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• Vienna Energy Forum 2013 >
• Side Events

Side Events

ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA: Business Partnerships – An effective instrument for development cooperation

How innovative cooperation supports the development of markets for renewable energy

Date – 28 May 2013

Time – 14:30 to 16:00

Location – Rittersaal

This side-event discusses innovative forms of cooperation between the private sector and established structures of development cooperation to develop new markets. Examples from the renewable energy sector show how both recipient countries and companies can utilize the opportunities of business partnerships. Traditional development cooperation faces many challenges, so alternative approaches are required. As business and development belong together, partnerships with the private sector are getting more and more important. Join the discussion on business partnerships and the development of renewable energy markets!

European Commission Joint Research Centre: Creating and sharing knowledge together on African Renewable Energy Sources

Date: 28 May 2013

Time: 16:00 – 17:30

Location: Mittlere Lounge

On the occasion of the Vienna Energy Forum 2013, JRC will release findings from the newest report “The availability of Renewable Energies in a changing Africa”. This report follows and extends the 2011 JRC report “Renewable energies in Africa” and focuses on the climatic, demographic and technological changes expecting to involve Africa in next decades and how they will impact the Renewable Energy production and deployment opportunities in the continent. This side event will explore to what extent climate change has affect the ability of the renewable energy sources to deliver their important resources to this goal and will look at the potential of the available options. Come and join the second report presentation, discuss issues with authors, and test the latest online tool developed to visualize off-grid electricity production options in Africa.

 

GFSE: Sustainable Energy Solutions for All: Made in Austria

Date – 29 May 2013

Time – 09:00 to 11:00

Location – Trabantenstube

Austrian know-how and technologies have a lot to offer to make inclusive sustainable energy solutions a reality. In this side event, the Austrian experience in the fields of renewable energy and energy efficiency will be presented. The event also seeks to facilitate the identification of cooperation opportunities for different actors in the context of SE4All. It will also highlight the value-added of multi-stakeholder networks in enabling joint action. We would be delighted if you could join the discussion.

 

IIASA: Multiple Benefits of the Global Energy Transformation Recent Research Findings

Date – 29 May 2013

Time – 09:30 to 13:00

Location – Künstlerzimmer

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is organizing the VEF side event “Multiple Benefits of the Global Energy Transformations: Recent Research Findings”. The main global problem areas of research at IIASA – energy and climate change, food and water, and poverty and equity – are among the greatest challenges facing humanity today. The side event will present recent research findings – focusing on energy and technology – and their relevance to the Post 2015 Development Agenda. The Global Energy Assessment (GEA), completed in 2012, was an important component of the energy-related activities at IIASA and some of the new research activities at IIASA are building upon the findings of GEA.

 

IAEA: Promoting a Sustainable Energy Future: the Role of the International Atomic Energy Agency

Date – 29 May 2013

Time – 10:00 to 12:00

Location – Mittlere Lounge

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supports its Member States in their efforts towards a sustainable energy future. In this side event, IAEA representatives will showcase the successful contribution of the Agency to build capacity, disseminate information, raise awareness and foster cooperation within and among Member States to help them make informed decisions regarding the most appropriate energy strategies. Topics discussed will include the sustainability of nuclear power as a clean energy solution, capacity building activities, the role of innovative technology solutions and the critical steps to introduce or expand a nuclear power programme.

 

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EUEI PDF: Africa-EU Private Sector Cooperation: Matchmaking for win-win business opportunities in the renewables sector? 

Date – 29 May 2013

Time – 11:30 to 13:00

Location – Trabantenstube

The Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP) is a multi-donor and multi-implementer programme that aims to accelerate the use of renewable energy in Africa. It was launched by more than 35 African and European Ministers at the First High-Level Meeting of the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP) in Vienna in September 2010. While the programme has already launched a number of support interventions in the area of policy advisory services, this side event aims at reflecting on the types of support interventions necessary to foster an active exchange and linking of African and European private sectors actors, as well as highlighting some of the positive examples where European and African actors have successfully worked together.

 

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Launch of the SE4All Global Tracking Framework

Date – 28 May 2013

Time: 14:00 to 14:45

Location – Radetzkysaal II

Prepared by a team of energy experts from 15 agencies under the leadership of the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, the report provides a comprehensive snapshot of over 180 countries’ status with respect to action on energy access, energy efficiency and renewable energy, as well as energy consumption. As the Millennium Development Goals process has clearly demonstrated, measurable goals that enjoy widespread consensus can mobilize commitments to action, strategic partnerships and widespread support from key stakeholders and whole societies.  For many, the Sustainable Energy for All initiative is an illustration of what a Sustainable Development Goal for the energy sector would look like. However, it is well known that measure progress is critical to achieving goals and getting results. The Global Tracking Framework Report is the answer to the challenge of measuring and reporting progress towards achieving the Sustainable Energy for All goals and objectives..  The report’s framework for data collection and analysis will enable us to monitor progress on the SE4ALL objectives from now to 2030.

 

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The Energy Future We Want – Including Water & Food in the Energy Debate

Date – 29 May 2013

Time – 14:30 to 16:00

Location – Radetzky II

The side-event will provide a global platform to discuss recent international undertakings and progress on the water-energy-food nexus. The side-event will stimulate contributions and insights from institutions and individual experts on strategies to include water and food in the energy debate as nations around the world develop new energy policies and evaluate the options they want to follow in response to the SE4All initiative. Contribute to the nexus debate by sharing your experience and expertise with representatives from the private sector, researchers, policy makers and water/energy experts around the world on the intricate links between water, energy and food.

 

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Regional Sustainable Energy Centers in Africa: Creating Regional Markets to Support the Decade of Sustainable Energy For All (SE4ALL)

Date – 29 May 2013

Time – 14:30 to 18:00

Location – Trabantenstube

The Energy and Climate Change Branch of UNIDO, in close collaboration with the ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE) and the Global Forum on Sustainable Energy (GFSE), are organizing the VEF side event “Regional Sustainable Energy Centers in Africa: Creating Regional Markets to Support the Decade of Sustainable Energy For All (SE4ALL)”. The side event will facilitate discussions on the added value and possible actions of a south-south cooperation network between regional sustainable energy promotion centers in Africa. It will highlight the roles of the Centers as part of the institutional structure of the SE4ALL initiative. In a learning event, the ECOWAS Observatory for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECOWREX), one of the flag-ship programs of ECREEE will be introduced to the audience. Finally, a new publication on Renewable Energy Status and Trends in West Africa will be presented.

UNIDO: Women’s Leadership on Energy Justice in Productive Sectors

Date – 29 May 2013

Time – 15:00 to 17:00; Networking Drinks from 17:00

Location – Künstlerzimmer

Increasing energy access for productive use will generate opportunities for women to earn a living for themselves and their families, but the debate thus far has been mainly focused on women’s domestic needs. At this side-event, we will look beyond the household door and discuss how to empower women to become active producers, managers, promoters, sellers and leaders of modern energy services for a truly sustainable solution to energy poverty.  We would be delighted if you could join us to share your experiences and expertise in this debate.

Register for the event  here

Ecologic Institute: An International Think Tank for Environment and Development.

The widowed Empress Wilhelmine Amalie had the orangery garden installed in Schoenbrunn with the purpose of overwintering her bitter orange plants inside a greenhouse.

The Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna has, since the Emperors’ days, hot-houses under the Orangery name, as seemingly the Emperors were keen of the citrus plants. Here you find a large collection of citrus varieties and fruit was produced for the Emperor’s Court.

May 17-20, 2013,  were citrus-festival days at the Orangery of the Schoenbrunn Palace.

Sunday May 19th there was what amounted to a Citrus tasting class where Katharina Seiser, an Eating-culture specialist and culinary journalist, explained the three kinds of Citrus plants – the Lemon, the Mandarin and the Pamplemousse father of the Grapefruit. We were told that there was also a fourth line – that of the Asian Ichang-Papeda which was not presented. We got to taste some two dozen different varieties and a few secondary products such as marmalade and sweets. I clearly got convinced that a fresh-picked kumquat tastes immensely better then the market bought produce.

The Buddha’s Hand is a very strange looking species – tastes good.

Life Minister of the Austrian Federal Government, Mr.Niki Berlakovich, was the honorary chairman of the festival.

In Koernten (Carinthia), at Faaker Sea (Lake) one finds an actual Mediterranean Citrus Garden -

  – that markets locally produced Lemon marmalade, Orange cakes and other products you would not expect to get from locally produced fruit in Austria. www.Zitrusgarten.at

At second thought – above should not surprise us,.  In the Center of Vienna, on the cement floor at the side of the Danube canal, there is also a Tel-Aviv Beach were in the summer young people play paddle ball like on the Tel-Aviv beaches.

Looking up the Ichang-Papeda on the internet – I found:

“January Fruit of The Month: Ichang Papeda And Its Amazing Hybrid Offspring.

The Ichang Papeda (Citrus ichangensis) is the hardiest of the evergreen citrus, said to withstand temperatures down to 0 degrees F. It is a tough, spiny, small tree growing wild on steep hillsides in the Himalayan foothills. Though its fruit is marginally edible, small, thick skinned, seedy and somewhat bitter with limited juice, it does make  an interesting and attractive ornamental. Its most important use is in hybridizing with other citrus species to create super cold hardy, yet highly edible varieties.

