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?

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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”).

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.

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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

from NYU School of Continuing & Professinal Studies – Global Affairs Division: scps.global.affairs@nyu.edu
that years ago made it possible for us to introduce Sustainable Development to the Achademe.

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They bring their real-world experience to life for their students.
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World Politics: Confrontation or Cooperatiion? (GLOB1-CE9284)
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Ralph Buultjens is a historian, author, and the former Nehru Professor and Professorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He was awarded the Toynbee Prize for Social Sciences in 1984. He is a well known media commentator featured on major networks such as the BBC, CNN, and ABC. He has also served as a consultant to the United Nations and major international organizations. At the Carnegie Council, Professor Buultjens served as trustee from 1978 to1984 and was Senior Fellow for several years. His numerous publications include: Conceptualizing Global History (with Bruce Mazlish, 2004) The Destiny of freedom: Political Legacies of the Twentieth Century (Louis Nizer lecture on public policy, 1999) Politics and History: Lessons for Today (1986), and The Secret Life of Karl Marx (1985).

Superstorm Sandy, NYC, and Climate Change (GLOB1-CE9023)
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The United Nations‘ Role in the War on Terror (GLOB1-CE9998)
Mondays, 6:45-8:50pm, 8 weeks, 6/3-7/22

Howard Wachtel is a Franklin Fellow in the Political Section (Sanctions Unit) of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, where he focuses on the al Qaeda/Taliban, Cote d‘Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Iraq sanctions regimes. During the course of the year, Howard will be monitoring each of these regimes, attending Security Council sanctions committee meetings, and contributing to the negotiation and drafting of Security Council resolutions related to each regime. He comes to the U.S. Department of State from Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP, where he is a litigation associate. Mr. Wachtel is primarily responsible for USUN’s interaction with the Security Council on issues related to al-Qaeda/Taliban sanctions (the “1267 regime“). He is responsible for providing guidance and recommendations regarding the strategic direction of the 1267 regime, including new measures to address recent litigation challenging the regime and to ensure that the regime adapts to the evolving nature of the terrorist threat.

Creating a Nonprofit in a Global Landscape:
A Comprehensive and Practical Approach (GLOB1-CE9943)
Monday-Friday – June 17-21, 2013 (one week intensive)

Brad Heckman is the founding Chief Executive Officer of New York Peace Institute, one of the nation’s largest community dispute resolution and mediator credentialing agencies. Previously, he served as Vice President of Safe Horizon, New York’s leading victims services and violence prevention agency. In that capacity, he oversaw the agency‘s Mediation, Families of Homicide Victims, Legal Services, Anti-Trafficking, Batterers Intervention, and Anti-Stalking Programs. Mr. Heckman served as International Director of Partners for Democratic Change, for which he developed community peacebuilding centers throughout Eastern Europe, the Balkans, South Caucasus, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. He received NYU-SCPS’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012, and serves on the boards of the National Association for Community Mediation, the New York City Peace Museum, and the New York State Dispute Resolution Association.

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 TODAY – LAST EVENT OF THE SEMESTER!

In Print with James F. Hoge, Jr.

Featuring Michael Levi, David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future

TONIGHT!
Thursday, May 9
6.30-7.45pm
RSVP here

Gov. Hickenlooper admits his absolutist positions in support of fracking are not rooted in science. (photo: Getty Images)

How a Big Fracking Setback Got Overlooked

By David Sirota, Salon

07 May 13

potential 2016 contender softens his pro-fracking stance, citing unsettled science. So why is it being ignored?

As an oft-rumored 2016 presidential candidate, a regular subject of obsequious profiles in the local and national press (including in this week’s New Yorker), and the chief executive of one of the biggest fossil fuel states in America, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s declarations about environmental issues carry weight. And so his stunning admission late last week is, indeed, big news in how it so definitively proves that political money buys hostility toward environmental science.

With his election campaigns bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, Hickenlooper has long ignored troubling drilling-related data from (among others) the Environmental Protection Agency, Duke University, the University of Colorado and the fossil fuel industry itself. Instead, as he rakes in massive amounts of fossil fuel campaign cash Hickenlooper has paid back his donors by publicly declaring that “there is literally no risk” associated with hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and by claiming to Congress that fracking fluid is safe to drink (it isn’t).

 That’s where Hickenlooper’s admission comes in.

At a forum on energy issues last week, Hickenlooper simultaneously defended his assertion that fracking is perfectly safe and yet according to the Associated Press, he also “said the science on the impact of fracking is far from settled.”

In other words, the chief executive of a major fossil fuel state is now on record at once claiming fracking is totally safe but admitting he believes we don’t have enough science to know that his reassuring assertions are true.

Worse, he is admitting the need for more scientific research into fracking while actively working to kill legislation to scientifically study the effects of fracking.

When a governor admits his absolutist positions in support of fracking are not rooted in science, it should generate headlines – especially when that same governor has amassed a record like Hickenlooper. He is, after all, one of the fossil fuel industry’s chief political spokespeople; indeed, he actually moonlights as one of the industry’s official spokesmen in its paid political advertisements. Additionally, Hickenlooper is one of the industry’s best political friends: He is not only right now fighting his own party’s legislation to punish polluters, he has also publicly denied that global climate change is even happening; appointed one of his fossil fuel industry donors to a key regulatory position; fought state legislative initiatives that would have empowered municipalities to better regulate oil and gas operations in their midst; threatened to sue cities that regulate drilling; and reduced regulatory enforcement in the face of drilling-related spills.

Yet, despite this industry loyalist admitting his public policy positions are not supported by science, and despite the media’s obsession with the Colorado governor, Hickenlooper’s statements have garnered little attention. Why?

First and foremost, the Hickenlooper fans in the national press corps typically drop into Denver for a few days and produce long essays about the governor’s charisma and charm – that is, about everything other than his actual record.

The resulting hagiography subsequently credits him for much of the state’s high-profile progressive successes despite the fact that most of those successes have come from the Legislature and ballot initiatives in spite, rather than because of, the governor. The one thing you don’t hear much about in this kind of puffery is arguably the single most important responsibility of any Colorado governor: the responsibility to regulate our state’s most financially powerful and environmentally rapacious industry. The result is that you hear more about how goofy and fun-loving and swell ol’ Hick is than you do about the fact the Hickenlooper Era has coincided with a frightening rise in drilling-related spills, a precipitous decline in environmental enforcement and parts of Colorado becoming toxic hazard zones.

But obsequiousness is only part of the explanation for the media blackout. The other part is about an undying devotion to The Narrative – that is, the meme that projects all political stories through a red-versus-blue prism, and that therefore casts hostility to science as only a Republican phenomenon rather than what it really is: a transpartisan side effect of political money.

Yes, it’s true; whether pretending climate change is a hoax or casting aspersions at the notion of independent peer-reviewed research, Republican politicians tend to reject scientific data more often than Democratic politicians. Because of that, a press corps that seems only able to portray issues as partisan showdowns tends to portray the so-called War on Science as an exclusively Republican onslaught. That same press corps, though, simply cannot process or comprehend the notion of a Democrat helping his donors wage a war on science (especially one like Hickenlooper who touts his geology degree) because that kind of politician contradicts the preconceived story line.

This Narrative, of course, is only further exacerbated by what I’ve previously called the “No Money” rule. Simply put, reporters don’t like to acknowledge the role that campaign cash plays in politicians’ positions because in elite political circles, acknowledging rank corruption is considered impolite and uncouth.

Thanks to these dynamics, a revealing and incredibly newsworthy admission by a bankrolled Democratic governor is, thus, wholly ignored – as is the science that should be driving our energy policy.

President Obama makes his fourth visit to Mexico and continues on to Costa Rica on what is also his sixth visit to Latin America. On this journey, the President hopes to highlight and reinforce the deep cultural, familial, and economic ties that so many Americans share with Mexico and Central America, and to promote economic growth across the region.

On Monday, the President met with Latino leaders who work both domestically and across borders to enhance social and economic development. The President heard various perspectives on how to strengthen collaboration in the region, further develop our economic relationship, and ideas for how the hemisphere can fit into broader strategic priorities. He emphasized that the long term trends in the hemisphere are clearly moving in the right direction, with growing middle classes, declining poverty and inequality in much of the region, and countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia taking a more active global role.

On Friday at the White House,business representatives offered strong support for measures intended to facilitate global and hemispheric trade, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They highlighted the growing importance of the energy sector throughout the Americas and the need for infrastructure improvements to facilitate cross-border trade.

The President made clear that immigration reform continues to be a top legislative priority this year; business leaders agreed on the need to enact commonsense immigration reform as quickly as possible. The meeting also underscored that increased trade throughout the region translates into jobs and growth here in America.

Over the next three days, the President traveled to Mexico City, and San Jose, Costa Rica. We hope you will follow @whitehouse, @lacasablanca and @nscpress for live updates from the President’s trip or get more information about the trip here.

On Friday, in Mexico City, President Obama spoke of what he considered a changing country — one making more headlines lately for economic optimism and potential political reforms than the drug cartels and organized crime violence that have claimed about 65,000 lives over the past six years.

