The report of this group commissioned during Kevin Rudd's period as prime minister was released about a week ago. I gave a presentation to some members of the team earlier this year on my work comparing Australian energy efficiency to that of other countries. So I was particularly interested to see what they came up with. One interesting point for academic economists is that the extensive reference list in the report includes hardly any references to the academic energy economics literature. There are no references to journals like Energy Policy or Energy Economics. There are several to a special issue of the journal Energy Efficiency which dealt with the energy efficiency certificates that the Task Force came out in favor of. I wonder whether this is because what is published in these journals is too esoteric, too useless or irrelevant, or the group just didn't have the time to do look through that stuff. It's got to be a bit depressing for people who publish stuff on energy policy to see a review which doesn't really look at all at most of what has been published academically on the topic. Also, the advisory group to the task force included representatives of industry and NGOs but no academic researchers.
I'll have more on the report soon. Henry Ergas doesn't like it.
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