One of our favorites of these here on the farm is the Shangjuan. It is a natural cross originating in China of Citrus ichangensis and C. maxima, the pummelo. Also called the Ichang Lemon, the Shangjuan, which means “fragrant ball” in Chinese, produces masses of large, juicy, yellow lemon like fruit. Somewhat rough skinned and with a generous amount of seeds that can be easily removed, each fruit can give up to ½ cup of good quality juice that can be used for fresh or for cooking and desserts. These fruits ripen October- January  for us, starting a full month before our Meyer lemons, giving us an abundant supply of high vitamin C juice at a time when it is most needed. When fully ripe the fruits have a good grapefruit taste and can be eaten as such, especially with a little sweetening. This easy to grow vigorous evergreen tree makes a great ornamental, its broad glossy dark green leaves giving year round beauty. Fragrant white spring blooms are followed by a heavy crop of fruit in the fall. The Shangjuan is considered hardy down to 5 to 10 degrees, which gives it adaptability to many areas where commercial citrus cannot be grown.

Another popular hybrid is the Yuzu, an ancient natural cross of Citrus ichangensis X C.reticulata. In the past it was called C.junos. The Yuzu originated in east Asia and grows wild in central China and Tibet. It was introduced to Japan and Korea during the Tang dynasty and has become a very popular fruit in these countries. The fruit ripens in the fall and is about the size of a tangerine. It has a fragrant juice similar to a lemon that is much esteemed in Japanese cooking. The spicy rind is also used as a flavoring. In Japan several fruits are wrapped in cheesecloth and floated in a hot bath for their relaxing scent. In Korea a syrup is made from the fruit and added to hot water as a remedy for the common cold and other winter illnesses. The upright evergreen tree is very hardy, able to withstand temperatures in the 5 to 10 degree F range. Even if defoliated the fruiting wood can survive to bear the next year. Like the Shangjuan it has lustrous green leaves, fragrant white flowers, showy fruit and many thorns.

The Ichang Papeda is also used in breeding programs to develop cold hardy citrus. It has been found to have a better ability to convey cold hardiness without compromising fruit quality than its deciduous relative the Trifoliate orange. Who knows what interesting and useful Ichang hybrids await us in the future.”

Which means to me – forget now the Mediterranean – Asia gives us the possibility to enlarge indeed citrus growing to colder climates as well!

Op-Ed Columnist

Without Water, Revolution.

Ed Kashi/VII

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: May 18, 2013 12 Comments

  Thomas L. Friedman by Josh Haner/The New York Times

As we were driving back to the Turkish border, I noticed a school and asked the driver to turn around so I could explore it. It was empty — of students. But war refugees had occupied the classrooms and little kids’ shirts and pants were drying on a line strung across the playground. The basketball backboard was rusted, and a local parent volunteered to give me a tour of the bathrooms, which he described as disgusting. Classes had not been held in two years. And that is what terrified me. Men with guns I’m used to. But kids without books, teachers or classes for a long time — that’s trouble. Big trouble.

They grow up to be teenagers with too many guns and too much free time, and I saw a lot of them in Tel Abyad. They are the law of the land here now, but no two of them wear the same uniform, and many are just in jeans. These boys bravely joined the adults of their town to liberate it from the murderous tyranny of Bashar al-Assad, but now the war has ground to a stalemate, so here, as in so many towns across Syria, life is frozen in a no-man’s land between order and chaos. There is just enough patched-up order for people to live — some families have even rigged up bootleg stills that refine crude oil into gasoline to keep cars running — but not enough order to really rebuild, to send kids to school or to start businesses.

So Syria as a whole is slowly bleeding to death of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. You can’t help but ask whether it will ever be a unified country again and what kind of human disaster will play out here if a whole generation grows up without school.

“Syria is becoming Somalia,” said Zakaria Zakaria, a 28-year-old Syrian who graduated from college with a major in English and who acted as our guide. “Students have now lost two years of school, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, and if this goes on for two more years it will be like Somalia, a failed country. But Somalia is off somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Syria is the heart of the Middle East. I don’t want this to happen to my country. But the more it goes on, the worse it will be.”

This is the agony of Syria today. You can’t imagine the war here continuing for another year, let alone five. But when you feel the depth of the rage against the Assad government and contemplate the sporadic but barbaric sect-on-sect violence, you can’t imagine any peace deal happening or holding — not without international peacekeepers on the ground to enforce it. Eventually, we will all have to have that conversation, because this is no ordinary war.

THIS Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers — Iran and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar on the other, each of which have an extreme interest in its Syrian allies’ defeating the other’s allies — all at a time when America, in its post-Iraq/Afghanistan phase, is extremely wary of getting involved.

I came here to write my column and work on a film for the Showtime series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” about the “Jafaf,” or drought, one of the key drivers of the Syrian war. In an age of climate change, we’re likely to see many more such conflicts.

“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.

Because of the population explosion that started here in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better health care, those leaving the countryside came with huge families and settled in towns around cities like Aleppo. Some of those small towns swelled from 2,000 people to 400,000 in a decade or so. The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs or services for this youth bulge, which hit its teens and 20s right when the revolution erupted.

Young people and farmers starved for jobs — and land starved for water — were a prescription for revolution. Just ask those who were here, starting with Faten, whom I met in her simple flat in Sanliurfa, a Turkish city near the Syrian border. Faten, 38, a Sunni, fled there with her son Mohammed, 19, a member of the Free Syrian Army, who was badly wounded in a firefight a few months ago. Raised in the northeastern Syrian farming village of Mohasen, Faten, who asked me not to use her last name, told me her story.

She and her husband “used to own farmland,” said Faten. “We tended annual crops. We had wheat, barley and everyday food — vegetables, cucumbers, anything we could plant instead of buying in the market. Thank God there were rains, and the harvests were very good before. And then suddenly, the drought happened.”

What did it look like? “To see the land made us very sad,” she said. “The land became like a desert, like salt.” Everything turned yellow.

Did Assad’s government help? “They didn’t do anything,” she said. “We asked for help, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about this subject. Never, never. We had to solve our problems ourselves.”

So what did you do? “When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.’ So we decided to move to the city. I got a government job as a nurse, and my husband opened a shop. It was hard. The majority of people left the village and went to the city to find jobs, anything to make a living to eat.” The drought was particularly hard on young men who wanted to study or marry but could no longer afford either, she added. Families married off daughters at earlier ages because they couldn’t support them.

Faten, her head conservatively covered in a black scarf, said the drought and the government’s total lack of response radicalized her. So when the first spark of revolutionary protest was ignited in the small southern Syrian town of Dara’a, in March 2011, Faten and other drought refugees couldn’t wait to sign on. “Since the first cry of ‘Allahu akbar,’ we all joined the revolution. Right away.” Was this about the drought? “Of course,” she said, “the drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution.”

ZAKARIA ZAKARIA was a teenager in nearby Hasakah Province when the drought hit and he recalled the way it turned proud farmers, masters of their own little plots of land, into humiliated day laborers, working for meager wages in the towns “just to get some money to eat.” What was most galling to many, said Zakaria, was that if you wanted a steady government job you had to bribe a bureaucrat or know someone in the state intelligence agency.

The best jobs in Hasakah Province, Syria’s oil-producing region, were with the oil companies. But drought refugees, virtually all of whom were Sunni Muslims, could only dream of getting hired there. “Most of those jobs went to Alawites from Tartous and Latakia,” said Zakaria, referring to the minority sect to which President Assad belongs and which is concentrated in these coastal cities. “It made people even more angry. The best jobs on our lands in our province were not for us, but for people who come from outside.”

Only in the spring of 2011, after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, did the Assad government start to worry about the drought refugees, said Zakaria, because on March 11 — a few days before the Syrian uprising would start in Dara’a — Assad visited Hasakah, a very rare event. “So I posted on my Facebook page, ‘Let him see how people are living,’ ” recalled Zakaria. “My friends said I should delete it right away, because it was dangerous. I wouldn’t. They didn’t care how people lived.”

Abu Khalil, 48, is one of those who didn’t just protest. A former cotton farmer who had to become a smuggler to make ends meet for his 16 children after the drought wiped out their farm, he is now the Free Syrian Army commander in the Tel Abyad area. We met at a crushed Syrian Army checkpoint. After being introduced by our Syrian go-between, Abu Khalil, who was built like a tough little boxer, introduced me to his fighting unit. He did not introduce them by rank but by blood, pointing to each of the armed men around him and saying: “My nephew, my cousin, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my son, my cousin …”

Free Syrian Army units are often family affairs. In a country where the government for decades wanted no one to trust anyone else, it’s no surprise.

“We could accept the drought because it was from Allah,” said Abu Khalil, “but we could not accept that the government would do nothing.”

Before we parted, he pulled me aside to say that all that his men needed were anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons and they could finish Assad off. “Couldn’t Obama just let the Mafia send them to us?” he asked. “Don’t worry, we won’t use them against Israel.”

As part of our film we’ve been following a Syrian woman who is a political activist, Farah Nasif, a 27-year-old Damascus University graduate from Deir-az-Zour, whose family’s farm was also wiped out in the drought.

Nasif typifies the secular, connected, newly urbanized young people who spearheaded the democracy uprisings here and in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia. They all have two things in common: they no longer fear their governments or their parents, and they want to live like citizens, with equal rights — not as sects with equal fears.

