One of the problems with the decarbonisation challenge is the incomprehensibility of energy units. One of those units is "million tonnes oil equivalent" or MTOE. Currently Australians consume around 133 MTOE in fossil fuels each year (we produce a lot more for export). 
While it's easy to say our #zerocarbon2050 challenge is to reduce consumption by 133 MTOE over 30 years, I doubt anyone has any idea what that means in terms of individual action. To do so we need a different set of units.
One way is to convert MTOE to LOE - litres of Oil equivalent - on a per capita basis. Currently, the Australian economy runs at around 6000 LOE's per person, which amounts about to 120 (50 l) tanks of petrol - or one tank of petrol of every 3 days for each person.
Interestingly, 11 years ago the rate was over 6800 LOE's per person. The reason total fossil consumption is growing is that our population grows faster than the fall in per capita consumption (nb. a shift to more gas and oil and less coal means per capita emissions are falling)
Nevertheless we are reducing at about 70 LOE's per person each year (~1.5 fuel tanks) and trend will have us below 4000 LOE's by 2050. Remarkably, that is about 1/3 the rate we need to get to zero LOE's by 2050. Did anyone notice!
In fact our challenge is to reduce average per capita consumption by about 4 tanks of petrol for each and every year, from now to 2050. Suddenly the challenge seems (at least to me) far less challenging.
several additional points ...
1) the carbon challenge is intimately related to population policy, with population growth a key driver for our increasing oil consumption.
1) the carbon challenge is intimately related to population policy, with population growth a key driver for our increasing oil consumption.
2) Australian oil production is in rapidly decline. We are on track to be totally dependant on imports by 2030, with a huge impost on the current account unless, of course, we rapidly reduce our per capita LOE.
