OECD countries by another two methods. Only the USA ranks consistently lower than Australia. Denmark consistently ranks highest of all countries by all methods. The third and final part of the thesis examines drivers of sustainable energy performance by Australia and a subset of four OECD countries: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden (OECD 4). The primary basis for OECD 4 selection was strong performance against the sustainable energy indicators, although other criteria including economic structure, trade and demography were also considered. A range of techniques, including factorisation, ‘what if’ analysis and linear regression are used to diagnose the underlying factors driving the performance of Australia and the OECD 4 against the sustainable energy indicators. The analysis is extended to include a qualitative assessment of policy drivers including strategic and institutional settings, energy pricing, electricity market policies, R & D and regulation. A major conclusion of the thesis based on the analysis is that Australia’s weak sustainable energy performance since 1990, relative to other OECD countries, has been substantially shaped by domestic policy decisions, decisions that were not inevitable given Australia’s economic structure, trade profile, demography, and geography.