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Climate change & emissions trading

FFC Mariner

Well-Known Member
No but they are the people who vote and they employ lots of people who also vote.

SME's are by far the largest employers in Australia.

This scheme/tax out in open debate will get shredded because it cant be explained.
 

dibo

Well-Known Member
It can be explained. That it can't be chewed down into tiny pieces and spat into people's mouths in bite size pieces doesn't make it wrong. It's complex, and that *some* people can't devote a good five minutes or so to understand the dynamics of it doesn't make it any worse an idea than running an army or many other things that cost a lot more...
 

midfielder

Well-Known Member
FFC

My experience with Small Business is similar to yours which may colour our responses and my work in tax may also over influence the aspect I come from..

Having said that our experience I believe is important in this debate because it is people like us who become in many ways the distribution system of information.. and communication works best when it is two way ... top down and bottom up... and sideways as well... and informal communication works much better than formal in the communication process at getting key messages across.

You also referred to the four types of taxes and how you could apply them. There is merit in what you say in one sense and problems in other areas. First the merit, all tax systems can only tax the four areas I identified and therefore all [well countries that can make a difference] have similar taxes.. The weakness is ..similar.. and what changes are made and how those changes are interpreted by the various courts.

The reason I choose a levy and on movement is everyone can do the same thing..

To explain Dibo is correct when he says this needs to an internationally agreeable, with the hope that developing nations will also join in ( assuming you agree Dibo on developing nations).  Say  US $ 0.015 was charged on every cent of fuel purchased by all countries that agreed. This is very simple spreads the cost across all sectors and affects everyone the same and has only a few taxing points thus very easy to collect measure etc.. The taxing points would be each refinery would add the change to all their customers.

The next bit is the challenge to collect this money and give it to IMO a UN appointed Greening Committee who in turn would distribute the funds to anyone who has a decent idea for new and better ways to fix the plant Maybe each country could collect the funds and fund their own research into new and better ways..

Without trying to repeat myself IMO the best chance is for humans to invent new products rather than apply controls to the existing problem children.  Thus the fuel levy is easy, understandable, enforceable, spreads the affect and if every nation does the same thing it is workable.
 

midfielder

Well-Known Member
To All

This is important stuff maybe a few more could join in...


Please

16179_no_exception_770.jpg
 

FFC Mariner

Well-Known Member
Assuming that we are about to embark on a slow change from 19C technology powered by fossil fuel towards a cleaner greener world, a few elephants in the room need to be confronted.

The oil industry and its stranglehold on US politics (and to a lesser extent the UK)

Power and how we generate it (selling Uranium is ok but using it ourselves isnt? How does that work?). We have a resource to produce cleaner electricity, we have desert everywhere so it doesnt need to be done in population centres so lets examine the nuclear option.

Imagine that we had never invented (say) the car. If someone wanted to design a vehicle would it look anything like what we have? Probably not and it wouldnt be powered as inefficiently as by petrol I expect.

We need to revisit the transport debate and develop mass transit systems that are clean and actually work. This is too important to leave to the States and needs central control and planning. Actually, the States are a 19c colonial hangover too - I would love to see them go but I digress.

1 thing I would do is use any levy to chuck shit loads of cash at the CSIRO and tell them to get cracking. Any technology can be licensed back to the private sector.

Somewhere we need to find a PM who has a vision for nation building. Would the Harbour Bridge be contemplated now? or the Snowy Mountains scheme? Sadly probably not.

Thats not a dig at either side of politics, its an indictment on the party machines and the sort of bland,faceless people who can survive in the system.
 

dibo

Well-Known Member
That last post is a gem FFC. I agree with almost all of it, though I still have issues with nuclear. The simple problem of waste is I think nearly insurmountable. We just don't have a way of 'locking it up'. Because of this, you create an incredibly long-lived and unbelievably toxic problem for future generations - no matter how diligent and careful *we* are, we can't guarantee that it will be safe forever. For this reason I can't see why we would invest in it rather than energy sources we know to be clean.

Then there is the issue of weapons. Uranium fed fission reactors produce among many things plutonium. The best known use for plutonium is the one we're going to have a war with Iran soon enough to prevent them developing...

