""You will become a political penguin on a smaller and smaller ice floe that is drifting out to sea. Goodbye, my little friend. That's what's going to happen."

It is not only foreign investors that are reaping the rewards from the New South Wales coal industry. New South Wales producers are also benefiting with Xstrata's 2004 annual profit up 277 per cent on 2003, BHP Billiton's half-yearly profit up 127.3 per cent from the corresponding period in 2003, and Excel Coal's net profit for the six months ending December 2004 up 427 per cent.

"My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel."

"The Howard Government is increasingly using science, as the old joke goes, as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support rather than for illumination."

"Now, global warming: is that a natural phenomenon, or does it result from man's activities?"

"What surprised us was how quickly it happened. It's pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago, scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually, so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly. But the big surpirse is that, for one, they are going, but, secondly, that when they do go, they just go suddenly. It's all at once, in the span of an hour."

"What's a doona?"

"There is a line between public relations and propaganda - or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth - to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival. And it is infuriating - as a public relations professional - to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change."

"The fact is that the last time we had high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 100 million years ago and the Sun was a little bit cooler at that time. Now if we push it up...this is not something that most climatologists will talk about but I think that there is a small chance, maybe a 1% chance, that if we really hit the planet too hard we may push it into a runaway system in which the temperature simply goes up and up until the oceans boil into the atmosphere, and that would extinguish all life on Earth."

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again."