If this new generation had a motto, noted Aita, the Syrian economist, it would actually be the same one Syrians used in their 1925 war of independence from France: “Religion is for God, and the country is for everyone.”

But Nasif is torn right now. She wants Assad gone and all political prisoners released, but she knows that more war “will only destroy the rest of the country.” And her gut tells her that even once Assad is gone, there is no agreement on who or what should come next. So every option worries her — more war, a cease-fire, the present and the future. This is the agony of Syria today — and why the closer you get to it, the less certain you are how to fix it.

At the end we have the UPDATE Of May 19, 2013!

Reader Supported News | 11 May 201

Jonathan Chait | Obama Might Actually Be the Environmental President.

President Obama spoke during a tour of a solar energy firm in Acadia, Fla., last fall. He has focused on renewable power and energy security. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, May 11, 2013.

Chait writes: “All the myths of the presidency we cling to are perfectly useless here. The heavy lifting will be, by conventional political terms, invisible. There is no need for Johnsonian arm-twisting or Sorkin-esque rhetorical uplift. The fight of Obama’s second presidential term – the much-mocked fight to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet – requires only the simple exercise of power.”
READ MORE

Dr. James Hansen | Norway, Canada, the United States and the Tar Sands
Dr. James Hansen, Reader Supported News
Dr. Hansen writes: “The common presumption that President Obama is going to approve the Keystone XL pipeline is wrong, in my opinion. The State Department must provide an assessment to President Obama. Secretary of State John Kerry is expert on the climate issue and has long been one of the most thoughtful members of our government. I cannot believe that Secretary Kerry would let his and President Obama’s legacies go down the tar sands drain.”
READ MORE

Obamacare Is Already Forcing Private Insurers to Lower Their Premiums
Sy Mukherjee, ThinkProgress
Mukherjee writes: “As Thursday’s development shows, that public information empowers consumers by forcing insurers to compete with one another to attract customers. Or to put it another way – and contrary to conservative fear-mongering about the law – Obamacare is working exactly as it was intended to.”
READ MORE

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tate of the Union addresses are wearying rituals, in which stitched-together lists of never-gonna-happen goals are woven into idealistic catchphrases, analyzed as rhetoric by an unqualified panel of poetry-critic-for-a-night political reporters, quickly followed by a hapless opposition-party response, and then, in almost every case, forgotten. This year, plunked into the midst of the tedium was a gigantic revelation, almost surely the most momentous news of President Obama’s second term. “I will direct my Cabinet,” he announced, “to come up with executive actions we can take now and in the future to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

Here was a genuine bombshell. It sounded a little vague, and the president did not explain precisely what he intended to do or how he would pull it off. But a handful of environmental wonks had a fairly strong grasp of the project he had committed himself to, and they understood that it was very, very real and very, very doable. If they were to have summarized the news, the headline would have been OBAMA TO SAVE PLANET.

Few outside the green community grasped the meaning of the revelation, and it sank beneath the surface with barely a ripple as bored reporters quickly turned to other matters. Several elements of the Obama agenda – immigration reform, gun control, the budget wars – have since churned busily away in plain view, while his climate pledge has generated no visible action. (Which, as we’ll see, may be just how the administration wants it.)

More than anything, though, Obama’s announcement was shrouded in the pervasive miasma of failure, the stench of too little, too late, that has surrounded his climate agenda. Obama’s election “was accompanied by intense hope that many things in need of change would change,” lamented Al Gore in a 2011 Rolling Stone essay. “Some things have, but others have not. Climate policy, unfortunately, is in the second category.” Matters appear only to have gotten worse since then, especially as climate activists chain themselves to the White House gate to protest the president’s likely approval of the Keystone pipeline. Obama himself has taken an apologetic tone, telling green-minded donors that the politics “are tough,” as people “struggling to get by” care more about providing for their immediate needs than forestalling long-term environmental degradation and climate change.

The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann recently wrote a eulogy for the environmental movement, using the 2010 disintegration of cap-and-trade legislation in Congress as the culmination of failure. “The movement had poured years of effort into the bill, which involved a complicated system for limiting carbon emissions. Now it was dead, and there has been no significant environmental legislation since,” he wrote. “Indeed, one could argue that there has been no major environmental legislation since 1990 … What went wrong?”

The pervasive “what went wrong?” narrative contains a series of assumptions: that Obama can prevail only by winning over public opinion and Congress, that the fate of his climate policy hinged on the cap-and-trade bill, and that the primary question hanging over his environmental record is how to apportion blame. None of these assumptions is correct.

The assumption that Obama’s climate-­change record is essentially one of failure is mainly an artifact of environmentalists’ understandably frantic urgency. The sort of steady progress that would leave activists on other issues giddy does not satisfy the sort of person whose waking hours are spent watching the glaciers melt irreversibly. But there is a difference between failing to do anything and failing to do enough, and even those who criticize the president’s efforts as inadequate ought to be clear-eyed about what has been accomplished. By the normal standards of progress, Obama has amassed an impressive record so far on climate change.

There are two basic ways to measure this, which must be taken together. The first, and simplest, is to ask: How much carbon are we emitting into the atmosphere? In the first year of Obama’s presidency, the United State pledged that by 2020 it would reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 17 percent (starting from the level set in 2005). That 17 percent reduction is the brass ring of the environmental movement. It is the target the cap-and-trade legislation was designed to hit. It is also the target that Obama must be able to claim he is on track to reach by the time of the next international climate summit in 2015. That occasion, most observers agree, will probably be the world’s last chance to sign an accord that averts catastrophically and permanently higher temperatures.

As it happens, after decades of rising, carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States started falling in 2008. They have kept falling. By the end of last year, emissions had fallen almost 12 percent below the 2005 level. That is to say, with 12 percent of the 17 percent drop having already occurred, and seven more years to go until the target date, the U.S. is two-thirds of the way to its environmental goal after just one-third of the time has passed. If you follow this measure, climate policy looks like a runaway success.

This metric isn’t entirely fair, of course, because most, though not all, of this drop occurred for reasons having nothing to do with Obama. About half of the emissions drop can probably be attributed to the recession. (When people cut back on their spending, they do less driving, don’t run the air conditioner as high, and so on.) Another portion of the decline occurred because the fracking boom flooded the market with cheap natural gas, which replaced much dirtier coal. These trends will probably level off, as the price of natural gas has plunged so quickly drillers have already scaled back their production. Still, even if the progress was temporary and mainly a result of luck, it has provided Obama with breathing room that most observers haven’t been willing to grant him.

The second way to measure Obama’s climate-change record is: What has he done? He has done quite a bit, probably far more than you think, and not all of it advertised as climate legislation, or advertised as much of anything at all. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was many things – primarily, a desperate bid to shove money into enough Americans’ pockets to prevent another Great Depression – but one of them was a major piece of environmental reform. The law contained upwards of $90 billion in subsidies for green energy, which had a catalyzing effect on burgeoning industries. American wind-power generation has doubled, and solar power has increased more than six times over. As Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald detailed in his book The New New Deal, the new law suddenly transformed the Department of Energy, previously a sclerotic backwater charged mainly with overseeing the nuclear-weapons cache, into a massive new engine of cutting-edge environmental science.

The stimulus had the misfortune of absorbing the brunt of the public’s dismay with the economic crisis, and Republicans successfully turned Solyndra, an anomalous case of a green-energy subsidy that went bust, into a symbol that rendered the whole law so unpopular Democrats quickly grew afraid to tout it. Even a close observer like Lemann has forgotten that it was indeed “major environmental legislation.” And yet, the wave of innovation – new fuels, plus turbines, energy meters, and other futuristic devices – will reverberate for years. Envia Systems, a stimulus-financed clean-energy firm in Silicon Valley, has developed technology for electric-car batteries three times as efficient as the technology in the Volt, capable of shaving $5,000 off the sticker price of an electric car when it comes to market in 2015. Just a few weeks ago, the Times reported on a new stimulus-financed research project to increase the energy content (and thus reduce the emissions) of natural gas.

The administration has also carried out an ambitious program of regulation, having imposed or announced higher standards for gas mileage in cars, fuel cleanliness, energy efficiency in appliances, and emissions from new power plants. In aggregate, they amount to a major assault on climate change. Some environmentalists judge them to be insufficient – a fair critique – but many more Obama supporters aren’t even aware that they exist. This is likely because none of these regulations produced any political theater. There was no legislation, no ponderous Sunday-morning talk-show chin-scratching, no dramatic wrangling of votes on the House floor. Just the issuing of a new regulation, a smallish one-day story.

Last August, for instance, the administration announced it was ratcheting up vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, from 29.7 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon. The news barely got a day of coverage, coming as it did during the first day of the Republican National Convention. About six weeks ago, the administration announced new standards for cleaner gasoline. “There is not another air-pollution-control strategy that we know of that will produce as substantial, cost-effective, and expeditious emissions reductions,” cooed the executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. Remember that?