The trip came as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto shifts his new administration’s focus to economic and social matters, instead of fixating on security — which analysts say remains a serious issue in many regions of the country.

President Obama promised to promote immigration reform — an important issue for Mexico, which has more than 10% of its population living in the United States. He also pledged action on guns, many of which flow south from the United States and are used to commit violence in Mexico.

President Obama went so far as to Blame U.S. For Gun Violence In Mexico – “Most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States,” President Obama said during a speech at Mexico’s Anthropology Museum. “I think many of you know that in America, our Constitution guarantees our individual right to bear arms. And as president, I swore an oath to uphold that right, and I always will.”

“But at the same time, as I’ve said in the United States, I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people. That can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States. It’s the right thing to do,” Obama added.

Following a 24-hour stay in Mexico President Obama continued to San Jose, Costa Rica. He was received by Tico astronaut Franklin Chang, Foreign Minister Enrique Castillo, and U.S. Ambassador Anne S. Andrew.The official welcome ceremony was held at the Foreign Ministry in downtown San José, where Obama met with President Laura Chinchilla – he, Chinchilla, and members of her Cabinet, held a bilateral meeting with the U.S. delegation. The stop in Costa Rica was the safest stop the US could have chosen in Central America these days.

Now back home, and the above trip must be seen in relation to Washington – Congress and Lobbyists.

We posted already about the US need to find a reasonable solution to the so called illegal immigrants to the US who are target to the various police levels and criminals in the US and Mexico systems. Most of them are also cheap labor because they are undocumented aliens, afraid to complain, and thus they are being exploited by US employers. They are a low paid working force in the US and a means to destroy the organized economy. This must come to an end as part of the reconstruction in US government policy. But this is just the beginning.

The GPS program of Fareed Zakaria on CNN today – Sunday May 5th, 2013, was all about a basic “Reset” of the US.

THE US MUST START DEALING MAINLY WITH ITS INTERNAL POLICIES – REFRAIN FROM FURTHER INVOLVEMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND SWITCH ATTENTION TO THE PACIFIC – SOUTH AND EAST ASIA. PART OF THIS CHANGE INCLUDES A CLEAR-CUT SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEMS WITH MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA AS WELL. Mexico is a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as well – so here another link to above general “RESET.”

First let us explain the need to step out from the Lebanon-Iraq-Syria morass – the three countries of the Levant with a minority rule of which the Christian Maronite minority  in Lebanon and the Sunni minority in Iraq have already been deposed, and only the Alawite minority in Syria was still left hanging on to power. [The Alawite are a Shi'ite subsect that makes up 12% of the population, but it also draws some support from other minorities--Druze, Armenians and others--who worry about their fate in a majoritarian Syria. These fears might be justified. Consider what has happened to the Christians of Iraq. There were as many as 1.4 million of them before the Iraq war. There are now about 500,000, and many of their churches have been destroyed. Christian life in Iraq, which has survived since the days of the Bible, is in real danger of being extinguished by the current regime in Baghdad.] These situations were impossible to defend and the US entered situations of civil war destined to end with the minority loosing power. No sense what-so-ever for the US to allow itself be dragged into the Syrian internal war as well.

[In fact, we have seen atrocities much worse than those in Syria very recently, in Iraq under U.S. occupation only few years ago. From 2003 to 2012, despite there being as many as 180,000 American and allied troops in Iraq, somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Iraqi civilians died and about 1.5 million fled the country. Jihadi groups flourished in Iraq, and al-Qaeda had a huge presence there. The U.S. was about as actively engaged in Iraq as is possible, and yet more terrible things happened - AND CONTINUE TO HAPPEN - there than in Syria.]

If the objective is actually to reduce the atrocities and minimize potential instability, the key will be a political settlement that gives each side an assurance that it has a place in the new Syria. That was never achieved in Iraq, which is why, despite U.S. troops and arms and influence, the situation turned into a violent free-for-all. If some kind of political pact can be reached, there’s hope for Syria. If it cannot, U.S. assistance to the rebels or even direct military intervention won’t change much: Syria will follow the pattern of Lebanon and Iraq–a long, bloody civil war. And America will be in the middle of it.

With the Middle East pushed thus to the backburner – Fareed Zakaria’s team on GPS could focus on what is really important and achievable for the US Administration – the fixing of the US Home.

The US must deal with the Financial Sector – this is done by looking at the infrastructure, the education system starting with day-care centers, and the immigration bill as well. Then focus on Asia.

The immigration bill must be presented as a win-win rather then a loosing platform. There are three scenarios for allowing the legalization of these illegal people living in the US underground. Legalizing them will create new tax-payers and new income for the Social Security Taxes. But they will also help bringing aboard their employers who will start paying taxes as well. The growth rate will increase by 1% and the average GDP by $1,500. This alone will give a jolt to the US economy.

Fareed Zakaria had two great teams on his program today – Richard Haas of the Center on Foreign Relations and Princeton University’s Anne Marie Slaughter covering the political side, and then Rana Faroohar of the Economist and Gillian Tett of The Financial Times on the economy.
Then, to top it all a direct interview with Salman Rushdie who has been an immigrant twice – first from India to London then from there to the US. He had the gift of gab to express all of the above and tie it up neatly. The two economists had no problem agreeing among themselves.

So let us summarize the day – The US will be brought back into balance by allowing a settlement of its tens-of-millions illegals and bringing them into the positive circle of tax paying residents with rights to an education, health, and freedom to move up the jobs-ladder.

As we wrote earlier today, in addition the settling of bringing in new professionally needed immigrants as requested by the Silicon Valley CEOs will help bringing back jobs that go now overseas because the skills are not available in sufficient amount in the US.

When people will start earning more, they will be able to afford new housing and eventually new demand will help growth.

Then, again as we recently wrote, with non-fossil energy becoming more competitive, with a little further push, the US will clearly be able to embrace  the green economy which again will lead to further savings by avoiding environmental damage and health problems.

OH my! We just described the NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION that starts with a friendlier look South-of-the-Border, arching to the true Orient and landing hard on those who opposed a betterment of the US economy by serving a 1% of the population aided by quite a few more naive followers that could not figure out by themselves that they were being had.

Latest Product From Tech Firms: An Immigration Bill.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, at lectern, with other senators who worked on an immigration overhaul now under consideration.

By ERIC LIPTON and SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published – THE NEW YORK TIMES: May 4, 2013    177 Comments

But most who watched the commercial, sponsored by a new group that calls itself Americans for a Conservative Direction, may be surprised to learn who bankrolled it: senior executives from Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who run companies where the top employees donate mostly to Democrats.

The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives.

They have managed to secure much of what they want in the landmark immigration bill now pending in Congress, provisions that would allow them to fill thousands of vacant jobs with foreign engineers. At the same time, they have openly encouraged lawmakers to make it harder for consulting companies in India and elsewhere to provide foreign workers temporarily to this country.

Those deals were worked out through what Senate negotiators acknowledged was extraordinary access by American technology companies to staff members who drafted the bill. The companies often learned about detailed provisions even before all the members of the so-called Gang of Eight senators who worked out the package were informed.

“We are very pleased with the progress and happy with what’s in the bill,” said Peter J. Muller, a former House aide who now works as the director of government relations at Intel. “It addresses many of the issues we’ve been advocating for years.”

Now, along with other industry heavyweights, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the technology companies are trying to make sure the law gets passed — which explains the political-style television advertising campaign, sponsored by a group that has revealed no details about how much money it gets from its individual supporters.

The industry also hopes to get more from the deal by working to remove some regulatory restrictions in the proposal, including on hiring foreign workers and firing Americans.

Silicon Valley was once politically aloof before realizing in recent years that its future profits depended in part on battles here in Washington. Its effort to influence immigration legislation is one of its most sophisticated.

The technology industry “understands there’s probably not a tremendous amount of resistance to their part of the bill,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview last week, saying he welcomed the industry support. “But their future and getting the reform passed is tied to the overall bill.”

The bill has a good chance of winning passage in the Senate. The hardest sell will come in the House, where many conservative Republicans see the deal as too generous to immigrants who came to this nation illegally.

Rob Jesmer, a former top Republican Senate strategist who helps run the new Zuckerberg-backed nonprofit group that sponsored the Rubio ad, insisted that his organization’s push is based on the personal convictions of the executives who donated to the cause and who believe immigration laws need to be changed. Those convictions just happen to line up with what their corporations are lobbying for as well, he said.

“It will give a lot of people who are educated in this country who are already here a chance to remain in the United States,” Mr. Jesmer said, “and encourage entrepreneurs from all over the world to come to the United States and create jobs.”

The profound transition under way inside Silicon Valley companies is illustrated by their lobbying disclosure reports filed in Congress. Facebook’s lobbying budget swelled from $351,000 in 2010 to $2.45 million in the first three months of this year, while Google spent a record $18 million last year.

That boom in spending translates into hiring of top talent in the art of Washington deal-making. These companies have hired people like Joel D. Kaplan, a onetime deputy chief of staff in the Bush administration who now works for Facebook; Susan Molinari, a former House Republican from New York who is now a Google lobbyist; and outside lobbyists like Steven Elmendorf, a former chief of staff to Richard A. Gephardt, a former House majority leader, who works for Facebook.