Given the lead time on nuclear reactors, I'd much rather us do the hard yards on wind, solar wave and tidal power. There's also geothermal which is a pretty neat idea and could provide just the sort of practically limitless clean energy that nuclear is meant to provide. I think we can continue with coal for the time being, it should just be priced appropriately (which is the whole reason I support an ETS). It should be as expensive as green power to encourage people to reduce their usage and choose green.
 

midfielder

Well-Known Member
FFC

Echo Dibo above post ...

Just liike to add the power stations where they they drill two or more holes deep into the earth and push water down one and the natural heat of the earth super heats the water and it comes up the other hole as stream and this heat drives the power station has always appealed to me...

The problem has always been to join the holes ... I understand the drilling part of the puzzle is solved, almost unlimited power for ever all you need is water to convert to steam ... a lake is perfect and in time return the steam to water back into the lake...
 

FFC Mariner

Well-Known Member
I believe there is a lot of work being done in South Australia on this? One of the issues is plugging into the grid over large distances.

Nation building, use the desert Luke, use the desert
 

midfielder

Well-Known Member
FFC Mariner said:
I believe there is a lot of work being done in South Australia on this? One of the issues is plugging into the grid over large distances.

Nation building, use the desert Luke, use the desert

That SA thing sounds hopeful and I agree if we can use the desert ... what other use is there for it..
 

dibo

Well-Known Member
Ross Gittins in today's Herald:

Abbott can't escape climate change and taxes

ROSS GITTINS
December 7, 2009

Tony Abbott's intention to have a strong climate change policy that doesn't involve an ETS or a carbon tax is rife with contradictions.

Tony Abbott's intention to have a strong climate change policy that doesn't involve an ETS or a carbon tax is rife with contradictions.

Tony Abbott's stated intention to have ''a strong and effective climate change policy'' that doesn't involve either an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax is rife with internal contradictions.

For a start, it's strange for a party of the right to reject the pro-market solution to climate change in favour of a much more intrusive, regulatory approach.

For another thing, it's strange to reject ''a big new tax'' in favour of an approach that, if it were to work, would require a huge increase in government spending on subsidies and incentives. If such an approach weren't to involve huge deficits and debt, or swingeing cuts in other government spending, it would require huge increases in old taxes.

These contradictions arise because of Kevin Rudd's success in driving a wedge between the Liberals' heartland supporters (never agree to anything proposed by evil Labor) and the wider electorate. The Herald's Nielsen poll says that even a majority of Liberal voters supports a trading scheme.

The pragmatist in Abbott knows he must go to the election with a credible-sounding plan to respond to the threat of climate change. But all the populist campaigning against ''a big new tax'' has, ironically, ruled out the most sensible approach.

But there's an even more fundamental contradiction: Abbott owes his job to the machinations of Nick Minchin and his band of climate-change deniers. If they couldn't stomach Malcolm Turnbull's compromise deal (which would have removed climate change as an election issue) why would they agree to any alternative approach proposed by Abbott?

Let's get back to basics. If you agree that global warming is a problem and something should be done to limit it, you have to accept it's a case of ''market failure'' which market forces aren't capable of correcting by themselves.

You must therefore accept the need for government intervention in the market in some form. (It's because libertarians are opposed to almost all intervention bar that needed for law, order and defence, and rarely admit the existence of market failure, that they find it so tempting to deny climate change is a problem.)

Most economic rationalists accept the need for intervention, but want to ensure it does as little as possible to disrupt the market and distort the choices made by producers and consumers. They see the problem as that the ''social cost'' of the damage done by greenhouse gas emissions isn't reflected in market prices.

So if they can find a way to get the social cost incorporated into market prices - to ''internalise the externality'' - they can leave it to market forces to do the rest.

One way to do this is impose a tax on carbon emissions, which forces up the prices of emissions-intensive goods and services, thereby reducing the demand for such items, encouraging energy efficiency, reducing any price disadvantage suffered by less-polluting energy sources and creating a monetary incentive for firms to find new technological solutions to the problem.

An emissions trading scheme is very similar. Its key role is also to raise prices, with the proceeds from sales of emissions permits going to government as a de facto tax. It creates a whole new synthetic market for the purchase and sale of permits and associated derivatives.

In theory, this makes it superior to a carbon tax. In practice, it makes it more difficult to administer and possibly opens it to greater price manipulation and uncertainty.