The political theater has instead played itself out in two episodes in which Obama has appeared impotent, or even indifferent, in the face of climate change. Currently, we are in the midst of the drama over the proposed Keystone pipeline, which Obama has hinted he will approve. NASA scientist James Hansen has proclaimed the pipeline, which would carry oil from the Canadian tar sands, “game over” for the climate. Most analysts, though, don’t support Hansen’s apocalyptic view. A survey of studies conducted by the Congressional Research Service found that the pipeline would increase carbon emissions by anywhere from 0.06 percent to 0.3 percent per year. (Note that emissions dropped 3.7 percent – twelve times the high-end estimate – last year.) Wonkblog reporter Brad Plumer called the pipeline “a slight step in the opposite direction” of meeting Obama’s climate goals. The pipeline’s outsize role in the presidential campaign, and the noisy protests it inspires, have elevated it far beyond the scale of more consequential environmental decisions.

The central environmental drama of the Obama years was the failure of the cap-and-trade bill in 2010. Both Obama and the environmentalists had invested all their soaring hopes in that bill. Its failure, a months-long slow bleed of wavering coal-state Democrats and hardening Republican intransigence, amounted to a kind of psychological torture for environmentalists. Cap-and-trade’s demise came to emblematize environmental policy in the Obama era. Ryan Lizza, in a lengthy 2010 New Yorker reportorial narrative, tabbed it “perhaps the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era.”

It was not the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era. There is one more.

On December 31, 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. The dispatches from that era feel unfathomably remote. The law passed Congress with Pearl Harbor war-resolution levels of support: In the House, 374 members favored it, with just one Nebraska Republican opposed. The Senate passed it 73-0. “Anti-pollution laws,” explained the Times, “did not excite political rivalry.” The law embodied a sweeping brand of environmental absolutism that would make Al Gore blush. It mandated that power plants use the best available technology, with no apparent thought given to the cost.

Obviously, nothing remotely like such a law could pass either chamber today. (Even Democrats favor more-cautious approaches to limiting pollution.) But the four-decade-old law has gained a new relevance to the climate crisis through a cascading, often dramatic series of recent events. The law requires the EPA to regulate “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Scientists at the time did not recognize that carbon dioxide contributed to global warming; they were more concerned with the human health effects of carbon monoxide and other chemicals. But as the scientific case for climate change hardened, environmentalists filed suit to force the EPA to regulate carbon emissions like other pollutants. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in the environmentalists’ favor. In 2008, the agency officially deemed carbon dioxide a pollutant, and sent its finding to the White House. The Bush administration refused to open the e-mail, thus, incredibly, running out the clock on any legal obligation.

The coming of the Obama administration, with its greater affinity for opening e-mails and lower affinity for fossil-fuel industries, resolved the question of whether Washington had an obligation to regulate carbon emissions. After Obama’s original cap-and-trade plan failed, he started using the agency regulatory powers directly. (This is how Obama has been able to issue new regulations on cars, fuel, appliances, and future power plants.)

So far, there is one hole in his regulatory agenda: power plants that currently exist. This is, unfortunately, a very large hole, as these plants, mostly coal, emit 40 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions. Coal is so inherently dirty that no available technology can prevent a plant from emitting unacceptable levels of greenhouse gases. You can require more-efficient cars or more-efficient refrigerators, and the industry will respond. You can’t really require coal plants to be anything more than slightly cleaner; it’s just physically impossible. The only meaningful standard one could impose for a coal plant would result in all of America’s coal plants shutting down – which, even if phased in slowly, would carry large costs and likely provoke a revolt from people suddenly staring at huge electric bills. The EPA’s choice, as environmental writer David Roberts has put it, appears to be “either a firecracker or a nuke.”

During Obama’s first term, the nuke was useful, as nukes tend to be, only as a threat. The idea was so abhorrent to power companies and some Republicans that it brought them to the bargaining table during the cap-and-trade negotiations. When negotiations collapsed, the prevailing assumption was that the ability to regulate existing plants had become a useless tool, paradoxically too powerful to actually deploy.

Then, a few weeks after last year’s election, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a plan for the EPA to regulate existing power plants in a way that was neither ineffectual nor draconian. The proposal would set state-by-state limits on emissions. It sounds simple, but this was a conceptual breakthrough. Much like a cap-and-trade bill, it would allow market signals to indicate the most efficient ways for states to hit their targets – instead of shutting coal plants down, some utilities might pay consumers to weatherize their homes, while others might switch some of their generators over to cleaner fuels. The flexibility of the scheme would, in turn, reduce the costs passed on to consumers. Here is a way for Obama to use his powers – his own powers, unencumbered by the morass of a dysfunctional Congress – in such a way that is neither as ineffectual as a firecracker nor as devastating as a nuke: The NRDC calculates its plan would reduce our reliance on coal by about a quarter and national carbon emissions by 10 percent.

This is the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era. The prospect, for environmentalists, is exhilarating but also harrowing. The struggle will be lengthy, waged largely behind closed doors, and its outcome won’t be known until the Obama presidency is nearly over.

In the second week of April, the acting administrator of the EPA told reporters that a state-based plan to regulate existing power plants – that is, something like the Natural Resources Defense Council plan – is “certainly something that will be on the table in this next fiscal year.” That was a gaffe. Officially, the Obama administration has no such plan, and the agency issued a quick official correction, a masterpiece of the passive voice: “To assert that any decision on any additional action has been made would be incorrect.”

The official administration line holds that Congress should pass a cap-and-trade law. In his State of the Union address, Obama prefaced his threat of executive action with a conditional “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.” The if is obviously preordained – no possible scenario, not even if John Boehner were ordered to pass a cap-and-trade bill by a returning Jesus Christ, bearing legislative text, could result in Congress’s passing a cap-and-trade law.

And within the environmental world, it is essentially a given that Obama will enact some version of the NRDC plan. Dan Lashof, its lead author, told me, “We are hearing that they’re looking quite seriously at our proposal.” A “person familiar with the matter” told the Wall Street Journal, “You will ultimately see a proposal from EPA to regulate existing power plants.” A group of electric utilities has already circulated a paper predicting that the EPA will do just that.

New regulations would have to withstand a certain legal challenge from the energy industry – though, crucially, implementation would not have to wait as cases wind their way through the courts. The EPA’s authority has withstood several high-profile challenges before, because the law is so broadly written; on the other hand, the challenges to Obamacare remind us that precedent cannot fully predict the behavior of agitated conservative judges. Also like the Obamacare challenge, the legal fight will play out against the backdrop of political war. Republicans in Congress have proposed barring the EPA from using its powers – in Senator James Inhofe’s formulation, “Put Congress, not unaccountable bureaucrats, in charge of deciding the nation’s energy policy.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page has described Obama’s threat to regulate carbon emissions as something akin to the action of a “dictator.”

So the administration and its allies have been mobilizing for combat. It’s not insignificant that Obama chose Denis McDonough, who has a deep background in climate change, to be his second-term chief of staff, or that he promoted Gina McCarthy, who oversaw the rewriting of EPA regulations in his first term, to run the department. Democratic Senators are vowing to block any House Republican attempt to handcuff the EPA. Working in Obama’s favor is the fact that Americans, while disturbingly blasé about climate change, favor federal regulation of greenhouse gases by huge majorities.

Lashof predicted the following sequence of events. The agency will finish drafting its regulation scheme by the end of the year. It will then take about a year of public comments and revisions, at which point it will finalize its rule. That will be the end of 2014, just after the midterm elections. Another nine months to a year will be required to carry out the rule, which will get us to the end of 2015 – and the international climate summit.

The administration’s refusal to publicly commit itself to this strategy, just as it risks losing supporters over the Keystone decision, is in some ways an odd political choice. But it makes sense as a strategy to win the inevitable conflict. The charade of asking Congress to pass new climate legislation demonstrates to the public – and to the courts, inevitably – that the administration is not trying to usurp Congress’s role and will take action on its own only as a final resort.

The timing of a drawn-out regulatory process also dovetails with the progression of Obama’s second-term agenda. The administration needs to cooperate with Republicans to pass immigration reform and harbors at least faint hopes for a budget accord. A muscular exercise of administrative power over environmental policy may reignite the raging anti-government paranoia that made any bipartisan cooperation impossible during Obama’s first term. Far more sensible to pass whatever laws can be passed first.

One also gets the sense, though, that even if Obama shouted his regulatory plans from the rafters, it wouldn’t do much to change the narrative. Outside the narrow energy-and-environment community, few major national reporters or pundits have keyed in to Obama’s strategy. They habitually equate progress with the passage of laws, and the absence of a legislative agenda means the lack of any agenda at all. “Many took note of Mr. Obama’s promise to tackle global warming in his inaugural address,” Edward Luce wrote mournfully in the Financial Times last week. “That was the last anyone heard of it.” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza is typical: “[G]iven the fraught politics around doing anything major on the issue … it seems likely that Obama will go small-bore rather than major overhaul if he wants to get something through Congress.” Note the assumption that doing anything major requires getting it through Congress.

Senator Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, chided reporters earlier this year: “A lot of you press me … on: ‘Where is the bill on climate change? Where is the bill?’ There doesn’t have to be a bill.”

She’s right. We don’t need a law, because Richard Nixon and his Congress, filled with what we today would call wenvironmental wackos, already passed it 40 years ago.

All the myths of the presidency we cling to are perfectly useless here. The heavy lifting will be, by conventional political terms, invisible. There is no need for Johnsonian arm-twisting or Sorkin-esque rhetorical uplift. The fight of Obama’s second presidential term – the much-mocked fight to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet – requires only the simple exercise of power.