The immigration fight, which has unified technology companies perhaps more than any other issue, has brought the lobbying effort to new heights. The industry sees it as a fix to a stubborn problem: job vacancies, particularly for engineers.

“We are not able to fill all the jobs that we are creating,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee late last month.

Chief executives met with President Obama to discuss immigration. Venture capitalists testified in Congress. Their lobbyists roamed the Senate corridors to make sure their appeals were considered in the closed-door negotiations among the Gang of Eight, which included Mr. Rubio and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who have been particularly receptive.

In the many phone calls and hallway asides on Capitol Hill this year, those lobbyists realized that they had to give a little to get a lot of what they wanted. At the top of their wish list was an expansion of a temporary visa program called the H-1B, which allows companies to hire foreigners for jobs in the United States. There are a limited number of H-1Bs available each year, and competition for them is fierce.

Companies like Facebook and Intel use them largely to bring workers to their own offices. Consulting companies like Tata, based in India, use them to supply computer workers at American banks, oil companies and sometimes software firms.

Critics of H-1B visas point out that they mostly bring workers at the lowest pay scales. The technology industry’s main rivals in these negotiations were lawmakers who have long been critical of guest worker visa programs, chiefly Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and groups that represent American engineers.

Silicon Valley lobbyists told Senate negotiators they agreed that the H1-B visa system had been subject to abuse. Go after the companies that take advantage of guest worker visas and give us the benefit of the doubt, they told the Senate staff members, according to interviews with several lobbyists.

“You know and we know there are some bad people in this system,” is how Scott Corley, the president of Compete America, a technology industry coalition, recalled the conversation. “We are simply trying to make sure that as they are pursuing the rats they are not sinking the ship.”

That acknowledgment, several lobbyists said privately, helped unlock an impasse in negotiations.

What emerged was a Senate measure that allows American technology companies to procure many more skilled guest worker visas, raising the limit to 110,000 a year from 65,000 under current law, along with a provision to expand it further based on market demand. The bill would also allow these companies to move workers on guest visas more easily to permanent resident visas, freeing up more temporary visas for these companies.

But it requires them to pay higher wages for guest workers and to post job openings on a Web site, so Americans can have a chance at them. And it draws a line in the sand between these technology firms and the mostly Indian companies that supply computer workers on H-1B visas for short-term jobs at companies in the United States.

“This provision accomplishes the goal of discouraging abuse of the program while providing an important incentive for companies to bring top talent to work in the United States for the long-term, where they will contribute to our economy,” said Mr. Kaplan, the former Republican White House aide who is now the vice president for United States public policy at Facebook.

The bill is written in such a way that it penalizes companies that have a large share of foreign guest workers among their United States work forces, eventually making it impossible for them to bring in any more. It allows large American companies that have many more American workers to continue to import workers. And it includes a provision that exempts from the guest worker count those employees that companies sponsor for green cards, essentially a bonus to American businesses like Facebook whose work forces are growing fast.

Companies that provide temporary foreign workers say the move is intended to push them out of the American market.

These companies, mostly based in India, have far less good will on Capitol Hill. Their hope now rests with convincing lawmakers that it would be counterproductive to punish them.

“Why are we in the United States? We are there because American corporations want us,” said Som Mittal, the president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, which represents Indian companies. “We help them become competitive and serve their customers better.”

In interviews, Mr. Rubio and an aide to Mr. Schumer said the draft bill takes a balanced approach to penalize those who do not hire American workers for jobs here. They say the proposal is good for the country, even as it may benefit American technology firms.

In March, some of the biggest figures in the technology industry, including Mr. Zuckerberg, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the venture capitalist John Doerr, unveiled a new nonprofit advocacy group, called Fwd.Us, with its first mission being to push Congress to overhaul immigration law. The group has hired lobbyists and a staff of veteran political operatives.

One of its first campaigns was to bankroll the television ad for Mr. Rubio. Two other ads backed Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, who is considered a critical swing vote, in a state where there are many critics of the legislation. Mr. Jesmer said the group spent “in the seven figures” on the ads.

Mr. Rubio has been a vocal ally. He says he understands the industry’s need for talent and wants to prevent companies from having to ship work overseas.

To negotiate the details on the immigration bill, Mr. Rubio hired Enrique Gonzalez, who took a leave from a law firm that handles H-1B visa applications for many technology companies. Mr. Gonzalez said the assignment presented no conflict of interest because he works with universities handling visas, not technology companies.

The fact that technology lobbyists were given an unusual degree of access to the negotiators on the bill is entirely justified, he said. “Because of the unique needs of the technology industry, the newness of it, the novelty of a lot of the issues they are confronting, I think that was why there were more engaged than some of the other industries were,” he said.

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(illustration: Solar News)

The Incredible Shrinking Cost of Solar Energy.

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment on Reader Supported News.

04 May 13

ob Wile uses a graph to point out the obvious, the dramatic fall in the cost of solar power generation. In many countries– Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal — and in parts of the US such as the Southwest, solar is at grid parity. That means it is as inexpensive to build a solar plant as a gas or coal one. The pace of technological innovation in the solar field has also accelerated, so that costs have started falling precipitously and efficiency is rapidly increasing.  

By 2015, solar panels should have fallen to 42 cents per watt.

Reneweconomy.com says that the best Chinese solar panels fell in cost by 50% between 2009 and 2012. That incredible achievement is what has driven so many solar companies bankrupt– if you have the older technology, your panels are suddenly expensive and you can’t compete. It is like no one wants a 4 year old computer.

Conservatives shed no tears when better computers drive slower ones out of the market, but point to solar companies’ shake-out as somehow bad or unnatural. No wonder US solar installations jumped 76% in 2012.

The reductions in cost over the next two years are expected to continue, at a slowing but still impressive 30% rate:

Construction has begun on the world’s largest solar plant. MidAmerican Solar and SunPower Corp. are building a 579 megawatt installation, the Antelope Valley Solar Project, in Kern and Los Angeles counties in California. That is half a gigawatt, just enormous. It will provide electricity to 400,000 homes in the state (roughly 2 million people?), and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 775,000 tons a year. The US emits 5 billion metric tons a year of C02, second only to China, and forms a big part of the world’s carbon problem all by itself. We just need 645 more of the Antelope Valley projects.

Important new research also shows that hybrid plants that have both solar panels and wind turbines dramatically increase efficiency and help with integration into the electrical grid. Earlier concerns that the turbines would cast shadows and so detract from the efficiency of the solar panels appear to have been overblown. Because in most places in the US there is more sun in the summer and more wind in the winter, a combined plant keeps the electricity feeding into the grid at a more constant rate all year round, which is more desirable than big spikes and fall-offs.

That Germany, then China, then the US are the world’s largest solar markets is no surprise. But that number 17 Japan will increase its solar installations by 120% in 2013 and so may be the second hottest solar market, just after China, this year, would mark a big change. Japan may well have 5 gigawatts of solar installed by the end of this year, even though the relatively new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is no particular friend of the renewables. In my own view, if Japan made the right governmental and private investments, it could overtake China in the solar field and reverse its long post-bubble stagnation.

ABB has been commissioned a large solar electricity generating plant on the edge of the Kalahari Desert near Cape Town, South Africa. It will supply the electricity needs of around 40,000 persons and reduce annual emissions by 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide. South Africa emits 500 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, and is third in the world for per capita emissions. (Still, it only emits a 10th as much over-all as the US). But they just need a thousand more plants like the Kalahari one, and voila! South Africa is also imposing a carbon tax, which will hurry things along. (At the moment, South Africa is far too dependent on dirty coal plants, which not only fuel climate change but also spew deadly toxins such as mercury into the atmosphere, whence it goes into human beings.

Because of South African and Israeli demand in particular, demand for solar panels in the Middle East and Africa has risen over 600% during the past year. Saudi Arabia’s announced plans to save its petroleum for export by going solar at home will add a great deal to regional demand if it sticks to those plans. (In most countries, petroleum isn’t used much for electricity generation as opposed to transportation, but in oil states such as Saudi Arabia it often is used in power plants; but that cuts down on foreign exchange earnings.)

The two Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan are emerging as the solar giants in India, with each having now passed half a gigawatt in solar electricity generation capacity. The two account for some 88% of all of India’s solar power. But Rajasthan may soon outstrip Gujarat, given the state’s solar-friendly commitments, its ample amounts of scorching sunlight, and its vast deserts.

Up to 75 homes, a large apartment complex, a middle school and a nursing home suffered major damage in West, Texas. (photo: NBC36TV/Twitter)

What Do the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Al-Qaeda Have in Common?

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

04 May 13

Answer: Both aren’t above killing people to attain their goals.

n 2009, Congress considered a bill that would have strengthened safety standards at fertilizer plants like the one that recently exploded in West, Texas, killing dozens of first responders and leveling a nearby middle school and a nursing home 500 yards away. The 2009 safety regulations were staunchly opposed by the US Chamber of Commerce, multinational corporations’ lobbying arm in Washington. The lobby spent millions to defeat it and labeled it a “key vote” that year. Even though it passed the House, the bill died in the Senate before even getting a vote.