What you do with the proceeds from the tax is of secondary importance. You can give them to households as compensation for the rise in their cost of living, use them to cut some other tax, use them to fund research into technological solutions or use them for some unrelated worthy cause.

This exposes the Liberals' silly argument, inherited from the libertarians, that ''the big new tax'' involves ''churning'' - taxing people then giving the money back to them. Churning could be avoided simply by ensuring you didn't compensate households directly.

But if you reject both the economic rationalists' market-based solutions, what's next? Regulatory compulsion or budgetary incentives.

You could pass laws requiring new vehicles to meet higher emission standards, new appliances to be more energy-efficient and new homes and buildings to meet higher standards of weatherproofing. You could even impose retrofitting.

You could compel power stations to move to less-polluting means of generation, or just double the renewable energy target to 40 per cent. You could tightly regulate farming practices.

Sound attractive? Sound like the sort of thing a Liberal government would do? Hardly. But voluntary efforts would fall far short. Abbott has continued the Liberals' commitment to the Government's target of reducing emissions by 5 per cent of their level in 2000 by 2020.

That's tougher than it sounds because emissions keep growing. On Treasury's projections, it requires emissions in 2020 to be 21 per cent lower than otherwise.

Coal-fired electricity generation is cheap relative to renewable energy or nuclear energy precisely because its market price doesn't include the social cost of the pollution it causes.

So if you want to overcome this cost disadvantage faced by non-fossil energy sources without ''a big new tax'' or without resort to compulsion, you have to provide big subsidies from the budget as an inducement.

I fear the saga of the Liberals' travails over climate change has a lot more twists and turns to go.
 

dibo

Well-Known Member
Tim Colebatch from The Age hops in today:

Time to call off the attack

December 8, 2009

Some time before Christmas, after a year and a half of seriously heavy work, after considering hundreds of lengthy submissions from some of our best and brightest, the Henry review will deliver its report to Treasurer Wayne Swan, setting out its plan for tax reform in Australia.

Right now, I would urge the Henry team not to. I suggest some excuse be found to put it off for another year. Maybe there's some more research we ought to do. Coalition Leader Tony Abbott could help come up with some reason to avoid a decision. But why? Because the Henry team's review of the tax system is a once-in-a-generation chance for experts to look at the system in detail, and suggest how it can be made to work better. If they do their job well, there could be big gains for us as a nation.

But to bring out the report before the 2010 election, with the Opposition now opposing everything the Government proposes, would destroy that opportunity. If the Henry report is on schedule, it will be DOA - dead on arrival.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a cautious manager, not a brave reformer. At the best of times, tax reform would need a lot of luck and Opposition support to make it to the runway, let alone get airborne. Under Malcolm Turnbull as leader, it was just possible. Under Abbott, forget it.

If Abbott is willing to try to destroy emissions trading - his party's policy for years - as just ''a great big new tax'', you can imagine what he will do with a report that will inevitably propose some new taxes and tax rises, while other taxes are scrapped or cut. The Henry report will be endless fuel for Opposition attacks. And to avoid damage, Rudd is likely to respond by shelving the whole thing.

That is the problem created by oppositions that see their job as being to declare war on everything. It drags down the policy debate. The ultimate exponent today is Barnaby Joyce, who claimed last month that we won't be able to buy a steak if we have emissions trading. You can always find something to attack, set the hurdles for yourself very low, and clear them with ease.

But an opposition that wants to be taken seriously as a prospective government must set its hurdles higher. It has to propose its own policies as alternatives. We're not mugs. If an opposition leader keeps attacking the government's policies without declaring any of his own, we smell it.

We've seen lots of opposition leaders before who thought their job was to oppose whatever a government proposed. They failed to win credibility, and lost. That credibility comes from doing the hard stuff: carrying the fight to the Government on some issues, lining up with it on others, and coming up with an alternative on the issues where you differ.

Credibility would come from Abbott being what his supporters say he is: a decisive guy who is not afraid to make a tough call, who sees the positives in everything, and who doesn't hide his views, so we know exactly where he stands.

Well, please, could someone find that Tony Abbott and bring him out? The Tony Abbott we've got now is doing just the opposite: on the biggest issue of our time, he is putting off making the tough call until everyone else has done so first. And he's held so many positions on it that no one has a clue what he really thinks, or what an Abbott government would do.

