“The car is doomed,” says Damon Honnery, an associate professor at Australia’s Monash University. In an interview with the Melbourne newspaper The Age, Prof. Honnery discussed the findings of his soon-to-be-published research paper, “Mitigating Greenhouse: Limited Time, Limited Options,” written with Dr. Patrick Moriarty.

Car travel should be cut by 80 percent, road construction halted, air travel drastically cut, and public transport boosted if Australia is to meet carbon emission targets set by the Kyoto Protocol. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor government signed on to the UN climate change treaty last December at the Bali conference on global warming.

Governments must focus on phasing out cars, improving the energy efficiency of public transport and making people use it, the professors argue. “People are going to have to fundamentally change the way they think about travel and make much more use of non-motorised travel such as cycling and walking,” Professor Honnery said.

Dr. Moriarty also wants to see air travel curtailed. “An overseas trip might become a once-in-a-lifetime experience rather than an annual event,” he said. Neither of the professors indicated whether these proposed restrictions should also apply to the hordes of government officials, professors, environmental activists, and UN bureaucrats who jet from one exotic summit locale to the next in their unending race to “save the planet.”

Ironically, the article on the Honnery-Moriarty paper appeared on the same day that hundreds of scientists and climate-change experts gathered in New York City for an International Conference on Climate Change that declared, “‘Global warming’ is not a global crisis!” Many of the scientists signed the Manhattan Declaration, which takes aim at draconian government tax and regulatory measures, like the Honnery-Moriarty proposals. The declaration notes that “there is no convincing evidence that CO₂ emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.” For more on the conference see the cover story "2008 Climate Debate."

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