Had those new regulations passed, the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, could have been prevented. But even though the plant dealt in highly-explosive materials like ammonium nitrate, it was only inspected once in its entire history, in 1985. Corporate lobbies like the US Chamber of Commerce prioritize profits and stock prices above safety of the surrounding community, and vehemently oppose environmental and safety regulations in all instances by spending millions of dollars to influence Congress and support candidates who promise to deregulate anything and everything.

The only problem with deregulating environmental and safety laws for corporations is that it opens the floodgates for environmental disasters and fatal catastrophes. Corporations successfully lobbied to deregulate offshore oil drilling in 2002 and 2003, successfully gaining an exemption from the Bush administration on having to install acoustic switches that would activate blowout preventers on oil rigs. Oil companies have to abide by that law in every country where they drill, except for the United States. The acoustic switch shuts off oil blowouts at the source, plugging the well before the blowout becomes too large to contain.

Even though it would only cost an additional $500,000 to install, business groups opposed the idea of oil companies posting record profits that year having to pay an extra cost for even such a basic safety measure. Yet after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf Coast, BP has had to pay out billions of dollars in fines and settlements. Clearly, the business model of hyper-deregulation is costlier not only in terms of dollars spent, but in lives lost, habitats ruined, and entire economies upended.

The explosion in Boston was defined as a terrorist attack, as Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s actions were done with malicious intent and claimed 3 lives while seriously injuring hundreds of others. The two men selfishly chose to end the live of others to make whatever petty point they wanted to make. But the explosion in West, Texas, was also done with malicious intent.

Anyone with half a brain knows that it’s incredibly dangerous for a place that manufactures explosive materials to operate under safety standards that are decades out of date. The wanton deregulation that inevitably led to that explosion was also done with selfish intent, as the US Chamber of Commerce chose to allow corporations to make more money rather than keep the community safe from harm. By that definition the explosion in West, Texas, was also a terrorist attack.

Corporate terrorists should be pursued just as much as religious extremists who commit terrorist acts. And since the US Chamber of Commerce hasn’t released a statement apologizing to the community of West for their reckless behavior that led to the deaths of dozens, it can be said that they will continue to commit acts of terror for selfish economic gain until they’re indicted for their complicity in manslaughter, if not murder.

Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary “We’re Not Broke,” which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Cross-Country Solar Plane Expedition Set for Takeoff.

The Solar Impulse is powered by about 12,000 photovoltaic cells that charge its batteries, letting it fly day and night.

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  Jim Wilson/The New York Times

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  Jim Wilson/The New York Times

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  Jim Wilson/The New York Times

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  Solar Impulse, via Associated Press

The Solar Impulse is powered by about 12,000 photovoltaic cells that charge its batteries, letting it fly day and night.

By DIANE CARDWELL

Published by The New York Times: May 1, 2013

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — When Bertrand Piccard was growing up in Switzerland, heady discussions about the boundless potential for human endeavor were standard fare.

His grandfather, a physicist and friend of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, had invented a special capsule so he and a partner could be first to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. His father, an engineer, helped design the submarine that made him and an American naval officer the first to plunge undersea to the earth’s crust.

“All the most incredible things seemed to be completely normal,” Mr. Piccard, a psychiatrist trained in hypnosis, said last week at Moffett Field at the NASA Ames Research Center here, preparing for his next expedition. “I thought this was the normal way to live and I was very disappointed to see that there are a lot of people who are afraid of the unknown, afraid of the doubts, afraid of the question marks.”

He went on to become part of the team that was first to circumnavigate the globe nonstop in a balloon. But when a propane shortage nearly ended his record-setting ride in 1999, he began dreaming of a way to fly day and night without fuel, an idea that has reached fruition in a featherweight solar airplane set for an initial voyage across the United States starting on Friday, weather permitting. His brainchild, the Solar Impulse, will not be the first sun-powered plane to fly; its chief distinction is its ability to go through the night.

Conceived of as a grand demonstration of what can be done with clean technologies — a Jules Verne-style adventure with a dash of P. T. Barnum thrown in — the project has more practical implications. While it could be decades, at least, before ordinary travelers line up to board solar electric planes, the technology is under consideration for drones, which risk damage each time they land to refuel.

Another venture’s solar electric plane, which seats two and could one day find a place in the sport aviation market, made its debut last week in Germany. The Sunseeker Duo from Solar Flight (founded by Eric Raymond, who also worked on the Solar Impulse project) can fly for about 12 hours at a time, said Eric Lentz-Gauthier, a pilot and spokesman for the company. And some of the technologies developed for Solar Impulse — which has a wingspan matching that of a 747 but the weight of a midsize car — are already set for commercial use, including the special batteries used to store the solar energy and the foam that insulates them.

The cockpit will fit only one, so Mr. Piccard will trade legs of the journey with his partner, André Borschberg, an engineer and entrepreneur who was a jet fighter pilot in the Swiss Air Force, flying at about 45 miles per hour for 18 to 20 hours at a time. The aircraft could theoretically fly continuously, but the pilots — despite Mr. Piccard’s apparent skill at self-hypnosis and Mr. Borschberg’s explorations of yoga and meditation — cannot.

“We have a sustainable airplane; now we have to build a sustainable pilot,” said Mr. Borschberg at a presentation at Stanford University later that day. So flight legs are limited, since the plane’s extreme sensitivity to turbulence demands a pilot’s direct attention.

The men plan stops in Phoenix, Dallas, St. Louis and Washington before a final landing at Kennedy Airport in New York around the end of June. The voyage is a precursor to a planned trip around the globe in 2015 for which the team is building a second plane, adding adjustments like an autopilot and reclining seat, to help them fly for as many as five days straight.

The two first met after Mr. Piccard presented his idea for fuel-free flight to the Swiss Institute of Technology, which put Mr. Borschberg in charge of studying the project. He ended up overseeing the aircraft’s design and construction, including its nearly 12,000 solar cells. Mr. Piccard turned to raising the $140 million in financing and sponsorship to support it (“Like in every couple, I was bringing the money in and André was spending it.”).

Solar Impulse borrows technologies from industries like semiconductor and boat manufacturing, Mr. Borschberg said. Constructed of a carbon fiber frame, monocrystalline silicon solar panels and a sheer, silver carbon wrapping, the plane is tough enough to reach almost 30,000 feet but so fragile you could put a finger through it.

“Everything is so efficient that we can fly only with the sun that we collect in the airplane,” he said.

For Mr. Piccard, the project represents another genealogical milestone. Like his grandfather and father before him, he is driven to be a pioneer.

“If you make a record, you know that it’s possible and you just want to beat the guy who did it before,” he said. “If you make a first, you have no benchmark. You don’t know if what you want to do is feasible or not. You just have to try.”

As a child, he said, he met Charles Lindbergh and heard the stories of his grandfather, who died when he was 4. He read books about exploration and space travel, building model planes and rockets, and he also learned from talking with his mother, the daughter of a cleric, about spirituality, philosophy, religion and the meaning of life. A temporary move to Florida during the launches of several Apollo space missions proved influential.

“I saw that everything was true: it was not a dream, it was not only books, it was not only nice stories but it was real,” he said. “There was the submarine of my father drifting in the Gulf Stream and the rockets going to the moon.”

But when he returned to Switzerland, he said, the American space program was in a lull so he turned to plumbing the depths of the mind instead, and became a psychiatrist. Still, he kept one foot in the world of physical exploration, he said, always trying new ways of floating through the air, including hang gliding and ballooning. He did not train as a balloon pilot, though, until he was invited in 1992 to join a trans-Atlantic race because the pilot wanted a psychiatrist aboard to help him sleep and manage stress.

Mr. Piccard loved it, he said, and saw a metaphor for life in an endeavor where the only way to steer was to change altitude, sometimes by shedding weight, throwing sand overboard.

“You also have to learn how to change altitude in the winds of life to find your way: different ways of thinking, different ways of reacting, different ways of understanding situations,” he said. “In life you have to drop your certitudes, your common assumptions, your convictions sometimes, to be more flexible to adapt to the unknown.”

When Mayor Bloomberg took over the day to day running of New York City, he cancelled all recycling programs because he thought their bottom line was in the red. Eventually he accepted the fact that paper recycling was suffering because there was actually theft of the paper put out for hauling by the city – so it was clearly profitable to move them to the recycler. He gave in, and only papers were recycled.

Then he was told that metal and  plastic containers have to be collected separately because there was no landfill space and hauling them out of State was a bigger loss then collecting them – so he decided to collect them in separate containers but they were never sorted out to become primary material for a world-wide growing recycling industry.

Oh well – the latest news tell us that he decided before ending his third term in office to collect plastic. We still are not convinced that he saw the “City-Light” – that is the fact that running a city is a service and not a business. 

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New York Times Editorial – April 30, 2013.

The Mayor Rethinks Recycling

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published on-line: April 29, 2013

On recycling in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has come a long way. After taking office 11 years ago, Mr. Bloomberg eliminated a major chunk of the city’s recycling program to save money. Many New Yorkers were outraged. He was, they said, littering the earth as well as missing a chance to convert waste to energy.