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and a few of the comments:

Small Family Farmer 2013-05-11 11:52

Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Stone Age

adam-keller2.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/the-stone-age.html

Posted by Adam Keller

============================================================

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FOLLOWING:

By Adiv Sterman May 17, 2013,

Israeli police officers confront ultra-Orthodox demonstrators during in front of the recruiting office in Jerusalem, May 16, 2013
(photo credit: Flash90)

Deputy Finance Minister Mickey Levy on Friday slammed ultra-Orthodox demonstrators who took part in violence at a Jerusalem rally Thursday protesting the universal draft law, claiming that their behavior “crossed all the red lines.”

Levy posted on his Facebook page that the injuring of 10 policemen by the protesters was shameful and unacceptable. He further stressed that the government would continue to promote equality in the burden of army service, and would work against extremists who want to “preserve poverty and discrimination.”

The Vienna Solarstammtisch that meets at the “Zum Hagenthaler” Restaurant at Wallgasse 32, 1060 Wien, every third Thursday of the month, is a creation of Eurosolar Austria.  www.eurosolar.at

It is led by Professor Franz Niessler, and the information is usually conveyed by Eng. Herbert Eberhardt   herbert.ebergardt at eurosolar.at

Many of the the Solar Table participants own electric vehicles and live in energy-saving homes equiped for use of solar energy.

At the May 2013 meeting, the First presenter was Rosemarie Dietz, a Green visionary from Perchtoldsdorf NO, who related her experiences when crossing on foot the length of Lower Austria (Niederoesterreich) looking for the implementation of renewable energy on her path. She was looking for location of wind-mills and for the use of photovoltaic use of solar energy, but she also found that there were no-more small local restaurants on her way where one could have stopped for a meal and a drink. The villages are shrinking and the young people move to the large cities. The small scale agriculture that was the base of the rural sector has vanished and everything is bought at the large supper markets like in the city – much of it imported from long distance.

The moderator was Gerhard Kohlmaier and the main speaker Professor Hannes Bauer who is now with the Union of Retirees of Lower Austria, Head of the Political and Economic Futures Forum and building an effort for change. His target is the economic security of the individual in a growing strength of the European Union. He clearly sees in providing safeguards for the communities in villages – people living on and from the land – the best way of providing this security – and it clearly grabs our attention because this is also our belief.

Dr. Bauer looked at the ethics of high social, ecological and democratic values as strength for Austria in the EU context – Quality of Life and the Social Security of the citizens are the goals of his sort of politics.

Dr. Hannes Bauer is not a newcomer to Austrian Politics. During the years 1989-1991 and 2000-2008 he was a Socialist Party member of the Austrian Parliament and 1986-1987 State Secretary in the Ministry of Trades, Industry, and Labor. His background is economics – business development. Having started out from the State Government of Lower Austria and entering in 1991 the Leadership of at the the Federal level of the Austrian Socialist Party. He belongs to the Chancellor Bruno Kreisky School of active policy-oriented Socialism.

The meeting of the Solar-Table May meeting was amazing. Besides the Austrian political Reds and Greens, present were also the Blacks, Blues, and the new Stronach Yellow – and all got involved in the conversation. Needless to say that all were for solar energy but had difficulty accepting each-others honesty in pursuing the goal of a decentralized, community-based, small-town or village based economy – though all adhered to such a goal.

Energy was a main topic. How do we build back an agriculture that will provide biofuels, and how do we do so that the villages rely on photovoltaic solar energy and windmills – being independent of big corporation electricity grids, and even able to supply energy to the National grid? How do we convince the governing powers that there is no need of shale-fracking – this beyond the obvious that fracking is dangerous to the environment? How does one handle American intervention in EU economy planning?

I will now do something unusual – I am going to put forward the ideas I voiced at the meeting and which I felt summarized the different points of view in an event that sounded like a political competition, but that could easily be turned into a united National front for independence from outside economic forces. All what is needed now is a single party to come up with such ideas in its platform and invite the others to join in.

Let us start now:

The thesis is that what grows on the land is sustainable and positive, what comes from the inside of the earth will not endure, is unsustainable, and negative.

Planting for food and fuel, for animal feed and industrial feed-stocks, for human and animal life, is all based on the continuous energy that reaches the earth from the sun – thus non depleting. This is done by people living in small communities on the land – this activity if cared for, with the help of appropriate National policies, will keep people on the land and avoid their migration to magnet-cities something the topic of the evening was aimed to achieve.

Planting wind mills and solar collectors, like the photovoltaic collectors, on the land or roof-tops, is just another act of reaping results with the help of solar energy – exactly like growing vegetation or animals. We see no difference here.

Looking under the land for riches deposited in the past, the likes of fossil fuels of all sorts – coal, shale, oil, gas, and figuring out technologies to extract them from underground, amounts to using up in a short time of natures bank-deposits. On top of this it gave us the CO2 problem and clear climate-change – both avoidable if we refrain from using fossil fuels.

ERGO: Working the land revives the villages and provides us with what we need. Searching ways to obtain products out of fossil deposits, destroys the land, the population living on the land, and eventually the whole economy, because of the way it effects the environment, the social and economic development of the State, and the security of the people who lose their direct relationship to the land.

What political party will have the courage to put a return to a land policy of growth on its election banner?

————————

Further:

Mr. Eberhardt brought to show the new Renaud “Twizy” small two-seater electric vehicle.

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Next Solar Table meeting will be Thursday, June 20, 2013, same location, 18:00 pm (6PM)

THE TOPIC:  RENEWABLE PRIMARY MATERIALS – “NAWAROS” – (“Nachwachsende Rohstoffe”).

EU Agenda for the May 20, 2013 week -

EU leaders discuss energy and tax next WEEK.

17.05.13

By Nikolaj Nielsen

A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. “If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades,” scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! “We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.”

 

 

 

May 17, 2013  | from Tara Lohan on AlterNet

If you didn’t know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports:

Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a “vanishingly small proportion” defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn’t specifically address humanity’s involvement — likely because it’s considered a given in scientific circles, the survey’s authors point out — but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.

In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration’s been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz’s first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas.

Of course, we’ve already been sold the story that we’re suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked — although what Americans will get out of the deal
will be higher gas prices and less energy security.

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management’s newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club’s Michael Brune reported Friday:

The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won’t be required to disclose what chemicals they’re using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we’re serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not “taking any meetings on the pipeline.”

Or is he? The group writes:

Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.

“I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans’ dinner tables every year,” said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.

4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:

“Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.”

In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.”

Of course the report mentions protecting the environment, but gives no specific details.

We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he’s completely out of touch with reality. You can’t hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think “all of the above” is a rationale energy strategy.

 ————————————-

The problem at hand are the major interests of the agri-industry’s corn-growers and the chemical industry. 

In Europe – it all started  with corn-borers advancing from East Europe into Central Europe and attacking the roots of corn plants. The corn-growers got help from the chemical industry pesticide-producers. The side effect is that this pesticide kills more then just the corn borers – in effect it kills bees and butterflies as well and without the pollen-transfer by the bees, there
is no agriculture period. Now genetic engineering provides the seeds to the corn-monoculture big-business that goes under the “farmers” name and this industry can survive without the bees, and seemingly are in a position to get benefits from what is the misery to anyone else.  A Minister whose terrain was concieved with great fanfare as LIFE MINISTRY because it combines Agriculture and the Environment, sided with the agri-business interests, but when the uproar from the environmentalists became deafening, he decided to offer compensation to the BEE-KEEPERS for their losses – thus adding further insult to the environmentalists and to the dying bees.

THIS IS UNSUSTAINABLE FROM OUR POINT OF VIEW!

Small Family farms were the backbone of  a Nation and the large oil-based monoculture industry is the anti-thesis to  that past. We would like to believe that the whole political spectrum will turn around and churn out ways to save bees and humans as well.

From the UN – May 15, 2013:

UNITED NATIONS, May 1, updated 7:59 pm — They say a sucker is born every minute, but this takes the cake. Someone has bid over $20,000 for an unpaid six week “internship at the UN in New York City working for the UN-NGO Committee on Human Rights.” Click here.

What will the UN say about a position in its “august” hall being auctioned off? This UN has put up with many conflicts of interest, for example envoy Tony Blair being paid $11 million by Kazakhstan.

By giving the first question only to UN Correspondents Association who pay $70 dues, the UN has allowed a “pay to question” system. But this?

It’s on the website “CharityBuzz,” to raise funds for the “RFK Young Leaders.” It is a new low.
Bids close May 14. So you can still bid for it!

Update of 7:59 pm: the UN finally came back (for now) with this:

Subject: Re: Your question today
From: UN Spokesperson – Do Not Reply [at] un.org
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:53 PM
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com

Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com

=============================================

After ICP Exposes Sale of UN Internship at UN for $20,000, UN Contacts CharityBuzz

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

UNITED NATIONS, May 1 — What does the UN do when it is shown that an internship at the UN is being sold, online, for more than $20,000?

  First it jests, then it asks. But the position remains for sale, with bids open until May 14, here.

  On the morning of May 1, Inner City Press exposed a “bid over $20,000 for an unpaid six week ‘internship at the UN in New York City working for the UN-NGO Committee on Human Rights’… This UN has put up with many conflicts of interest, for example envoy Tony Blair being paid $11 million by Kazakhstan. By given the first question only to UN Correspondents Association who pay $70 dues, the UN has allowed a ‘pay to question’ system. But this?”