In recent weeks he has declared the scientific arguments on global warming are ''complete crap''. Yet now he tells us he believes them. He urged Turnbull to put off a decision until after this month's Copenhagen summit. Now that it seems that Copenhagen is likely to put us on the path to a global agreement, he wants us to wait until the US Congress has made up its mind. If that happens in the next few months, as some close observers predict, what comes next? Do we wait until Iran or Saudi Arabia decide what to do?

What do we make of this serial indecision on an issue of first-level importance, which we have been debating for years? The Bureau of Meteorology has just reported that last month was the hottest November ever recorded across Australia. This year is likely to end up the second or third hottest on record. The past eight years have all been among the 15 hottest years on record. Yes, there's always a chance the scientists have got the wrong explanation for it, but isn't it better to buy ourselves insurance by acting now than being sorry when it's too late to do anything?

Abbott's denunciation of emissions trading as ''a great big new tax'' ignores the reality that what comes into government as taxes goes out as benefits to people. It ignores the reality that any solution to global warming is going to cost a lot of money - and that emissions trading, if it works as planned, creates incentives for the market to find the lowest-cost way of solving the problem.

And don't be fooled: with 2 per cent annual population growth and rapid mineral development, even Australia's minimal target to cut its emissions in 2020 to 5 per cent below 2000 levels will be hard to achieve, let alone the more ambitious targets we may have to take on if the Copenhagen process results in a global agreement next year. It can be done, but only by tough governments prepared to get on with the job. That's why centre-right governments the world over are backing emissions trading.

If Abbott ever leads the Coalition back into government, he will have to do the same. He will have to run the very scheme he now attacks. There are no soft answers to hard issues.

Tim Colebatch is economics editor.
 

midfielder

Well-Known Member
Dibo

Hope I am wrong but it appears to be going all pear shaped don't think even Kevin 07, can bring it together...

My feeling are it is just to complex  ... I can hear ya... that should not make a dif BUT it does.

Using Football as an example the rules are easy to follow and FIFA sit as the final judge... As I have said put a levey on fuel and power bills the same everywhere in the world and use the revenue raised to fund new ideas and hughly reward decent ideas and then put pressue on Governments to pass laws supporting the new ideas..

My example of the car http://marinators.net/forum/index.php?topic=3213.0 is one if it works ... make all cars use this method by 20!?

Encourage others to join the thread .. it is an important issue maybe even more important than football.
 

FFC Mariner

Well-Known Member
Who would have expected that Copenhagen would turn out to be anything other than a massive waste of time, money and carbon?

Like Camp David in the '70's, Gleneagles etc etc. Turkeys tend not to vote for Christmas.
 

dibo

Well-Known Member
FFC Mariner said:
Turkeys tend not to vote for Christmas.

It seems to be worse than that. The turkeys risk their heads for fear of shedding a few tail feathers.
 

FFC Mariner

Well-Known Member
Easy fix. Centralised global Govt, rigid control and planning. Gunboats dispatched to the waverers.

Worked fine last time...........and they learned to play cricket :)

PS big tick to loony Boris the Lord Mayor of London who has determined to make London the greenest City in Europe (its currently 11th). Grants to community groups who identify wasteland that can be planted to gardens. Top idea.
 

dibo

Well-Known Member
NewScientist is pretty active this week, what with Copenhagen and all (the page on the site has all sorts of useful links to reports about work done by real scientists):

Deniergate: Turning the tables on climate sceptics

15:54 14 December 2009 by Michael Marshall and Michael Le Page

For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

"Climategate" has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion. If you believe climate sceptics, a huge body of evidence involving the work of tens of thousands of scientists over more than a century should be thrown out on the basis of the alleged misconduct of a handful of researchers, even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions.

If we are going to judge the truth of claims on the behaviour of those making them, it seems only fair to look at the behaviour of a few of those questioning the scientific consensus. There are many similar examples we did not include. We leave readers to draw their own conclusions about who to trust.

1. Fun with the sun
In 1991, the journal Science published a paper by researchers Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, then at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen. It included graphs that appeared to show a remarkably close correlation between solar activity and terrestrial temperatures suggesting that other factors, such as carbon dioxide levels, have little influence on global temperatures.