He has since become a passionate convert. With about 20,000 tons of garbage hauled from the city every day, Mr. Bloomberg has been working hard recently to restore the city’s recycling program to its pre-2002 levels. On Wednesday, he announced that any rigid plastics including toys, yogurt cups, food containers and such can finally go in clear recycling bags. It is the city’s biggest expansion in recycling in more than two decades.

A day later, he announced that 100 restaurants in the city, ranging from the sophisticated Le Bernardin to the boisterous Chipotle eateries, have promised to start reducing their food waste by 50 percent. Some of it will be donated to food kitchens or charities like City Harvest. But a lot will go to commercial composting centers outside the city. There, the discarded leeks and potato peels can be turned into energy or compost that, ideally, could help farmers produce more leeks and potatoes.

Tackling organic waste is a big task. Every year, the city adds mountains of watermelon rinds, coffee grounds and other organic plate scrapings to the waste stream. Most of it goes to landfills where it festers and sends methane pollution into the atmosphere. As alternatives, city officials are experimenting with organic recycling at 68 schools and one Manhattan apartment building. Green markets across the city accept bags of leftovers, and a new system of curbside recycling of organic garbage is scheduled to start soon in Staten Island.

The city’s recycling rate has yet to reach the pre-Bloomberg level of 20 percent. But the mayor wants the city to reuse 70 percent of its waste by 2030. That’s a big challenge for his successors, but at least these latest efforts finally move in the right direction.

April 15-21, 2013, I participated on a trip to Baltic Sea States of the KPV (Komunal Politische Vereignigung) of the Politische Akademie of the Austrian Peoples Party (OEVP). Above took us to Estonia  Saturday April-20 to Sunday April 21-st. This was a weekend and it might have been a too short time for serious learning about matters of Energy Policy. But I was fortunate to come back with enough information because I had the chance to meet very helpful people and I was prepared ahead with my questions.

We drove from St. Petersburg in Russia to Narva in Estonia and then continued to the capital – Tallinn. We had the luck of having a very good Estonian guide and were honored that evening with a reception at the residence of Austrian Ambassador H. E. Ms. Renate Kobler who invited as well local and Austrian resource people and made sure to establish contacts according to our interests.

I had in effect two different set of interests. One was in regard to a transportation policy instituted this year by the city of Tallinn that offers free rides on the electric street-cars to documented residents of the city while having increased charges for the out-of-towners. The idea behind this being that people will be moving back to the city from the suburbs and increase the tax roles thus making up for some of the losses and allow for gains in air quality by getting out of their cars. I learned that though nice in theory, seemingly it did not work in practice because it applied mainly to the poor – so it did not result in enhanced income from taxes leaving just the lower income from the tram-rides. The topic was originally brought to my attention by the Austrian Standard of April 5, 2013.

This was the minor interest of my two suggested topics.

The other topic – and that one of major interest these days – dealt with the use of oil-shales for energy – an issue of global importance  when Shale-Gas has become the energy interests’ battle cry. It was brought out of obscurity in the United States, and Europe is talking as if it was going to follow suit. Austria has also shales and at present media battles rage between business interests and the environmentalists – with the Eurosolar monthly table all convinced that Austria can become energy self-sufficient without touching the shales.

Estonia, as well as Spain, are countries with experience in what can happen when energy is obtained from these shales.

Under the Soviets, the shales were mined and used like a lower grade coal in thermal power plants. What was left are mountains of ash from the combustion process and mountains of  spent shales from the retorting process in which the product was a synthetic crude oil. These mountains of by-product contain heavy metals and when washed by rains these heavy metals poisoned the underground water, thus making it unusable for drinking and agriculture. Everybody I talked to told me the same thing – the losses around Narva are immense.

Wikipedia tells us: “Oil shale in Estonia is an important resource for the national economy. Estonia‘s oil shale deposits account for just 17% of total deposits in the European Union but the country generates 90% of its power from this source. The oil shale industry in Estonia employs 7,500 people—about one percent of the national work force—and accounts for four percent of its gross domestic product.^[1]

There are two kinds of oil shale in Estonia – Dictyonema argillite (claystone) and kukersite.^[2] The first attempt to establish an open-cast oil shale pit and to start oil production was undertaken in 1838.^[3] Modern utilization of oil shale commenced in 1916. Production began in 1921 and the generation of power from oil shale in 1924.^[4]

In 2005 Estonia was the leading producer of shale oil in the world. Of all the power plants fired by oil shale, the largest was in this country.^[1][5] As of 2007, six mines (open cast or underground) were extracting oil shale in Estonia.^[2]“

Kukersite, named after the Kukruse settlement in Estonia, is the better quality shale. Estonian kukersite deposits are one of the world’s highest-grade shale deposits with more than 40% organic content and 66% conversion ratio into shale oil and oil shale gas. They have relatively a lower content of heavy metals.

in the 1830s, although the attempt of shale oil distillation failed, oil shale was used as a low-grade fuel. Then studies of Estonian oil shale resources and mining possibilities intensified in the beginning of 20th century because of industrial development of Saint Petersburg and a shortage of fuel resources in the region. Finally – the world’s two largest oil shale-fired power stations – Balti Power Plant and Eesti Power Plant (known as the Narva Power Plants) – were opened in 1965 and in 1973. Because of the success of oil shale-based power generation, Estonian oil shale production peaked in 1980 at 31.35 million tonnes.^[3] In 2004, two power units with circulating fluidized bed combustion (CFBC) boilers were put into operation at Narva Power Plant.^[4] In 1984, the scientific-technical journal Oil Shale was founded in Estonia.^[15]

Some of the spent shale is used in cement manufacturing and Uranium is a by-product.

Kerogen (from Greek for wax + -gen, that which produces)^[1]  is a mixture of organic chemical compounds that make up a portion of the organic matter in sedimentary rocks.^[2] It is insoluble in normal organic solvents because of a huge molecular weight. The soluble portion is known as bitumen. When heated to the right temperatures in the Earth’s crust, (oil window ca. 60–160 °C, gas window ca. 150–200 °C, both depending on how quickly the source rock is heated) some types of kerogen release crude oil or natural gas, collectively known as hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). When such kerogens are present in high concentration in rocks such as shale they form possible source rocks. Shales rich in kerogens that have not been heated to a warmer temperature to release their hydrocarbons will eventually  form oil shale deposits. (The name “kerogen” was introduced by the Scottish organic chemist Alexander Crum Brown in 1906.)

What above tells us is that the organic matter in shales is in the form of very large molecular weight polymers. These can be deconstructed at high temperature in retorts, and then the quality of the remaining ash (or spent shale) can be investigated and the potential damage to the environment assessed. An alternative could be to create a fire underground and collect above ground the released oil or gas created by breaking up the kerogen polymer. In such case the damage from the ash cannot be assessed without knowing the underground conditions and where the underground waters will take the released heavy metals. The Shale Gas operations now in the United States are underground production sites explained as examples of Hydro-Fracking which sounds incoherent when we do not know the operating temperatures which are needed to break chemical bonds of that polymer. Neither the new American production companies nor the EU Shale Gas production interests give us such technology details as they did not even obtain patents that would have required transparency.

This present posting has an added purpose.

I learned that  June 10-13, 2013, the Estonian users of shale-for-energy intend a Shales Symposium in Tallinn as a follow up to the 2006 Symposium that was held in Ammann, Jordan.

The Symposium in Tallinn will be followed by a Field Trip to Estonian oil shale processing industry – an extraordinary opportunity to visit the most important sites of Estonian oil shale industry, including the new, recently completed Enefit280 Oil Plant.

I would like to hope that the European Commission send some inquisitive people to that symposium in order to learn about the side-effects or the environmentally harming “externalities” that could cause harm to the underground aquifers.

Further, as mentioned at the beginning, another European location were there was experience with Oil Shale Retorting is Puertollano, in the Ciudad Real region of Spain. With information from these  sites the EU could be in a better position to judge the issues involved.

I was personally involved with the Purtollano plant of the Empressa Nacional de Pisara Bituminosa Calvo Sotelo in 1959. That plant was producing lubricants or viscous petroleum product alternatives in huge retorts and leaving behind mountains of spent shale as well. Looking at the remains of those mountains – in Puertollano and in Narva, could help the decision making process at the EU.

We realize the importance of the energy independence goal – but as it can be reached in various ways, it is important to start out with open eyes.

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Estonia and Sweden Oil Shale

What the following article does not dare to mention – seemingly not to hurt the Koches – is that the troubles of the citi-opera – the high culture second New York City opera – the one that was created in order to give home to new experiments in opera, light opera/operettas, and musical theater – the kind of material that could not be put on the stage of the Meropolitan Opera – having lost two seasons at the time of reconstruction of the building – just could not afford it anymore – and one might even think that they were not to the Koch Brothers tastes.

Now the information is as follows: The David H. Koch Theater is a building intended for theater and ballet, modern and other forms of dance, part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts located at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and 63rd Street in New York City. Originally named the New York State Theater,^[1] the house has been home to the New York City Ballet since its opening in 1964 – that did return to the renamed building.  It also served as home to the New York City Opera from 1964 to 2011 – that did not return to the renamed building.

The theater occupies the south side of the main plaza of Lincoln Center, opposite Avery Fisher Hall.

