Petrol consumption and emissions from automobiles: Can policies make a difference?

Abstract

The use of fossil fuels in transportation has increasingly become an important topic as a result of growing concerns over global warming. Automobile petrol demand has been of particular interest to researchers and policy makers, given that the automobile is considered to be a major contributor to the enhanced greenhouse effect. This paper seeks to predict Australia’s automobile petrol demand up to the year 2020 based on the best performing forecasting model selected out of eight models. In order to establish ways to reduce emissions for cars, we estimated the impact on CO2 for several potential policy instruments, using TRESIS 1.4 (an integrated transport, land use and environmental strategy impact simulation program).