From:    cseipt at agu.org
Subject: CLARIFICATION: Eligibility for participation in the African Climate Change Fellowship Program
Date: August 22, 2008

“Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Participation in the African Climate Change Fellowship Program is open to citizens of all African nations.

It is important to note that the citizenship requirement is one of four general requirements that all applicants must meet to be eligible for a Fellowship award. In addition to being a citizen of an African nation, all applicants must also meet the following general eligibility criteria:

Applicant must be age 40 years or less as of 31 September 2008;
The proposed Fellowship project and activities must be clearly related to and likely to advance climate change adaptation in Africa; and
Applications must be complete and received on or before 17 September 2008.
Applicants are also required to meet a number of eligibility criteria that are specific to the type of Fellowship for which they apply (i.e., Policy, Doctoral Research, Post-Doctoral, or Teaching Fellowship). For more information about Fellowship-specific criteria, please refer to the ACCFP 2008 Call for Applications. The Call for Applications and other important application materials can be accessed on the Pan-African START Secretariat’s website at: http://accfp.pass-africa.org.

The ACCFP aims to support African professionals, researchers and graduate students to undertake activities that will enhance their capacities for advancing and applying knowledge for climate change adaptation in Africa. The Program is jointly administered by the global change SysTem for Analysis, Research and Training (START), the Institute of Resource Assessment (IRA) of the University of Dar es Salaam and the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), with financial support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). If you have questions about the Program, please contact the Pan-African START Secretariat at  pass at ira.udsm.ac.tz.

We thank you for your continued interest in the ACCFP and for your understanding in this matter. Again, we apologize for this oversight and any confusion that it has caused. Please help us to spread the word about this exciting opportunity to other colleagues and friends. Forward this email to qualified individuals that might be interested to apply!

We look forward to receiving your applications!

Best,

Clark Seipt
On behalf of START, IRA-UDSM, and AAS”

Muslim Sportswomen Gain Standing in Beijing.
Thursday 07 August 2008

by: Aline Bannayan, Women’s eNews
 http://www.truthout.org/article/muslim-s…

The Beijing Olympics starting Friday will showcase the varying degrees to which Muslim countries are warming up to women’s sports. The United Arab Emirates and Oman are sending women for the first time.

Amman, Jordan - Even before the Beijing Summer Olympics begin on Friday, Habiba Hinai is tasting victory.

For the first time, her country is sending a female Olympian to the games. Buthaina Yaqoubi, 16, will compete in the 100-meter dash and either the long jump or the triple jump.

Hinai, one of three women to represent Oman by bearing the Olympic torch during the relay earlier this year, is vice-chair of Oman’s Volleyball Association, the highest position for any woman in the country’s sports scene.

For 18 years she has advocated for the advancement of women’s athletics in her country, seeing it expand from an activity only available in schools in 1993 to the formation of national women’s volleyball, tennis and table tennis teams in 2004.

Now that her country is sending female competitors to the games, Hinai says she can start looking forward to the day when more Muslim women join the International Olympic Committee and Olympic Asian Committee. “That’s the only way to develop sports in the Muslim world.”

The 135-member International Olympic Committee, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, has 15 female members. Two are former Olympians from Arab Muslim countries: Morocco’s 1984 track-and-field 400-meter star Nawal El Moutawakel, the first Arab woman to earn a gold medal, and Egyptian swimmer Rania Elwani, who competed from 1992 through 2000.

Nine men from Arab and Muslim countries also serve on the committee, which organizes the games and represents its 205 national members.

Warming Rates Vary

Muslim countries are warming up to women’s Olympics by varying degrees.

North African nations dominate in Muslim women’s representation. Among them, Tunisia is a particular standout, with women competing in track and field, canoeing, fencing, judo, table tennis, tennis, tae kwon do and wrestling.

The 11 women in Morocco’s 38-member delegation include 30-year-old Olympic 800-meter track champion Hasna Ben Hassi. The country’s many promising young competitors include 24-year-old Meriem Alaoui Selsouli, a potential gold medalist in the women’s 5,000-meter event, who faces fierce Ethiopian competition. The country is also sending Khadija Abbouda, the Olympics’ first Moroccan female archer.