The graphs were seized on by climate change sceptics and have been widely reproduced ever since. But according to Peter Laut of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, the close correlations in the original graphs, and in updated versions published in 1995 and 2000, exist only because of what he describes as a "pattern of strange errors".

Laut described his findings in a peer-reviewed paper (Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, vol 65, p 801) and also wrote them up in a less technical form for the geophysicists' newspaper Eos (vol 85, p 370 (PDF)). His concerns about the 1991 paper are shared by a number of leading climate scientists.

Outcome: Little action has been taken following publication of Laut's papers. The 1991 paper is still frequently cited by climate deniers.

2. The great swindle
A television programme called The Great Global Warming Swindle was commissioned by the British broadcaster Channel 4 and aired in 2007.

The documentary, written and directed by Martin Durkin, prompted a voluminous complaint to the UK's broadcast regulator Ofcom, alleging 137 breaches of broadcasting regulations.

For instance, the programme showed a graph comparing temperature and solar activity since 1550, based on a 1995 paper by Friis-Christensen and Lassen. This was one of the graphs questioned by Peter Laut (see above).

In the original graph, there was a gap in the solar activity line between 1600 and 1700 because there were no sunspots at this time, as confirmed by sunspot records. In the TV programme, this gap had somehow been filled in. Friis-Christensen accused the programme makers of fabricating the data.

The programme was also alleged to have misrepresented the views of several scientists who were interviewed on camera.

Outcome: Ofcom upheld some complaints about scientists being misrepresented, but decided that the breaches of factual accuracy did not fall within its remit.

3. The Oregon petition
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine is a research centre in the small town of Cave Junction; it says it conducts research into "protein biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine and ageing". In 1998, it issued a petition urging the US government to reject all limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The petition was mailed to thousands of US scientists, who were asked to sign it.

It was accompanied by an article entitled "Environmental effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide". One of the authors, Willie Soon, is a well-known climate sceptic. The article closely resembled the style of articles from the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, down to the typeface. It had not been published in that or any other journal, as the US National Academy of Sciences made clear in a statement.

Despite intense scientific criticism (see here (PDF) and here, for example) the petition attracted over 30,000 signatures although the organisers admitted that they did little to verify the respondents' credentials, allowing obviously fake names like "Dr Geri Halliwell" to be included.

Outcome: As of 2008, the petition was being recirculated. The accompanying article has acquired an aura of respectability, having finally been published in a journal, albeit not one specialising in climatology: the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

4. Peer review?
In 2008, the Forum on Physics and Society (FPS), a newsletter produced by the American Physics Society, published an article entitled "Climate sensitivity reconsidered". The article claimed that "the IPCC's estimates may be excessive and unsafe" and that attempts to cut CO2 emissions "are pointless, may be ill-conceived and could even be harmful".

The article was written by Christopher Monckton, a British journalist and consultant. Although apparently highly technical, the piece has been strongly criticised by professional climate scientists, including Gavin Schmidt, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York.

The piece was reported by the US Science and Public Policy Institute as having been "peer-reviewed".

The editors of FPS pointed out that, as was standard practice at the journal, they had merely edited the piece without sending it out to specialist climate scientists for peer review. A disclaimer was subsequently added to the piece, clarifying that nothing in FPS was peer-reviewed.

Outcome: In late 2009, Monckton embarked on a tour of North America to promote his personal views on climate change.

5. No logo
The Global Warming Policy Foundation is an independent think tank chaired by the former British finance minister Nigel Lawson that claims to "bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist and all too often depressingly intolerant". So it is a little disappointing that a graph in the banner on the organisation's homepage is so misleading.

That graph is a jazzed-up graph of average global temperatures since 2001 and shows, essentially, no trend. The implication is that global temperatures are not increasing.

Of course, no conclusions can be drawn from such a short time span, because temperatures vary so much from year to year anyway. You have to look at several decades in order to pick out real trends. The UK Met Office this week published data showing that the first decade of the 2000s has been the warmest on record.

Outcome: On 3 December the British newspaper The Independent reported that "an error by a graphic designer" in the graph had been corrected. The larger issue of the misleadingly short time span has not been addressed.