Many in New York liked the look of the interior of the original building with the huge Promenade its two large statues by Elie Nadelman sculptuers and actually found nothing wrong with the building and its use. When the Lincoln Center’s decision to redo and rename the building – the decision was received with extreme alacrity by various organized groups.

The oil and gas money of the Koch Brothers serves to lubricate right wing policies in the US – among these also the Climate Change deniers – but then there is also a patina of art covering their name – the like of putting the Koch name next to Lincoln.

In July 2008, oil-and-gas billionaire David H. Koch pledged to provide $100 million over the next 10 years for the purpose of renovating the theater and providing for an operating and maintenance endowment. It was renamed the David H. Koch Theater at the New York City Ballet Winter gala, Tuesday, November 25, of that year. ^[2] The theater is to bear his name for at least fifty years, after which it may be renamed; the Koch family retains the right of first refusal for any renaming. {The Wikipedia}

Also:

Mr. David Koch is an executive vice president and a board member of Koch Industries, based in Wichita, Kan., and owns a diverse group of companies with more than $100 billion in revenues and 80,000 employees in nearly 60 countries. The companies’ brands include Stainmaster carpet, Lycra spandex, Quilted Northern tissue and Dixie cups and tabletop products.

Koch Industries, founded in 1927 by Mr. Koch’s father, Fred, with a fleet of oil-delivery trucks, became the nation’s largest privately held company in November 2005, when it acquired the paper maker Georgia-Pacific for $13.2 billion.

Born in Wichita, Mr. Koch earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to which he donated $100 million for cancer research in October.

Other charitable donations have included $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History in 2006 for the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing. That same year he promised $20 million to Johns Hopkins University’s medical campus in Baltimore, a gift that resulted in the new David H. Koch Cancer Research Building.

Mr. Koch also serves as the board chairman and chief executive of the Koch Chemical Technology Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, and on more than 20 nonprofit boards, including those of American Ballet Theater, the American Museum of Natural History and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Mr. Koch’s home in Aspen, Colo., famous for its New Year’s Eve parties in his bachelor days, boasts trophies from big-game hunts with his father in Botswana and Mozambique. A pair of 130-pound Ugandan elephant tusks frames the dining room. He and his wife, Julia, have three children.

Mr. Koch, a major contributor to the Republican Party and supporter of conservative causes, was the vice presidential candidate on the Libertarian ticket in 1980. In 2003 he helped establish the nonprofit Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which supports free-market policies and promotes government spending limits. It split off from an earlier Koch-backed enterprise, now called FreedomWorks, which promotes similar goals.

In short – he is a most important financial backer of everything connected to the Tea Party.

In recent years Mr. and Mrs. Koch have become fixtures on the New York social circuit. They were honored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual corporate benefit, at the Food Allergy Ball in 2005 and at the American Museum of Natural History in 2006.

His taste in real estate made news in 2006 when, seeking more space for his family, Mr. Koch sold his apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, once owned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and moved to 740 Park Avenue, home to business titans like Ronald S. Lauder and Mr. Schwarzman.

Mr. Koch said that he considered Mr. Schwarzman’s gift to the library an inspiration. “I admire people like that immensely — who have great wealth but are generous in terms of supporting worthy causes,” he said.

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www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/arts/music/city-opera-might-do-best-at-city-center.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130427

Critic’s Notebook

Why Not Have City Opera Go Home to City Center?

via New York City Center

The New York City Opera started at City Center in 1944. Above, the center in more recent years.

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Published in the New York Times : April 26, 2013

“We are playing to our strengths,” Mr. Steel said in an interview. Looking ahead to the 2012-13 season, he said that City Opera would be “out in the city with four brand-new productions of unusual works.” That, he asserted, “is what our audiences are interested in.”

Maybe so. On Saturday night at City Center, the company presents the final performance of its fourth and last production of the 2012-13 season: the director Christopher Alden’s zany, slightly surreal and exhilarating staging of Offenbach’s operetta “La Périchole.”

Say what you will about today’s City Opera being only a remnant of its former self, artistically Mr. Steel has delivered on his promise. This season he presented bold productions of four unusual works. At least three, including “La Périchole,” have been must-see events for operagoers in New York.

“La Périchole” was the second consecutive production at City Center, the company’s birthplace, which it left in 1965 to take up residence in Lincoln Center, in what was then the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater). It felt like a homecoming to see the company on the City Center stage. The renovated City Center is now much more inviting and comfortable. And whatever they did to that theater improved the acoustics. It might make sense, and would certainly simplify things, for City Opera to move back there. Many challenges would be met if the company had a home.

The season began in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the director Jay Scheib’s dazzling staging of “Powder Her Face,” the 1995 debut opera by the audacious British composer Thomas Adès about the real-life sex scandal involving the Duchess of Argyll. Much of the buzz concerned the scene in which the mezzo-soprano Allison Cook, playing the Duchess, reflected on her sexcapades while some two dozen fully naked men casually strolled by. But the production also involved an inventive use of live videos, with a camera following characters to back rooms. For a week “Powder Her Face” was the most daring theatrical event in New York.

The following week, also at the academy, was Britten’s “Turn of the Screw” in an updated production by the director Sam Buntrock, who gave a “Poltergeist” twist to this 19th-century tale of a governess who comes to the haunted house of two orphaned children under the care of an absent uncle. If this was the least adventurous offering, it was still a novel take on the opera, and the cast was terrific.

The company’s return to City Center happened this month with a Rossini rarity, “Moses in Egypt,” a stirring biblical drama, in a production by Michael Counts that used arresting videos to depict night skies, desert landscapes and, in the final scene, the parting of the Red Sea. The opera world has been talking about the potential of video to make possible a new kind of old-fashioned spectacle. This production pointed a way.

And now there is Mr. Alden’s manic “Périchole,” Offenbach’s comedy about a couple, struggling street singers in Peru, who become entangled with the country’s daffy viceroy. As played by the dynamic bass Kevin Burdette in this production, the viceroy is a demented, jittery and sex-crazed ruler in some vaguely modern realm that could be Miami Beach as much as Lima.

So where does this leave City Opera for the future? Mr. Steel made inspired choices of works and directors. All four shows were artistically strong. But because City Opera must rent space and build each production to order, it had to crowd its offerings into concentrated periods of two weeks each: the first two at the academy in February; the second two at City Center this month, for a total of just 16 performances.

This now seems to be the template for City Opera: to offer four productions each season with the hope of expanding in the future. To his credit, as Mr. Steel explained in a phone interview, for the first time in a decade City Opera has balanced its books. Its operating budget of about $12 million may not be much. But it pays the bills. When might the company extend its season?

“As soon as we have the money,” Mr. Steel said, an answer that should reassure his board and patrons.

Unlike any opera company that maintains a home, City Opera has no chance to coast, in a good sense, by regularly bringing back successful past productions. I am not just talking the distant past. What about productions Mr. Steel has presented since taking charge in 2009? I long to see again Mr. Alden’s revelatory production of Bernstein’s opera “A Quiet Place.”

The time has come to end the debate over whether Mr. Steel’s decision to abandon Lincoln Center was a visionary move or an act of desperation. The old City Opera is no more. Those who do not remember the company from its days of decades ago can read about it in the conductor Julius Rudel’s new memoir, “First and Lasting Impressions,” written with Rebecca Paller. Mr. Rudel recounts his 22 years as City Opera’s director, not just the triumphs and adventures, but also the follies and backstage contretemps.

It is amazing, though, to look at the archives of City Opera and see how many productions the company offered at its height. For example, during the 1969-70 season (the combined two-month fall and two-month spring seasons), the company presented 21 productions, not just lots of standard repertory, but things like Shostakovich’s “Katerina Ismailova” and Ginastera’s “Bomarzo,” for a total of 145 performances.

During the interview Mr. Steel spoke of the company as having two main bases: the Brooklyn Academy and City Center. Yet each will be used only once next season. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s outrageous yet moving opera “Anna Nicole” will have its American premiere at the academy in September; Mr. Alden’s new production of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” will play City Center in April 2014.

Mr. Steel, who has a keen interest in overlooked 18th-century operas, will offer a true rarity, Johann Christian Bach’s “Endimione” in its American premiere at El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, an intimate space ideal for Baroque works. And City Opera will present a co-production of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn that will utilize the warehouse’s entire 13,000-square-foot space.

All enticing. Yet as long as City Opera remains a roving company presenting a handful of productions in various theaters, it is going to be harder to cultivate a strong profile and build loyal audiences. Mr. Steel has a tenacious commitment to his vision of a traveling opera company. The truth is he may not see other options.

If Mr. Steel and his board would like to settle down somewhere — and there are compelling arguments to do so — the place seems obvious: City Center, where “the people’s opera” opened its doors in 1944.

This April 25, 2013 file photo shows Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, left, the mother of the two Boston bombing suspects, speaking at a news conference in Makhachkala, the capital of the southern Russian province of Dagestan. At right is her sister-in-law Maryam. (photo credit: AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev, File)

BOSTON (AP) — Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhohkar Tsarnaev was moved from a hospital to a federal prison medical center, while FBI agents searched for evidence Friday in a landfill near the college he was attending.