  After publishing this article, Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky at the May 1 noon briefing (video here, from Minute 13:42)

Inner City Press: there is a UN internship that’s being auctioned off online. I am not assuming that you’d know of this, but I have seen it, I have written an article about it –

Spokesperson Nesirky : Well, you want it? You want it or something?

Inner City Press: No, no, not at all, I wanted to know if it is legal. They are saying that people should pay $22,000 to work in the UN, it’s for the UN NGO Committee on Human Rights, for six weeks. They are auctioning it off openly to benefit something called the RFK Young Leaders Foundation. But, it seems to smack of… it says, you’ll learn how the UN really works. I am wondering if the UN is comfortable with positions inside the building being sold for money online.

Spokesperson Nesirky: I’ll have to look into that; I am not aware of that particular unusual story, Matthew. But, I am happy to look into it.

Inner City Press: Thank you.

  Throughout the afternoon, Inner City Press received responses from all over. But from the UN Spokesperson, nothing until after 7:30 pm:

Subject: Re: Your question today
From: UN Spokesperson – Do Not Reply [at] un.org
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:53 PM
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com

Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com’

  Well, that’s something. But RFK’s Michael Sandel was asked; later, Inner City Press asked the RFK Center’s Sierra Ewert:

“I am a journalist who covered the UN; this morning I wrote a story, then asked the UN a question, about the RFK Center’s RFK Young Leaders role in the auctioning off of a “UN internship” for over $20,000 on CharityBuzz.com. I want to ask you, on deadline, what the RFK Center’s knowledge of, involvement in, and position on this auctioning off of an internship at the UN is. Please respond ASAP.”

=====================================

After ICP Asks of Sale of Internship AT UN, UN SpinsIt’s Not a UN Internship

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, May 2 — Yesterday morning Inner City Press published an expose that an internship at the UN was and is being sold, online, for more than $20,000. Then at the May 1 UN noon briefing, Inner City Press asked the UN to justify that

Inner City Press: people should pay $22,000 to work in the UN, it’s for the UN NGO Committee on Human Rights, for six weeks. They are auctioning it off openly to benefit something called the RFK Young Leaders Foundation. It says, you’ll learn how the UN really works…. I have written an article about it… I am wondering if the UN is comfortable with positions inside the building being sold for money online.

Spokesperson Nesirky: I’ll have to look into that; I am not aware of that particular unusual story, Matthew. [Video here, at 13:42]

  Nearly eight hours later after some others jumped on that story if only on Twitter, some far away giving credit or hat tips and some closer at hand troublingly not, the UN sent Inner City Press this answer:

Subject: Re: Your question today
From: UN Spokesperson – Do Not Reply [at] un.org
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:53 PM
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com

Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com’

Inner City Press immediately published this answer, in a second story noting that it had asked the RFK Center’s Sierra Ewert:

“I am a journalist who covers the UN; this morning I wrote a story, then asked the UN a question, about the RFK Center’s RFK Young Leaders role in the auctioning off of a “UN internship” for over $20,000 on CharityBuzz.com. I want to ask you, on deadline, what the RFK Center’s knowledge of, involvement in, and position on this auctioning off of an internship at the UN is. Please respond ASAP.”

  The RFK Center has yet to respond; some have come to its defense, or to the defense of Bruce Knotts. But is that the point?  Inner City Press put in other requests for comment.

   For what it’s worth, the bidding started at $500 then got into a contest between “m.alam” and “Aygul,” with the latter the interim (Young?) leader at $22,000.

  The UN, after publication of Inner City Press’ second story, sent a “further to” clarification:

“Further to the earlier email, just to add that we do not believe that the internship in question is a UN internship. As mentioned, we are trying to establish the details of this case and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com.’”

  It was at this point, using precisely this “further to” language from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson’s office, that another slowly came to the story. How did it happen?

 What was the role of the spokesperson’s office, which just last week didn’t answer Inner City Press’ April 25 noon briefing question about Ban meeting with former French president (and now investment adviser for Qatar) Nicolas Sarkozy — then gave the answer to Agence France Presse? There is a growing pattern of this.

  The auctioned internship story has hit a nerve given the parallel debate about the ethics of unpaid internships; some have become aware of it through that world, and that’s good. But in the smaller world of those who cover the UN, there are troubling developments on which we have also put in questions. In the UN fUN-house it is “World Press Freedom Day;” one would expect answers.

================================================

T H E    U P D A T  E :

Internship at UN, Bid Up to $26,000 As UN Can’t or Won’t Act on Auction.

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, May 3 — Now the UN insists its Office of Legal Affairs is working hard on the “unusual” auction, now for $22,000, of a “internship at the UN.” But how can it be that the UN and OLA have accomplished nothing? Inner City Press first wrote about this on the morning of May 1 and asked about it at that day’s noon briefing.

Since then Inner City Press reported that a bidder named “Aygul” was ahead, bidding $22,000. The RFK Center, for which the auction is being conducted, has not provided any explanation.

Yet again at the May 3 noon briefing, the UN said it was still trying to figure out what was going on, and told Inner City Press not to be critical of the lack of results. (TNRS coverage).

And alongside Inner City Press’ May 3 noon briefing questions, the bidding on the “internship in the UN building” went higher, with a bid by “m. alam” for $26,000. From the UN’s May 3 transcript:

Inner City Press: On this internship question, I am assuming that when you have more you will say more, but yesterday I was saying, that they could contact NGO, and I am looking again at this page. It seems pretty straightforward that an NGO that is accredited to the UN shouldn’t be offering an internship at the UN for $22,000; and the bidding is still open. So, does the UN intend to somehow take action on this while the bidding is open? Can the person who is currently bidding $22,000 actually enter the UN as an intern under the terms that were offered?

Spokesperson Martin Nesirky: Matthew, we have said very clearly that internships at the United Nations are not for sale. Internships at the United Nations, United Nations internships, are unpaid. I also said yesterday that the Office of Legal Affairs is looking into it, and that includes contacting a number of people. You seem to assume what is and is not being done. And I don’t think that is right to do that. They are doing their job to find out. It obviously does look unusual, to say the very least, and we are trying to find out the full details. And once we have something further to say, we will. But just to repeat that United Nations internships are simply not for sale. And furthermore, they are unpaid.

But again, this is the same UN Office of Legal Affairs which after 15 months of delay tersely ruled that all claims about the UN bringing cholera to Haiti were “not receivable.” So, no, we do not have confidence in them cleaning this up.

QUESTION: The impression in Europe is that we are going through a very far-reaching and deep crisis, possibly the last crisis, because Europe is losing ground against the Far East and South America. And it could really mean that we are losing our sovereignty. Do you think that Europe will be able to regain the economic and political strength to be a leader in the world, or is this really the end? Do you think that Europe will be a world leader again? Or do we have to prepare for a reversal of growth?

SOROS: I share your concern about the gravity of the crisis. I have taken it very seriously. As a believer in an open society, I have made it my first priority for the last few years. This book [Financial Turmoil] is a testament to my concern. I do not think that the euro crisis is the end of Europe. We must not allow it. The EU as it was originally conceived was the embodiment of the values and principles of an open society, and it had the potential to exercise a beneficial influence in the world in promoting those principles. It is a great loss for the world that the EU has become totally preoccupied with its own internal problems.

For the full text go to: www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-resistible-fall-of-europe–an-interview-with-george-soros

On Sunday, yesterday, George Soros was awarded the Tiziano Terzani Prize for his 2012 book Financial Turmoil published in Italy by Hoepli. This posting is based on his latest comments about the European financial crisis, which are adapted from a press conference he held in Udine, Italy.

Observed concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have exceeded the symbolic 400 parts per million (ppm) threshold at several stations of the World Meteorological Organization’s Global Atmosphere Watch network. This is a wakeup call about the constantly rising levels of this greenhouse gas, which is released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and other human activities and is the main driver of climate change. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years, trapping heat and causing our planet to warm further, impacting on all aspects of life on earth.

On May 9, 2013, the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, recorded a reading of 400.03 ppm, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Mauna Loa is the oldest continuous atmospheric measurement station in the world and so is widely regarded as a benchmark site in the Global Atmosphere Watch.

Several other Global Atmosphere Watch stations have also reported CO2 concentrations exceeding the 400 ppm threshold during the seasonal maximum. This occurs early in the northern hemisphere spring before vegetation growth absorbs CO 2.

The threshold was first crossed at stations in the Arctic. A monthly average value exceeding 400 ppm was registered at Barrow, Alaska, USA (71.3N) for the first time in April 2012, as well as at Alert, in Canada (82.5N). From the beginning of 2013, measured CO 2. values at another GAW Global station, in Ny-Ålesund, Norway, (at 78.9N) also exceeded 400 ppm. This threshold has now also been crossed at stations closer to the Equator. Izaña, (Canary Islands, Spain), reported daily mean values exceeding 400 ppm at the end of April 2013. This was followed by Mauna Loa, which has been carrying out measurements since 1958.

The Global Atmosphere Watch coordinates observations of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases like methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere to ensure that measurements around the world are standardized and can be compared to each other. The network spans more than 50 countries including stations high in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas, as well as in the Arctic, Antarctic and in the far South Pacific.