6. David Bellamy
Readers in the UK may remember botany lecturer David Bellamy as a leading conservationist and a presenter of television programmes about the environment and biodiversity. To give some idea of his commitment to environmental issues, in 1983 he was jailed for blockading Australia's Franklin River in protest at a proposed dam.

However, Bellamy has become a prominent global warming sceptic and has made a number of notable claims in the media.

For instance, in 2005 he wrote a letter to New Scientist claiming that most of the world's glaciers are growing, which is manifestly not the case. In fact, around the world glaciers are melting three times as fast as they were in the 1980s.

Then last year he claimed that, as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, "300,000 square kilometres of former desert are now covered with trees". He cited New Scientist as the source for this claim, so we combed our archive to find the evidence.

Outcome: We couldn't find any article making such a claim. On the contrary, we found an alternative explanation for the greening. Bellamy has never contacted us to acknowledge the error with the glaciers or to point us to the source of the claim for the greening of the desert.

7. Astroturfing
It's not just a kind of artificial grass: the word astroturfing also refers to a form of propaganda.

Organisations promoting a particular viewpoint set about creating an artificial "grassroots" movement, which appears to be spontaneous but is in fact carefully planned by the organisation.

Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives select committee on energy independence and global warming received a number of letters opposing the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would set limits on the country's greenhouse gas emissions. The letters were purportedly from members of the public.

However, it then emerged that the letters were an example of astroturfing: several of them had been faked.

Outcome: At a hearing of the House select committee, the president of US lobbying firm Bonner and Associates apologised. The fake letters were apparently created by a temporary employee.

8. Cosmic correlations
According to Henrik Svensmark, a physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, cosmic rays have a major affect on the Earth's climate. He says that fewer cosmic rays mean fewer clouds, warming the Earth.

In 1997, Svensmark claimed there was a correlation between cosmic ray intensity and satellite measurements of total cloud cover since the 1980s. This apparent correlation depends on adjustments to the data, however, and it does not hold up (PDF) when more recent cloud measurements from 1996 onwards are included.

Svensmark has also pointed to an apparent correlation between low-altitude cloud cover and cosmic rays. But after 1995, the fit of Svensmark's graph depends on a "correction" of satellite data, and the satellite scientists say this is not justified. "It's dubious manipulation of data in order to suit his hypothesis," says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London. Svensmark does not accept this.

Recent independent studies suggest cosmic rays can affect cloudiness, but not in the way Svensmark claims, and that their effect on climate is insignificant. Direct satellite measurements rule them out as an explanation for the recent warming.

Outcome: Svensmark wrote a book about his ideas, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by Nigel Calder, editor of New Scientist from 1962 to 1966. Despite the lack of scientific support, his claims remain popular with climate deniers. Svensmark claims the world is cooling. Well, let's see.

They've also got a Climate change topic guide for you to bone up on all the hard science. Y'know, in case you are curious about clouds, cosmic radiation, hockeystick curves, glacial growth and all sorts of other interesting things and their relationship to climate change.

Lastly, they've got a very useful resource called Climate change: A guide for the perplexed that takes the most common reasons put forward to argue that climate change isn't happening and walks you through the science. For the most part, the 'reasons' are shown to be weak, flawed or simply contradicted by the evidence. there are some areas acknowledged to be ambiguous - this is science, not faith.

New Scientist is a magazine that has been running for decades as basically a weekly science newspaper. They're not a mouthpiece for anyone, they have debates on all sorts of scientific topics and it's actually a pretty good read for the most part. And you don't need to be a scientist to 'get' it - the assumed knowledge for the most part isn't that much higher than your average program on Discovery or Nat Geo.

So if you're curious, have a read and see what you think. You may not see anything that enlightens you, but then again you might see the whole situation in much more colour and detail than you get from us having a bash at each other in here or from the pages of the dailies here in Oz.
 

midfielder

Well-Known Member
Dibo

I take a medium .... FFC what is your size ... Dibo place the order ..

HHHMMMMmmmmmmm get me two large as well for gifts...

Tell us what we owe..
 

FFC Mariner

Well-Known Member
midfielder said:
Dibo

I take a medium .... FFC what is your size ... Dibo place the order ..

HHHMMMMmmmmmmm get me two large as well for gifts...

Tell us what we owe..

Maybe we could get them in yellow and form another splinter group at BT. Names, scarf design and web presence required.

note the economist is having the best time.............
 

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