If you’ve followed Australian news over the past two months, the sense of panic has been all-pervasive. Headlines about the fuel crisis blast from screen and podcasts tracking fuel supplies update daily, while images of shuttered petrol stations and trucking companies facing financial ruin are unavoidable. The message has all the subtlety of a hammer: We can’t live without fossil fuels. The problems of yesterday – climate change, stagnant transport decarbonisation and stalled renewable energy projects – have been swept aside. Climate change doesn’t matter when we are paying 50 cents per litre more for petrol. Instead, the information waves are clogged with the message that we need more fuel, more storage, more distribution, more access, lower prices. The only cure for a fossil fuel crisis is more fossil fuel dependency.
This knee-jerk response to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not an accident of geography or economics; it is a reflection of a deeply entrenched mining-centric narrative that has long underpinned Australia’s national identity. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has worked to insert itself as the bedrock of the Australian economy and culture. Through extensive lobbying and media campaigns it has constructed an “artificial reality” where fossil fuels are the solution, and clean fuels are a distraction.[1] This myth is bolstered by politicians all too willing to signal their unwavering allegiance to fossil fuels. They denigrate electric vehicles, allow the country to be used as dumping ground for fossil fuel guzzling cars banned in other countries, and gift the largest consumers of diesel in the country – mining companies – $60 billion in diesel fuel credits in less than 20 years.
We also bought into this story. As industry advertising drives the obsession with ever-larger SUVs and 4WDs, we cling to the myth of the valiant explorer taming a harsh landscape to dig resources that power our prosperity. This romanticised delusion has kept us shackled to fossil fuels and blind to a better, cleaner, safer future. Had we embraced electric vehicle imports earlier, fostered a genuine transition to renewable energy, made fossil fuel companies pay for the harm they cause, and nurtured our own technological innovations, we could have been insulated from the effects of fossil fuel addiction. And fuel would only cost the price of sunlight.
The irony is sharp: while Australian households struggle with petrol costs resulting from a decade of climate denial and market dumping of polluting vehicles, multinational gas companies exporting Australian resources are reaping record profits from global price spikes. The public is paying the price for choosing mining lobbyists and wealthy vested interests over a resilient, electrified transport grid.
To make sense of this moment, we should recognise this crisis for what it is: a public relations coup. The industry’s insistence that we must rapidly expand fossil fuel projects, bypass environmental regulations to dig for uneconomic domestic oil, or continue subsidising their own fuel costs under the guise of security is a masterclass in strategic distraction. We need to reject the industry-led narrative that our only hope lies in digging deeper. It is time to call out this profiteering for what it is. A capture of our political imagination that benefits a few while our climate and the Australian public bear the cost.
[1] R. Gulliver (2024). “The Fossil Fuel Façade: Unmasking an Artificially Constructed Reality,” M/C Journal 27(6).
*Cover Image: Oil Rig Maintenance in Darwin Harbour, September 2013 by Ken Hodge licensed under CC BY 2.0.
[Cover Image Description: Offshore oil drilling platform on tall red legs in Darwin Harbour, with a red Norwegian Farstadt Shipping Tug Supply Vessel Far Fosna alongside and a shoreline in the distance.]