Algeria’s female volleyball players, All Africa Games champions, will compete in that sport for the first time. “It’s extraordinary. We can meet the world’s best teams. And we’re setting an example for women’s sport in Algeria,” said team captain Marimal Madani. Algerian women will also compete in judo and athletics, where Nahida Touhami will compete in the 1500-meter event.

Jordan’s seven-member delegation includes four women. Among them Nadine Dawani, a tae kwon do competitor, and Zeina Sha’ban, a table tennis champion, have the honor of carrying their nation’s flag in the Aug. 8 opening ceremony.

First Women From Oman and UAE

Among the socially conservative Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates joins Oman in sending its first women to the games. Sheikha Maitha Mohammad Rashed Al-Maktoum, the daughter of Sheikh Mohammad, will compete in tae kwon do. Her cousin and another member of the ruling family, Sheikha Latifa Bint Ahmad Al-Maktoum, will take part in equestrian show jumping.

Muslim Women in Olympic History

1964: Iran sent its first female athlete to Olympics.

1984: Morocco’s Nawal El Moutawakel became the first Arab woman to win a gold medal when she came in first in the women’s 400 meters at the Los Angeles Games. She is now minister of sports.

1992: Hassiba Boulmerka of Algeria won a gold medal in 1,500-meter race. She often trained in Europe after being castigated in her own country for competing in a vest and shorts. That same year Susi Susanti became the first Olympic athlete to win a gold medal in badminton for Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

2000: Jordan’s Princess Haya, the sister of King Abdullah, became the first female Arab flag-bearer at an Olympic Games, the first and only Arab woman to compete in equestrian events and the first member of an Arab royal family to compete in the Olympics. In 2006, she became the first Arab woman to lead an international sports federation when she was elected president of the International Equestrian Federation.

2004: Women from Iran won medals in pistol shooting. That year Afghanistan-which had ended Taliban rule only three years earlier-sent two female athletes to compete; one in track and field and one in judo. Bahrain sent Ruqaya Al-Ghasra as their first-ever female competitor.

Iran, Pakistan and Bahrain, which usually have predominantly male delegations, are sending a limited number of women.

Iran’s 53 athletes include three women, who will compete in rowing, archery and tae kwon do.

Two women are among Pakistan’s 21 athletes. They are 22-year-old Sadaf Siddiqui running the 100-meter dash and 18-year-old swimmer Kiran Khan. Pakistan first sent female athletes to the games in 1996.

Bahrain is also sending two women, including Ruqaya Al-Ghasra, 24, who won the 200-meter event at the 2006 Doha Asian Games and the 100-meter dash at the 11th Pan-Arab Games in 2007. She has qualified for both the women’s 100-meter and 200-meter races in Beijing. Her countrywoman, Maryam Yusuf Jamal, will compete in the 800-meter.

Iraq has one female sprinter, Dana Hussein, 21, among its four qualifiers.

Somalia’s Samiyo Yusuf will run in the 400-meter and 800-meter events as the only female athlete representing the war-torn nation.

Brunei and Saudi Arabia will not be sending any women. Both countries bar women’s sports for “cultural and religious reasons” and do not allow women to participate in the Olympics.

Qatar and Kuwait will also not be sending any women to Beijing. Both countries allow women’s sports, but are opting to send male athletes with what they consider better competitive chances.

Post-Barcelona Push

Women’s participation in the Olympics has been a particularly sensitive subject since 1992.

That year, 35 countries - half of them Muslim - sent no female athletes to the Barcelona Games.

To lower those numbers two French advocates, Annie Sugier and Linda Weil-Curiel, founded a group called Atlanta Plus to work on requiring countries to include women in their Olympic delegations.

Weil-Curiel, a lawyer, says all-male delegations contravene the Olympic charter’s prohibition against all forms of discrimination. She has been lobbying the International Olympic Committee for years to impose sanctions on nations that bar women from competing.

