Financial incentives and tax breaks are needed to encourage vehicle owners to get rid of combustion engine vehicles and transition to electric vehicles, Australia's peak national transport advisory group has found.
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The nation's peak body for road transport and traffic, Austroads, last week released an issues paper which analysed the contribution by the transport sector to Australia's greenhouse gas emissions and has highlighted the need for "a strategic re-balancing of priorities" to achieve future emission targets.
Transport accounts for about 19 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions and is steadily rising, with cars, light commercial vehicles and heavy vehicles as the major contributors.
Transport sector emissions in the December quarter of last year alone rose another 2.7 per cent in "actual" terms, according to the government's latest greenhouse accounts.
Electric vehicles (EVs) currently account for less than 2 per cent of national vehicle sales but more models are coming thick and fast, with numbers forecast to reach 23 per cent by 2030.
However, Austroads' modelling shows our EV sales simply are not moving fast enough to control our emissions output without some active form of policy intervention.
This week UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flagged a scheme in which owners would be given up to 6000 pounds (A$10,900) to swap their diesel and petrol cars for electric.
The Austroads report said that only with a two-pronged approach - encouraging the "retiring" of older vehicles from the road and through "accelerated policy intervention" to support electric vehicle sales - will the adopted emissions targets be achieved.
It also flagged the need to "drive behaviour change in reducing the reliance of passengers and freight on the road network".
It says encouraging people to use their cars less could be achieved through the politically unpalatable concept of road pricing, which is basically charging vehicle owners for the distance they drive every day.
"While it [road pricing] has primarily been used globally as a [traffic] congestion management tool, it provides a strong mechanism for influencing and enabling emission reductions," the report says.
Tougher vehicle emission laws remain a continual "no-go" area for the Australian government and the commercial aftershocks on the car industry wrought by the coronavirus pandemic means that this position is likely to remain unchanged. Australia does not have mandatory greenhouse gas emission standards in place for cars.
In 2018, Australia's national average carbon dioxide emissions intensity from new passenger and light commercial vehicles was 45 per cent higher than in Europe.
A significant part of the problem is Australia's poor quality regular-grade petrol, which is high in sulphur content and acts as a catalyst "poison" for the latest generation of vehicle emission control systems in cars.
Car importers last year wanted government to accelerate the mandating of better quality fuel but were comprehensively out-muscled by the fuel industry, which won the political lobby to keep national fuel standards unchanged until 2027.
The latest United Nations Emissions Gap Report released last year found that total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide have reached a record high level.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement to which Australia is a signatory, to achieve the a global average temperature reduction of less than 1.5 degrees C by 2050 there needs to be at least a 50 per cent reduction from 2018 levels.
However, global gas emissions have risen by 1.5 per cent per year in the past decade, the Austroads report found.
Among the states and territories, the ACT has set the most aggressive target for net zero emissions by 2045.