Carbon dioxide is the single most important greenhouse gas emitted by human activities. It is responsible for 85% of the increase in radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – over the past decade. Between 1990 and 2011 there was a 30% increase in radiative forcing because of greenhouse gases. Radiative forcing is calculated relative to the pre-industrial level of key greenhouse gases.

According to WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 390.9 parts per million in 2011, or 140% of the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million. The pre-industrial era level represented a balance of CO2 fluxes between the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased on average by 2 parts per million per year for the past 10 years.

At the current rate of increase, the global annual average CO2 concentration is set to cross the 400 ppm threshold in 2015 or 2016. www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/global.html.-

Iran will assume the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament on May 27 and hold it over four weeks, until June 23, 2013.

The conference chair helps organize the work of the conference and assists in setting the agenda.

The conference was established in 1979 after a special U.N. General Assembly session, and is made up of 65 countries. In the past, the conference and its predecessors negotiated major multilateral arms limitation and disarmament agreements. In recent years it has become paralyzed, with member states often divided even on setting the agenda.

The Conference of Disarmament reports to the UN General Assembly and is billed by the UN as “the single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community.”

Iran is astate that illegally supplies rockets to Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, potentially aiding and abetting mass murder and terrorism. To make this rogue regime head of world arms control is an outrage. Abusers of international norms should not be the public face of the UN.

“This is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s shelter,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, the Geneva based non-governmental organization, which announced it will hold protest events outside the UN hall, featuring Iranian dissidents.

The UN is not shocked, its officials say Iran’s post is merely the result of an automatic rotation.

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The US and others speak up:

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another e-mail we got:

This isn’t the first time that the Conference on Disarmament has faced similar controversy. In July 2011it was North Korea’s turn to take the helm. Not surprisingly, North Korea took the appointment as a sign of approval. Its representative announced that the country was “very much committed to the Conference” and that “he would do everything in his capacity to move the Conference on Disarmament forward.”

So fast forward. We find an ever more aggressive North Korea sharing nuclear know-how with like-minded belligerents, such as Iran and Syria.

When North Korea took the helm, Iran’s representative told the Conference: “I would like to congratulate the distinguished ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the assumption of the presidency and assuring him of my delegation’s full support and cooperation.” You can be sure that the North Korean rep will deliver an equally flowery welcome when Iran dons the crown.

This also isn’t the first time that the UN has appointed Iran to a position of authority wildly at odds with its reprehensible record. In 2010 Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women – the UN’s top women’s rights body. Iranian laws that permit women to be stoned for alleged adultery? Irrelevant.

The saddest part of this charade is that these countries and their despotic leaders take sustenance from acquiring such formal trappings and basking in the accompanying diplomatic niceties. The United States is a member of the Conference on Disarmament. We don’t need another administration speech that the “door is still open” but “the window is closing.” With an Iranian poised to preside, we need to leave.

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UN rights chief finally thinks Egypt’s human rights trajectory a problem

UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay is getting worried somebody might figure out she was on the wrong side of history in Egypt. Her latest press statement is entitled: “Egypt risks drifting away from human rights ideals.” D’ya think? So Pillay now has this to say about the legal moves currently unfolding under the human rights tutelage of the Muslim Brotherhood: “I am very concerned that the new law, if adopted in its current form, may leave them in a worse situation than they were prior to the fall of the Mubarak Government in 2011.”

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Then see also:

Saudi Arabia heads UN counter-terror efforts

A Festival of singing people – 440 of them – from 18 choirs – in 16 European Cities – May 9-12, 2013 – held with workshops at the reestablished historic Odeon Theater in Leopoldstadt – the previously mainly Jewish Second District of Vienna.

The Festival culminated in a public concert on Sunday May 12, 2013 at the Austria Center back-to-back with the offices of the Vienna UN compound. The Honorary Chairman of the event was Austria’s President – the Honorable Heinz Fischer.

This after the 2011 revival of the European States Makkabi sports-competitions that brought at the time 60,000 out-of-town visitors to Vienna.

The present event was dedicated to the revival of Jewish culture in European Communities – and at times the choirs including non-Jews as well.

The timing seems symbolical – it started May 9th – the Victory Day over Nazism and ended on Mothers’ Day – if you wish in memory of those Jewish self sacrificing mothers that helped continue Judaism in Europe that proving that Hitler was defeated.

At the workshops the choirs were taught new songs that were then performed jointly by all participants at the grand-finale of the Sunday event. These included Adon Olam with the Chief cantor of Vienna’s Jewish Community Shmuel Barzilay, Ose Shalom, and the israeli National anthem – The Hatikah (Hope).

The professional leader of the event was Choirmaster Roman Grinberg of the Vienna Jewish Choir whose President is a Young man Florian Pollack who was the organizer of the Sunday concert. Though performing also liturgical music, this choir is cultural in content – including both men and women, something that might have been difficult to do if it were directly part of the Orthodox stream of the majority of Vienna Synagogues – though quite normal with the Or Chadash Reform Vienna Synagogue. Nevertheless the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Austria, Rabbi Chaim Eisenberg, who himself has in the past performed with the Vienna Jewish Choir outside the Synagogue, wrote an introductory note to the Sunday program booklet.

The MC on Sunday was Ms. Danielle Spera who is a well known Austrian TV personality, and in 2010 became the Director of the Vienna Jewish Museum. She was the top choice of Vice Mayor Renate Brauner, who is in charge of the Vienna Holding Company that owns the buildings of the two Vienna Jewish Museums that were up for renovation in the 2010-2011 years.

The meeting of the choirs cost 200.000 Euro and the money came from institutional contributions. The main backer was the Bruxells based European Jewish Union that was described by the MC as The Jewish European Parliament.

At the workshops, the nine choirs that belong to the Renanim organization – choirs from Amsterdam, Bruxelles, Dijon, Marseille, Nantes, Nice, Paris, Toulouse, and Utrecht chose to appear in a large united choir – thus reducing the number of choirs on Sunday from 18 to 10 facilitating a more manageable situation.

The Sunday event started with one choir on stage and all the others in various locations in the hall – singing together Uru Ahim- Hava Neranna. . .  with an added 1400 people in the large and full hall of the Austria Center (In the audience I spotted also several women with Muslim head-covers). Then, after the introductory, thankfully rather short  speeches, the line-up was thus as follows:

1. The Vienna Jewish Choir led by Roman Grinberg that was created 20 years ago by Dr. Timothy Smolka with 8 people and counts now on 50 active singers having performed at many events all over Europe. Their contribution was mainly in Jidish – old folk-songs.

2. The Assoziazione Coro-Kol of Rome led by Choirmaster Andrea Orlando that started with Verdi’s Va Pensiero and moved to Hebrew Shabbat and wedding songs. This choir was established in 1993 by the Great Synagogue of Rome and has usually a repertory that includes Ladino as well as Yiddish songs.

3. The Masel Tov Choir of Wuppertal, Germany with Rokella Rachel Verenina, formerly of Odessa, the Ukraine, as choirmaster.It is a choir established 15 years ago by Russian immigrants that finally wanted to express themselves freely. It has now 35 active members – Jews and non-Jews and is one of the best in Germany. They sang Yiddish and German. In the choir I spotted also one black man and many of the singers looked like hardened industrial workers – what they probably are indeed.

4. The Boys Choir of The Vienna City Tempel – the Main Synagogue of Austria Shmuel Barzilai, the Chief Cantor in charge. It had 7 boys under the age 13. This Choir is modeled after the famous Vienna Boys Choir. Their songs were all in Hebrew and from the liturgy and were received with warm applause.

5. The Shalom Chor of Berlin led by Nikola David who is an operatic singer who after graduating from cantorial school has now a position with the Erfurt Synagogue. The 37 active members are from the community and from churches around Berlin. They sang in Hebrew and interestingly wore shawls of single colors – red, green, orange, blue, light green – which left me with the impression that they covered the political spectrum of Germany. I wonder if this was indeed the intent of these colors.

6. The Ensemble Vocal Zamir of Paris with Albert Benzaquen as choirmaster ranging in music from Shlomo Carlebach and Naomi Shemer to Chasidic and Ladino. It was created in 1980 from basically members of families from the Sephardic community. They have had many appearances in France and do not miss the choir festival in Israel – the Zimrya in Jerusalem. Working people – they clearly enjoy what they are doing and we were told meet twice a week.

7. The Jewish Choir “Eva” of Saint Petersburg with Elena Rubinovich as choirmaster. An all girls choir. The teen-age girls dressed in white blouses and blue long skirts. They had a large Magen David attached to their blouses above the heart. They started with Jerusalem of Gold in Hebrew, had a Russian song and moved to Yidddish – “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” the Jewish American song. Interesting – this was different then in the written program and clearly they have a large repertory and were excellent – real singing talent – lurks here. We were told that the girls are children and youth organized by the Welfare and Community Centre. Terrific applause.

8. The Varnishkes of Lviv, The Ukraine with Oleksandra Somysh as Band leader of what was indeed a Klezmer-music group.  Another example of terrific applause. The team was born 6 years ago and as they state it – they adore the magic of Yiddishkeit. They include volunteers and foreign students and are lovely. They reminded me of a similar non-Jewish group I saw in Cracow years ago and Elie Wiesel was in the audience then.
The Lviv group – the singing was all in Yiddish – and we understand that young German audiences love to listen to them.