Based in Paris, her organization now calls itself Atlanta-Sydney-Athens Plus and can happily point to the shrinking supply of all-male delegations.

Thirty-five all-male Olympic teams competed in Barcelona in 1992 compared to 26 in Atlanta in 1996, 10 in Sydney in 2000 and five in Athens 2004. There are at least four all-male delegations sent to Beijing, but a tally is not yet available.

Women came closer to parity during 2004 when they competed in 135 events and represented 44 percent of all participants.

Sports officials in Arab countries contend that women’s limited participation is not restricted to their countries and point to the limited number of women in the International Olympic Committee’s decision-making bodies.

In March 2008, during the fourth International Olympic Committee conference on women and sports, held in Jordan, 600 participants endorsed the Dead Sea Plan of Action. It calls for gender equality in national teams, their leadership and technicians, and also encourages female sports reporters to actively cover the events. Attendees included the world’s top sporting officials, including International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge, many Olympic medalists and King Abdullah and Queen Rania of Jordan.

Women were barred from competing in the first modern games in 1896 but four years later they were permitted to participate in the “ladylike” sports of tennis, golf and croquet.

In Beijing, female athletes will compete in nearly every Olympic sport, including wrestling, which was opened to women for the first time at the Athens Games. The Japanese are expected to be the dominant force with the Americans, Bulgarians and Chinese expected to pose a threat in their quest for Olympic gold.

——–

Aline Bannayan is a reporter and editor based in Amman, Jordan. A former national basketball team player, she has covered sports for the Jordan Times as well as the AP in Amman since 1991.

Libya Preaches to Durban II on Racism Against Maids, as Qaddafi Jr. Arrested for Beating Maids
Published by UN Watch - August 7, 2008
Many newspapers over the past few weeks have reported on Libya’s hostile measures against Switzerland and its citizens. Few, though, have noted the irony of it all, a part of which relates to the United Nations.

The Incident

The conflict began after Hannibal, the youngest son of Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi, and his wife Aline were arrested by Geneva police in their luxury hotel, which is situated next to the UN human rights office. Two of their servants, a Moroccan man and a Tunisian woman, had complained of being beaten with a belt and coat hanger, causing hotel staff to call in the authorities. (The desert despot’s 32-year-old son has a long record of violent run-ins with the law across European capitals.)

The couple were charged with assault. Hannibal spent two evenings in detention while his wife, who came to Geneva to give birth, was transferred to a maternity unit. Released on $500,000 bail, they flew back to Libya escorted by doctors from Geneva’s main hospital.
Qaddafi’s Revenge

The outrage has ebbed, but the crisis remains. Today’s Tribune de Geneve reports that Foreign Minster Micheline Calmy-Rey may head on a special mission to Libya. Which bring us to the irony of it all.

Swiss Ironies

But it’s more, more than just oil, investments and trade. It’s political and moral support. In the past year, Calmy-Rey and her diplomats worldwide waged a massive campaign to elect her Geneva friend Jean Ziegler — the 1989 co-founder of the “Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize” — as a senior adviser to the UN Human Rights Council. When the vote was won, Swiss UN ambassador Blaise Godet literally embraced his colleague from Cuba’s Castro regime, Ziegler’s other favorite government, thereby revealing another unholy alliance.

This week in Geneva the council’s advisors feted Ziegler at their inaugural session, while choosing as their chair the Cuban Alfonso Martinez — whose long record on a predecessor UN body included killing a resolution for the Kurdish victims gassed by Saddam in Halabja. When the current stand-off was ignited in July, Swiss newspaper Le Matin suggested Ziegler as a natural mediator. “I think Qaddafi appreciates me as a writer and intellectual, because he reads my books which are translated into Arabic in Cairo,” Ziegler told the newspaper. “There is a relationship of mutual respect and listening between us,” said Ziegler, from his place of vacation in Calabria, Italy.

However, the newspaper noted, “the sociologist categorically refuses to comment on the current crisis between Switzerland and Libya.” Nor did Ziegler ever say a word — or lift a finger – over all the years that the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor were cruelly held hostage in Libyan jails.