Tsarnaev, 19, was taken from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the throat and other injuries suffered during a getaway attempt, and transferred to the Federal Medical Center Devens, about 40 miles from Boston, the US Marshals Service said. The facility at a former Army base treats federal prisoners.

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and CNN writes about the statement by an unnamed US official:

Russian authorities intercepted a communication in 2011 between the mother of the accused Boston Marathon bombers and someone who may have been one of her sons “discussing jihad,” a U.S. official with knowledge of the investigation told CNN’s Susan Candiotti.

The Russians turned over their intercept of the conversation — which the official described as vague — to the FBI only in the past few days, the official said.

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and a Canadian Professor reviewing the stand at the UN of an American who has been seriously discredited in the past but continues to be employed by the UN:

Glenn Greenwald | Why Is Boston ‘Terrorism’ but Not Sandy Hook?

Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK
Greenwald writes: “The overarching principle here should be that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is entitled to a presumption of innocence until he is actually proven guilty. As so many cases have proven … people who appear to be guilty based on government accusations and trials-by-media are often completely innocent. Media-presented evidence is no substitute for due process and an adversarial trial.”
READ MORE

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As Always, The UK Guardian has ideas for the US Legislators.

Why Does America Lose Its Head Over ‘Terror’ But Ignore Its Daily Gun Deaths?

By Michael Cohen, Guardian UK

22 April 2013

{  HERE AN UNDERSTATEMENT: }

The marathon bombs triggered a reaction that is at odds with last week’s inertia over arms control.

he thriving metropolis of Boston was turned into a ghost town on Friday. Nearly a million Bostonians were asked to stay in their homes – and willingly complied. Schools were closed; business shuttered; trains, subways and roads were empty; usually busy streets eerily resembled a post-apocalyptic movie set; even baseball games and cultural events were cancelled – all in response to a 19-year-old fugitive, who was on foot and clearly identified by the news media.

The actions allegedly committed by the Boston marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, were heinous. Four people dead and more than 100 wounded, some with shredded and amputated limbs.

But Londoners, who endured IRA terror for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston. They’re right – and then some. What we saw was a collective freak-out like few that we’ve seen previously in the United States. It was yet another depressing reminder that more than 11 years after 9/11 Americans still allow themselves to be easily and willingly cowed by the “threat” of terrorism.

After all, it’s not as if this is the first time that homicidal killers have been on the loose in a major American city. In 2002, Washington DC was terrorised by two roving snipers, who randomly shot and killed 10 people. In February, a disgruntled police officer, Christopher Dorner, murdered four people over several days in Los Angeles. In neither case was LA or DC put on lockdown mode, perhaps because neither of these sprees was branded with that magically evocative and seemingly terrifying word for Americans, terrorism.

To be sure, public officials in Boston appeared to be acting out of an abundance of caution. And it’s appropriate for Boston residents to be asked to take precautions or keep their eyes open. But by letting one fugitive terrorist shut down a major American city, Boston not only bowed to outsize and irrational fears, but sent a dangerous message to every would-be terrorist – if you want to wreak havoc in the United States, intimidate its population and disrupt public order, here’s your instruction booklet.

Putting aside the economic and psychological cost, the lockdown also prevented an early capture of the alleged bomber, who was discovered after Bostonians were given the all clear and a Watertown man wandered into his backyard for a cigarette and found a bleeding terrorist on his boat.

In some regards, there is a positive spin on this – it’s a reflection of how little Americans have to worry about terrorism. A population such as London during the IRA bombings or Israel during the second intifada or Baghdad, pretty much every day, becomes inured to random political violence. Americans who have such little experience of terrorism, relatively speaking, are more primed to overreact – and assume the absolute worst when it comes to the threat of a terror attack. It is as if somehow in the American imagination, every terrorist is a not just a mortal threat, but is a deadly combination of Jason Bourne and James Bond.

If only Americans reacted the same way to the actual threats that exist in their country. There’s something quite fitting and ironic about the fact that the Boston freak-out happened in the same week the Senate blocked consideration of a gun control bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential buyers. Even though this reform is supported by more than 90% of Americans, and even though 56 out of 100 senators voted in favour of it, the Republican minority prevented even a vote from being held on the bill because it would have allegedly violated the second amendment rights of “law-abiding Americans”.

So for those of you keeping score at home – locking down an American city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties. All of this would be almost darkly comic if not for the fact that more Americans will die needlessly as a result. Already, more than 30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks).

What makes US gun violence so particularly horrifying is how routine and mundane it has become. After the massacre of 20 kindergartners in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, millions of Americans began to take greater notice of the threat from gun violence. Yet since then, the daily carnage that guns produce has continued unabated and often unnoticed.

The same day of the marathon bombing in Boston, 11 Americans were murdered by guns. The pregnant Breshauna Jackson was killed in Dallas, allegedly by her boyfriend. In Richmond, California, James Tucker III was shot and killed while riding his bicycle – assailants unknown. Nigel Hardy, a 13-year-old boy in Palmdale, California, who was being bullied in school, took his own life. He used the gun that his father kept at home. And in Brooklyn, New York, an off-duty police officer used her department-issued Glock 9mm handgun to kill herself, her boyfriend and her one-year old child.

At the same time that investigators were in the midst of a high-profile manhunt for the marathon bombers that ended on Friday evening, 38 more Americans – with little fanfare – died from gun violence. One was a 22-year old resident of Boston. They are a tiny percentage of the 3,531 Americans killed by guns in the past four months – a total that surpasses the number of Americans who died on 9/11 and is one fewer than the number of US soldiers who lost their lives in combat operations in Iraq. Yet, none of this daily violence was considered urgent enough to motivate Congress to impose a mild, commonsense restriction on gun purchasers.

It’s not just firearms that produce such legislative inaction. Last week, a fertiliser plant in West, Texas, which hasn’t been inspected by federal regulators since 1985, exploded, killing 14 people and injuring countless others. Yet many Republicans want to cut further the funding for the agency (OSHA) that is responsible for such reviews. The vast majority of Americans die from one of four ailments – cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease – and yet Republicans have held three dozen votes to repeal Obamacare, which expands healthcare coverage to 30 million Americans.

It is a surreal and difficult-to-explain dynamic. Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on “others” – jihadists, terrorists, evil-doers etc. But the lurking dangers all around us – the guns, our unhealthy diets, the workplaces that kill 14 Americans every single day – these are just accepted as part of life, the price of freedom, if you will. And so the violence goes, with more Americans dying preventable deaths. But hey, look on the bright side – we got those sons of bitches who blew up the marathon.

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WOULD IT NOT BE IN PLACE TO CHECK THE MENTAL HEALTH OF CANDIDATES FOR THE UN SENATE?          HOW STRANGE THEIR VOTES OUGHT TO SEEM TO THE MAJORITY OF HONEST AND SANE PEOPLE OF THEIR CONSTITUENCIES?

THE FOLLOWING ARE ARTICLES THAT HINT TO THE AMOUNT OF DAMAGE CAUSED BY EASY-GET-YOUR-GUN AMERICA!

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For Wounded, Daunting Cost; for Aid Fund, Tough Decisions.

 www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/us/for…

Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Victims of the Boston Marathon bombings waited to be treated on April 15 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
More Photos »

By ABBY GOODNOUGH, The New York Time

Published: April 22, 2013

       Interactive Feature

4:09:43

       Photographs

Victims Remembered as Boston Suspect Is Charged

Many of the wounded could face staggering bills not just for the trauma care they received in the days after the bombings, but for prosthetic limbs, lengthy rehabilitation and the equipment they will need to negotiate daily life with crippling injuries. Even those with health insurance may find that their plan places limits on specific services, like physical therapy or psychological counseling.

Kenneth R. Feinberg, the lawyer who has overseen compensation funds for victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the shootings at Virginia Tech and other disasters, arrived in Boston on Monday to start the difficult work of deciding who will be eligible for payouts from a new compensation fund and how much each person wounded in the bombings and family of the dead deserves.

The One Fund Boston, which Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston and Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts created a day after the bombings, has already raised more than $10 million for victims and their families. At the same time, friends and relatives have set up dozens of smaller funds for individual victims.

For at least 13 victims who lost limbs, including William White of Bolton, Mass., expenses may also include renovations to their homes that make it easier for them to get around.

“What if his stairs are at the wrong incline, or he needs a ramp, or the cobblestones in his backyard are uneven?” said Benjamin Coutu, a friend of the White family who helped create a donation page on a fund-raising Web site for Mr. White and his wife and son, who were also wounded in the blasts. “People who are insured in these situations think, ‘Wow, I’m O.K., I’m covered.’ It’s not until a month or two later that they realize, ‘I’m covered for the bare bones.’ ”

The overall medical costs are difficult to estimate, especially since it is not yet clear how much rehabilitation or future surgery the victims with the worst injuries will need. But as a basis for comparison, medical costs for shooting victims average about $50,000, said Ted Miller, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation who studies the costs of injuries.

