Acronym watch

Malcolm Weatherup writes: Re. “Tips and Rumours: Turf wars” (yesterday). Being of  “a certain age”, I do my best to adjust to the modern acronym addiction, so l was startled after reading the above to discover that BFF has two meanings: Best Friend Forever (how mawkish) and also Big Fat F… (work it out yourself). This is both ungallant and undoubtedly untrue on all levels, but Ms Tips and Crikey in general don’t normally leave us with multiple choice options like this. And unfortunate timing, too, written on the same day when Kaspar Wowser crisply highlighted the hacking of affair promoting website Ashley Madison. But anyone who wilfully chooses the second meaning — ha! as though the unfat Plibbers couldn’t do better than an ageing myopic owl from Queensland — should describe themselves as a BFDF … insert the word “dumb”. I shall now F.O. … being of that certain age, that would be “Fall Over”.

On reform

John Gleeson writes: Re. “Rundle: all hail the great sky god Reform!” (yesterday). Guy Rundle forgot that the term “reform” is used nowadays to describe any change that will disadvantage the electorate.  Orwell understood that Newspeak and Doublespeak were the future.  Abbott and his band of charlatans give Orwell substance.  Perhaps the day is near when we will see “reform” and “Barangaroo” in the same sentence.

Winning the battle, losing the war

Richard Middleton writes: Re. “Shorten’s Super-RET: dumb economics, but smart politics?” Good to see Bill has started to take the fight to the enemy. If you do not emit CO2 or carbonaceous by-products of filthy fossil fuels, be it coal or gas, then there is no possibility of imposing any so alarmingly named “carbon tax” (not that there was anything wrong with the damn thing, just very badly handled by Labor). So that is the real answer: decarbonise our energy production and other industry.

This relatively easy, but initially costly, to do. The best solutions are anything that is plentiful and renewable, be in sun, wind, tides, geothermal or hydro. The long terms benefits are savings on escalating and dirty fossil fuels, not using the existing long half life nuclear fuels. Comprehensive plans to decarbonise Australia (and the rest of the world) have been worked on over the last few years by the smart people and friends at Beyond Zero Emissions. (bze.org.au)

You may not have heard of them as their publicity smarts are no match for their technological smarts and vision, but that does not take away from their plans. Do check it out, think about it and perhaps send it to your friends. This should be a talking point for everybody who cares about the future of the planet (for humans and many others) and Australia, and an issue at the next election. The project for the 21st century. A win for all except the filthy fossil fuel industry. It would also make us clean, green and very very rich.