Durban II: Libya Pledges to Confront “New Form of Racism Related to Maids”

Perhaps the greatest unspoken irony is that of Libya’s role. The country currently chairs the planning of the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, the UN’s next world conference against racism and intolerance. In advance of an African preparatory session later this month, Libya has just submitted a UN questionnaire on its policies and practices.

Here we learn that the sixth principle of Qaddafi’s Green Charter “defines Libya’s society of non-discrimination.” And that the penal code “does not discriminate between local or foreign workers in Libya.”  And that Article 420 prohibits “all forms of slavery” and “forced labor.” Finally, “Libya does not only not practice racism but we combat the practice of regimes against the African people.” How? By confronting — get this — a “new form of racism related to house helpers (maids).” No less.

Yes, over the next year the world shall look to the Guide of the Revolution to guide us all on how to treat foreigners, how to practice tolerance, and — as its most shining example — how to treat house helpers and maids.

Meanwhile, in Libya, the mother of the abused Moroccan servant has been thrown into jail, and his brother forced into hiding.

Eventually, a deal will be struck, Calmy-Rey will kowtow before Qaddafi, the criminal case will be closed. Hannibal will then be free to return to his beloved Lake Geneva playground.

As Libya’s leading expert on how to address what it calls a new form of racism — how to treat house helpers — why not have Hannibal Qaddafi take the place of the current Libyan represenative and personally head the UN’s Durban II process? More than anyone, he will appreciate the job’s diplomatic immunity.

Libya says Mediterranean Union will divide Africa: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi - the only one who was invited to the launching of the Mediterranean Union, but declined to attend - he prefers to see Arab dominance in Africa - not North Africa as part of a European Alliance.

RENATA GOLDIROVA for the EUobserver, August 5, 2008.

Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi has reaffirmed his critical stance towards the Union for the Mediterranean - the brainchild of French President Nicolas Sarkozy - saying it will divide the 53-nation African Union.

In addition, he has accused the EU of wanting to dominate its southern partners, once under European colonial rule.

Texas to Tel Aviv

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, Op-Ed Columnist, of the New York Times.
Published: July 27, 2008

What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of “Dallas” and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club? You’d get T. Boone Pickens. What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin? You’d get Shai Agassi. And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world’s leader in electric cars. You’d have the start of an energy revolution.

The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power. Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai.

Agassi, age 40, is an Israeli software whiz kid who rose to the senior ranks of the German software giant SAP. He gave it all up in 2007 to help make Israel a model of how an entire country can get off gasoline and onto electric cars. He figured no country has a bigger interest in diminishing the value of Middle Eastern oil than Israel. On a visit to Israel in May, I took a spin in a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront in Agassi’s prototype electric car, while his sister watched out for the cops because it is not yet licensed for Israeli roads.

Agassi’s plan, backed by Israel’s government, is to create a complete electric car “system” that will work much like a mobile-phone service “system,” only customers sign up for so many monthly miles, instead of minutes. Every subscriber will get a car, a battery and access to a national network of recharging outlets all across Israel — as well as garages that will swap your dead battery for a fresh one whenever needed.

His company, Better Place, and its impressive team would run the smart grid that charges the cars and is also contracting for enough new solar energy from Israeli companies —  2 gigawatts over 10 years — to power the whole fleet. “Israel will have the world’s first virtual oilfield in the Negev Desert,” said Agassi. His first 500 electric cars, built by Renault, will hit Israel’s roads next year.

Agassi is a passionate salesman for his vision. He could sell camels to Saudi Arabia. “Today in Europe, you pay $600 a month for gasoline,” he explained to me. “We have an electric car that will cost you $600 a month” — with all the electric fuel you need and when you don’t want the car any longer, just give it back. No extra charges and no CO2 emissions.

His goal, said Agassi, is to make his electric car “so cheap, so trivial, that you won’t even think of buying a gasoline car.” Once that happens, he added, your oil addiction will be over forever. You’ll be “off heroin,” he says, and “addicted to milk.”