For Mr. Feinberg, whom city and state officials asked to administer the One Fund Boston, the first task is to determine how much money is going to be available through it. Most donations typically arrive in the first month after a disaster, he said, adding that the fund-raising window should ideally be brief. “I’m a big believer, in most of these programs, that the fund should be a very small duration,” Mr. Feinberg said in a phone interview. “Because you’ve got to begin to get the money out the door to the people who really need it, and you’ve got to know how much you’re going to distribute.”

The thornier job, though, will be figuring out who qualifies for the funds and how much each victim who survived — as well as the families of the three who died — should receive. More than 170 people were wounded in the blasts, and more than 50 remain in the hospital.

Mr. Feinberg said that he would seek input from victims and their families before deciding on a formula. For victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, he said, compensation amounts were based on how long they were in the hospital. After the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., victims who were paralyzed or suffered traumatic brain injuries received just as much as the families of those who died.

“You can’t pay everyone the same if someone has a broken ankle versus a brain injury,” he said. “There’s got to be some sliding scale.”

After the shootings in Aurora, some of the hospitals who treated victims agreed to limit what they charged and to waive charges entirely. Tim Gens, executive vice president of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, said that the hospitals treating the Boston victims had not yet discussed how to handle billing, but that it would be decided case by case.

For the uninsured, Mr. Gens said, Massachusetts has a charity care fund that covers all or part of their costs, depending on their income. Each hospital also has its own policies for waiving costs in certain situations, he said.

Meanwhile, Mr. Gens said, “For those who have insurance, there really shouldn’t be an issue.” Massachusetts requires most of its residents to have health insurance,  although a small number refuse to comply or get waivers. It is not yet clear how many of the wounded were visiting from other states, or how many were uninsured.

“Massachusetts has been the leader of ‘let’s create health insurance for everyone,’ ” said Dr. Miller of the Pacific Institute.“So it will be very interesting to see how that plays out in terms of how the costs get borne.”

Charlie Baker, a former chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, one of the state’s largest insurers, predicted that given the circumstances, most insurance companies and employers would cover as much care as victims needed, regardless of what their policy allowed.

“If, say, they have a physical therapy benefit with an annual limit of 30 visits, I just don’t see a lot of employers saying, ‘Stick to the benefit,’ ” Mr. Baker said. “They’re going to say ‘go for it’ as long as the treatment is medically helpful.”

Rich Audsley, special adviser to a committee that helped distribute $5.4 million raised for victims in Aurora, said he wished there had been enough money to cover the needs of people who were not physically injured but suffered emotional trauma from witnessing the shootings or having victims die in their arms. Mr. Audsley said that he hoped some of the One Fund Boston money would go to community agencies that can provide counseling.

“We’re talking about emotional scars for many people that will be with them for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Audsley said.

Mr. Coutu, the family friend of some victims, said that while Mr. Feinberg figures out a formula for distributing money from the larger compensation fund, smaller fund-raising efforts could provide crucial interim help. The one for the White family has raised more than $55,000 so far.

“The great thing about these sorts of micro-fundraisers is they can access the funds immediately,” Mr. Coutu said. “This is theirs.”

After the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Feinberg compensated victims’ families by calculating the likely lifetime earnings of the dead. He won praise for his handling of the fund, which was created by Congress and paid more than $7 billion in taxpayer funds to more than 5,000 survivors and families of the dead. But it was an emotionally charged process.

“When people come to see me,” he said of disaster victims and their families, “I’d be better off with a divinity degree or a degree in psychiatry.”

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From Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts:

Pincas –

It’s a calm, quiet day in Boston today. It’s difficult to believe that such horror filled our streets only a week ago.

Two times, bombs rocked the streets of Copley Square. Three lives were taken that day, and a law enforcement officer was killed just three days later. More than 260 people were wounded, many of whom remain hospitalized with amputations and other scars of tragedy.

I’ve heard from folks across the country, asking what they can do to help. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino have formed a fund to help the people most affected by these tragic events.

If you’re looking for a way to help, please consider making a donation to The One Fund Boston today.

During the Boston Marathon, everyone in our city cheers for each other. We help each other across the finish line. When terror struck, we acted as a family. Throughout the chaos, courageous people ran toward danger to help strangers in need.

Now we cry together. We pray together. We help each other.

No one can replace what we’ve lost here in Boston. But today, and in the weeks and months ahead, we’ll get through it together — through sorrow and anger, rehabilitation and recovery. That’s what families do.

The OFA family knows how to work together to accomplish amazing things. Let’s make a difference for the Boston Marathon victims.

Your donation will directly help the families who need it most.

Please make a donation now to The One Fund Boston:

my.barackobama.com/The-One-Fund

From West, Texas to Watertown, Massachusetts, we remember and honor the men, women, and children we lost last week. We help those whose lives will never be the same. And we thank our first responders, medical professionals, law enforcement officers, and National Guard for their heroic work.

I’m very proud of the people of Massachusetts for their strength, resolve, and courage. Bostonians are tough.

We are fighters — and we cannot be broken.

No matter where you live, thank you for being with us in our time of crisis and our time of healing. We run together.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Warren
U.S. Senator, Massachusetts

In responding to Terror Attack, Boston Doctors Benefitted Greatly from Israeli Training.

Though condemning the Boston Marathon bombings in which 3 people were killed and more than 100 wounded, Iran also criticized U.S. drone attacks in the Middle East. Some online Jihadis expressed happiness over the Boston attack. Photo: Wikimedia Commons via Aaron Tang.

Several Boston hospitals have been thrust into the spotlight with recent events in that city, and along with them so too have the medical staffs. Everyone wants to know how they have so successfully responded to a crisis of such proportions. The answer to some extent is this: Israel.

Aish.com recently interviewed Dr. Alasdair Conn, Chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General. He described how Israeli doctors played a prime role in the successful medical response following last week’s terror attack.

Collaboration began after 9/11 when staff at Massachusetts General realized they wouldn’t be prepared for an attack of that magnitude closer to home.

“We could manage to treat patients from a multiple car crash – with three or four or five patients – pretty well,” recalls Dr. Alasdair Conn, Chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine, “but what would happen if we had many more patients, simultaneously and with very little warning?”

Dr. Conn and his colleagues looked to Israel for advice, and turned to Dr. Pinchas Halpern, Chief of the Emergency Department at Tel Aviv Medical Center. A world-renowned expert on trauma care, Dr. Halpern had helped make Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center one of the world’s leaders in emergency medicine.

Halpern came over in 2005, when Israel was experiencing a wave of terror attacks. For the doctors at Massachusetts General, the visit would prove tremendously important 8 years later. “To this day I remember a comment,” Dr. Conn recalls. “One of the Israelis said that here in the United States we have a terrorist event every few years, but ‘unfortunately, in Israel,’ he said, ‘we have a situation where a bomb is put on a bus once every three weeks. We have no notice, and we get 50 or 60 or 70 casualties with no warning.’”

Logistics was a focal point of the training process. Israeli doctors taught their American colleagues lessons they’d learned in organizing responses to large-scale disasters. “Only a small part of dealing with such an event is medical, much of it is logistical,” Tel Aviv’s Dr. Halpern explained.

He and his colleagues developed a unique triage system, moving casualties indoors as soon as possible and streamlining processes to make it more rapid. “We did away with a lot of the structure that was in the textbook that was never really tested,” Dr. Halpern said. They developed protocols like doing extra CT scanning to detect small pieces of shrapnel from bombs designed to cause maximum damage.

Israeli trauma doctors had learned to alter their lab testing procedures, to streamline the way they identified victims after terror attacks, and to not discharge blast victims right away, because often their injuries don’t show symptoms until later. Mass. General’s Dr. Paul Biddinger noted that “we improved our plans for triage, site security, reassessment and inter-specialty coordination” after consulting with the Israelis.

Another lesson the Israelis learned was to call up large numbers of staff as soon as the hospital hears of a terrorist attacks in case they are needed. This proved particularly beneficial last week.

“As soon as we heard about the blasts we didn’t let any anesthesiologists or general or trauma surgeons or pediatricians leave the hospital,” said ER head Dr. Alasdair Conn. “We learned that from the Israelis. I remember walking through the emergency department two hours after the bomb victims arrived. Many of the acute patients had already been moved, and it looked like there were more staff than patients in the ER. If there had been a third or a fourth bomb that day – we could have managed.”

Over 30 blast victims arrived at the hospital following last Monday’s attack. Each victim had their own dedicated team attending to them.

“We’re not smarter than other doctors,” Dr. Halpern told Aish.com. “But we have two things going for us. One, unfortunately, is the high level of terrorism Israel faces. The other factor is Israel’s advanced medical system. In general, countries with lots of terrorism have a lower level of academic research and writing; countries with sophisticated medical systems have lower levels of terrorism. Israel combines both.”

Noting that Israelis had been first on the scene at disasters across the globe, Dr. Halpern said, “We can help, so we feel we have a moral obligation. We respond very quickly and efficiently. We think out of the box, not dogmatically, and we are often first on the scene… There’s a very strong sense to apply the skills we’ve gained morally. I choose to live in Israel in the face of much adversity, and I believe it is incumbent upon us as Jews and Israelis to help whomever we can.”

“When we were preparing for mass casualties we realized the Israelis had the expertise in this type of situation,” Dr. Conn said, “and we turned to them. This week it really paid off.”