9. Hor Bracha Baruh a Choir named after the Baruch Brothers of Belgrade. This choir is not by definition Jewish – but it was named after three brothers that were killed fighting in the resistance in WWII, and the choir comes to honor their Jewish culture. The choir was founded in 1879 as the Serbian Jewish Singing Society – perhaps the oldest Jewish choir in the world – then re-established under the present name when Yugoslavia split and the Serbs clearly were looking for Israeli recognition mentioning that it was Serbs that were most friendly in those terrible war-years.Their repertory is eclectic – included Serbian, Ladino and Hebrew and sounded well rehearsed. It is a nostalgic but hope-filled experience. The Choirmaster Stefan Zekic – a clear professional.

10. The Renanim combine with Avner Soudry as choirmaster and Therese Beuret-Sadoul as Administrator that gave us a Paul Ben Haim Hebrew composition, a Suite Judeo-Espagnole and a very appropriate Shir LaShalom, then Mipi El. They remained on stage and were joined by everyone else for the Grand Finale.

There were obviously no encores – but everyone, afyer milling around for a while, happily called it a night.

from Matthew Russell Lee:

The Free UN Coalition for Access had tried to hold off but now must cover the bungled move-back of the UN press corps to the Secretariat building.

It was delayed for months, then set to occur on May 10. But when the day arrived, there were still no keys for the offices being moved back to. (There were also extensive complaints to FUNCA, mostly from UNCA members, that the largest and most private offices were granted to the Executive Committee members of the UN Correspondents Association, a questionable and questioned grouping with which the UN exclusively and secretly negotiated office assignments.)

Journalists were told that a new television system called EZTV would replace the old cable system. But as of May 10, when FUNCA members tried the referenced eztv.un.org, it did not work. Nor did the wi-fi in the third floor press area.

Now on the Sunday before the Monday “move in,” the UN has offered apologies not to the entire press corps, but only to UNCA Executive Committee insiders, trying to use them who have been so well served by these secretive planning to molify others.

By no means all UN correspondents are represented by UNCA, despite recent false statements by UNCA president Pamela Falk of CBS, broadcast propaganda-like on UNTV in the UN’s lobby, to the contrary.

So where is the on the record mea culpa to all UN correspondents? Journalists were told to turn in their keys to their former cubicles and move on May 13. But it is not ready, and there are no keys to the new spaces. Investigative journalists have commitments to their sources, and will not leave any records unlocked.

This is UN incompetence, and perhaps more.

350NYC

United Against Pipelines, Forward on Climate!  Tomorrow, Monday May 13th,  New Yorkers will march and rally to greet President Obama when he attends a fundraiser in NYC––his first visit since his post-Sandy inspection. In his Inaugural Address just a few months ago, Obama promised “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”
Yet he continues to promote an “All of the above” energy policy that includes coal, tar sands, and fracked shale gas.

Join us if you stand against fossil fuel pipelines, against fracking, against tar sands, and FOR a country powered by wind, water and solar.

Gather in Bryant Park starting at 5 (meet near the fountain off 6th avenue at 41st Street). Reverend Billy and his choir will lead us off with a rousing blessing and song. We’ll begin to march at 5:30, then rally in front of the Waldorf Astoria at 6:30.

If you can, please wear yellow and orange (the colors of Occupy Sandy) to demonstrate your support for a clean energy future.
act.350.org/signup/NYC_Unites_Against_Pipelines/.

Event Partners: 350 NYC, 350 NJ, 350.org, Brooklyn For Peace, Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline (CARP), CREDO, CUNY Divest, Food & Water Watch, Global Kids Inc., Green Party of NY, Human Impacts Institute, NYC Friends of Clearwater, NYU Divest, Occupy the Pipeline, Occupy Sandy, Restore the Rock, Sane Energy Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, Sierra Club National, United for Action, World Can’t Wait, WESPAC, YANA (You Are Never Alone).

 IRANIAN VERSION of THEOLOGICAL DEMOCRACY THAT WILL SET UP IRAN RULERS until June 2017.

Iranian presidential election, 2013

2009 14 June 2013 I 2017

Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Conservative

The eleventh election of the President of Iran is scheduled to be held on 14 June 2013. If no presidential candidate polls 50 percent of the vote on the first round, a runoff will be held on 21 June. It will elect the seventh President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Registration for candidates took place from 7 May and concluded last night – on 11 May 2013.
After the registration step, registered candidates must be qualified by the Guardian Council in order to be on the ballot.
Their list will be released after five days – that is May 16, 2013 and that constitutes the Final-Start Line-up of the race.

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Two Candidates Shake Up Iran’s Presidential Race as Last-Minute Entries.

By THOMAS ERDBRINK
Published, The New York Times: May 11, 2013

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a protégé of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was soundly defeated by Mr. Ahmadinejad in the 2005 election, arrived simultaneously at the Interior Ministry headquarters in the capital, Tehran, to register. The building was cordoned off by security forces restraining hundreds of people, who were shouting slogans in favor of and against Mr. Mashaei.

Both men had kept analysts wondering until the last minute whether they would participate in the elections, set for June 14. If their candidacies are approved by a council of conservative clerics and jurists — a hurdle that analysts say will not be easy — the men are virtually certain to shake up the campaign because they hold views that challenge Iran’s governing establishment, a loose alliance of conservative Shiite Muslim clerics and Revolutionary Guards commanders who hold sway over the country’s judiciary, security forces, Parliament and state news media.

The men’s criticisms of those governing behind the scenes will undoubtedly appeal to Iran’s dissatisfied urban voters. But they also strongly oppose each other, setting the stage for a highly contested election if both men win approval to run.

Appearing at a news conference with Mr. Ahmadinejad after registering, Mr. Mashaei, 52, said he was set to continue Mr. Ahmadinejad’s international policies, seen by the West as confrontational, and his economic decisions, considered controversial. Mr. Mashaei represents a new generation of politicians, defined by the president, who seem determined to to oust older leaders from power. While once supported by Iran’s political establishment, Mr. Ahmadinejad and his team have now fallen out of favor, mostly because they have accumulated too much influence, analysts say. “Mashaei means Ahmadinejad and Ahmadinejad means Mashaei,” the president said at the news conference.

But Mr. Mashaei has been far more outspoken than his mentor on issues like personal freedoms, often stressing individual rights. He also organized a controversial conference in which a group of dancing women carried around the Koran, angering conservative clerics.

Mr. Rafsanjani, on the other hand, has cast himself as a pragmatist, calling for a more open society and better business relationships with the West. Mr. Rafsanjani, 80, a veteran of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, says Iran is in a “danger zone” because of the “amateurism” of the president and his team. A cleric himself, Mr. Rafsanjani has criticized traditionalist clerics and their supporters for trying to quash all dissenting voices.

Iran faces huge economic problems and continuing strain under international sanctions, and many ordinary citizens feel suffocated by a blanket of security procedures. But on Saturday, neither candidate came up with a plan to address those issues.

Mr. Rafsanjani did not talk to reporters, but has recently said he would bring in experienced managers to solve Iran’s problems.

Technically, all Iranians are free to participate in elections, but Iran’s powerful Guardian Council, which vets candidates, will decide by May 23 who will be allowed to run. “I think it is highly doubtful that Mr. Mashaei will be allowed to run,” said Amir Mohebbian, an analyst who is close to Iran’s highest leaders. “I hope we will not witness any street riots when that happens.”

Even if they pass muster, both men are likely to face heavy political resistance from Iran’s establishment as revenge for rewriting what seems to have been a prewritten script for the campaign, meant primarily to attract yes men.

The governing establishment has called Mr. Mashaei “deviant” because he believes that Muslims can have individual relationships with God instead of only through clerical intermediaries. Its leaders have also warned Mr. Rafsanjani not to run and called him a traitor, accusing him of supporting Iran’s two main opposition leaders during the 2009 elections.

Until Saturday, many ordinary Iranians had largely ignored the coming vote, partly because of their traumatic experiences in 2009, when many protested Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election victory as a fraud and were forced off the streets by security forces. With Mr. Mashaei and Mr. Rafsanjani both entering the race, that could change.

“This is very surprising,” said Taha, 26, a former engineering student, who, like others interviewed for this article, asked that his surname not be published. “I will support Mr. Rafsanjani. He can reform our system.”

Others said they would vote for Mr. Mashaei, who became controversial after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a decree in 2009 banning him from becoming vice president.

“He seems to be a man who can stand up against those who rule our country,” said Abbas, a taxi driver. “We want change.”

At his news conference, Mr. Mashaei apologized for arriving to register at the last minute but did not explain why, and did not take any questions. Mr. Rafsanjani reportedly waited in his house most of the day Saturday, to get permission from Ayatollah Khamenei to run. It is unclear whether permission was given.

In a sign of the tensions that will undoubtedly surface in the campaign, two fistfights erupted in the building’s pressroom after Mr. Mashaei and Mr. Ahmadinejad left.

In the first, after an opponent of Mr. Mashaei accused him of placing “pornographic statues” in Iranian parks, a supporter shoved all the press microphones off a table and started hitting another person. In the second, a reporter for the semiofficial Fars news agency fought with an unidentified man in a baseball cap. The police intervened, but no arrests were made, local news media reported.