T. Boone Pickens is 80. He’s already made billions in oil. He was involved in some ugly mischief in funding the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry. But now he’s opting for a different legacy: breaking America’s oil habit by pushing for a massive buildup of wind power in the U.S. and converting our abundant natural gas supplies — now being used to make electricity — into transportation fuel to replace foreign oil in our cars, buses and trucks.

Pickens is motivated by American nationalism. Because of all the money we are shipping abroad to pay for our oil addiction, he says, “we are on the verge of losing our superpower status.” His vision is summed up on his Web site: “We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year … I have been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. If we create a renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.”

Pickens made clear to me over breakfast last week that he was tired of waiting for Washington to produce a serious energy plan. So his company, Mesa Power, is now building the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, where he’s spent $2 billion buying land and 700 wind turbines from General Electric — the largest single turbine order ever. The U.S. could secure 20 percent of its electricity needs from wind alone.

But Pickens knows he’s unique. Unless, he says, “Congress adopts clear, predictable policies” — with long-term tax incentives and infrastructure — so thousands of investors can jump into clean power, we’ll never get the scale we need to break our addiction. For a year, Senate Republicans have been blocking such incentives for wind and solar energy. They vote again next week.

If only we had a Congress and president who, instead of chasing crazy schemes like offshore drilling and releasing oil from our strategic reserve, just sat down with Boone and Shai and asked one question: “What laws do we need to enact to foster 1,000 more like you?” Then just do it, and get out of the way.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Credit Sarkozy for working to revive a club - that is the Mediterranean Club.

By CHRIS PATTEN, OXFORD, England, and posted as http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/eo20…

Maybe it is time to be a bit more generous to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and look at the outcome of what he does rather than the way he does it.

The original launch of the Mediterranean Union almost sank the whole enterprise. Appearing to speak without giving the issue much thought, Sarkozy initially proposed a club of European and mostly Arab states along the Mediterranean’s shore. It would have been in essence a French-run enterprise that the rest of Europe would have paid for. This did not go down well, particularly with the Germans.

Suspicion was strong that the French were trying to find a way to buy off Turkey with a relationship falling well short of European Union membership.

Sarkozy bowed to his European critics and enjoyed a diplomatic triumph. We shall soon see whether there is substance to the initiative, or whether it is just a coat of fresh paint on an old and tired idea.

The original Barcelona Process, launched in 1995, was an excellent scheme. Intended to provide an economic and political backdrop to peacemaking through confidence-building in the Middle East, it was an admirable recognition of Europe’s historical, commercial, cultural and political ties with its neighbors south of the sea, which have brought us all together over the years.

Yet, the successes of the Barcelona Process were modest: a great idea on the launchpad had difficulty getting off the ground. So Sarkozy deserves at least 2 1/2 cheers for trying to revitalize it. But if the Mediterranean Union is to achieve more than was managed in its first manifestation, a number of things will need to happen.

First, Europe is better at talking about free-trade areas than delivering free trade. For example, there are still too many barriers to agricultural trade between the north and the south. And guess which country leads the opposition to any significant opening up of European agriculture. France, take a bow.

Second, however slow we have been in opening up a real Mediterranean market, the barriers to freer trade between Arab League countries are just as great.

Third, it was excellent that, in Paris, Sarkozy began the process of bringing Syria in out of the diplomatic cold. Hopefully, his attempts to act as a peace broker between West Bank Palestinians and Israel are also blessed with success.

But the truth is that Europe, for all the gallant efforts of Javier Solana, has been absent from serious politics in the Middle East. We have not dared cross the absentee monopolists of policy in Washington.

Europe should get more seriously involved, even at the risk of occasionally irritating America, which may be less likely to happen once the Bush administration is history.

For a start, we should recognize that there will be no political settlement in Palestine without including Hamas. What would incredibly have been former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s first visit to Gaza in his first year of peacemaking had to be canceled recently because of security concerns. Enough said.

Europe must decide how serious it is about all the admirable stuff in the Barcelona Process regarding pluralism, civil society, the rule of law and democracy. Should a shared concept of human rights be one of the foundations of our Mediterranean partnership?

If so, what are we in Europe proposing to do about it? If this is just blah-blah, better not say it. We discredit ourselves and important principles when we say things we don’t mean.

————-

Lord Patten is a former governor of Hong Kong and European commissioner for external affairs. He is currently chancellor of Oxford University and co-chair of the International Crisis Group.  www.project-syndicate.org)

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Medit…

Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 TREC logo.

The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), also known as the TREC Development Group,^[1][2] is a voluntary association formed in 2003^[3] as an initiative of the German association of the Club of Rome^[1][4] and the Hamburg Climate Protection Foundation.^[1][5]

TREC promotes an increase of Europe’s energy supply^[6] and a reduction of its CO2 emissions by campaigning for renewable non-polluting electric power transmission to Europe via high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines from solar and wind power stations in the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa.

In 2004 and 2005^[7][8] TREC participated in Middle East and North Africa Renewable Energy Conferences MENAREC-1 and MENAREC-2 sponsored by Jordan’s National Energy Research Center (NERC), founded in 1998 in Amman.^[9]

TREC is supported by the Social Democratic Party of Germany,^[10] the German green party,^[10][11] the German physics society,^[11] the German Advisory Council on Global Change,^[11][12] Greenpeace,^[11] and Prince Hassan bin Al Talal^[13] of Jordan.

German Aerospace Center (DLR) studies

Early in the 2000s, the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU) commissioned and funded the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute for Technical Thermodynamics (see technology, thermodynamics) for three studies^[14][15][16] to evaluate the following:

• the anticipated water and power needs through 2050 in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa;
• the potential for renewable energy in the Middle East and North Africa;
• the potential for an electric power transmission grid connecting the three regions.

Dr. Franz Trieb, the principal investigator for these studies, is a member of the TREC-Network.^[17]

Two studies, one on concentrated solar power (CSP) for the Mediterranean Basin,^[14] the other on trans-Mediterranean interconnection and infrastructure,^[15] have been completed.^[18][19] As of mid-2007, the third study of CSP for the desalination of seawater is in progress.^[16]

Images from DLR studies

DLR studies:[14][15] hypothetical infrastructure of HVDC power supply to Europe from Middle East and North Africa.

DLR studies: hypothetical and existing HVDC transmission lines. Key: Blue: before 2020. Red: after 2020. ●: interconnections to AC.

DLR studies: projection that solar power plants in desert areas indicated by red squares would be sufficient to generate the amount of electricity currently consumed by the world, Europe, Germany, respectively.

DLR studies: projected capacity, land area, costs, etc., 2020 to 2050.

Feasibility and implementation

The high solar radiation in the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa outweighs the 10-15% transmission losses between the desert regions and Europe. This means that solar thermal power plants in the desert regions are more economic than the same kinds of plants in southern Europe. The German Aerospace Center has calculated that, if solar thermal power plants were to be constructed in large numbers in the coming years, the estimated cost would come down from 9-22 EuroCent/kWh to about 4-5 EuroCent/kWh.

In addition to direct supporting measures, TREC proposes two projects which are technically feasible but would require financial and political support:

• Gaza solar power and water project:^[20] concentrated solar power plants, for the combined generation of electricity and desalination of sea water for Gaza, which could, it is hypothesized, be located in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula coastal region.

• Sana’a solar water project: desalination and power plants could be located near the Red Sea for the Yemen capital Sana’a which is facing the exhaustion in coming years of its ground water reserves, much of it used to irrigate qat.^[21] The additional cost of transporting desalinated water or pumping it to higher elevations can also be a significant, even an inhibiting, factor.^[21]

Criticism

The European importation of electricity from the Middle East and North Africa entails political risks when the quota exceeds a certain level.^[20] Implementation would require cooperation between the states of Europe (e.g., France prefers nuclear power generation) and the states of the Middle East and North Africa.