- THE BATTLE for the lands of the Galilee is two-fold, and Hashomer Hahadash is determined to fight it on both fronts. Alongside their guarding and educational activities, the guardsmen, along with half a dozen other organizations, are involved in the 2009 version of "land liberations." In response to the recent surge in purchase of private lands by Israeli Arabs, often financially backed by money arriving from foreign states, these groups have taken to offering to purchase the land from its Jewish owners themselves, in an attempt to keep it in Jewish hands, and for use in agriculture.
Kadima MK and former secretary-general of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip Otniel Schneller says that there currently exist two opposing trends that threaten to drastically change Jews' relationship with the land. "On the one hand, modern Israelis have increasingly come to view the land as real estate rather than national assets. You can see this in the recent privatization of the land that used to belong to the ILA, you can see it in the JNF's readiness to swap lands with the government."
"On the other hand," he continued, "we see a reverse trend among Israeli Arabs. They are beginning to see the land as a strategic asset, and they are doing everything they can to both stop lands in their possession from being sold to Jews, and to take over lands illegally where they can get away with it."
"The state has yet to realize, and I hope they will soon, that this is its most important battle. It is proper that the government start an organization with the sole purpose of safekeeping our national assets," says Schneller.
He accuses other politicians and the media of keeping the problem under wraps because it lacks ratings and is not politically correct. "It's not easy for a politician to say it, but for me it's clear. Israel is a Jewish state before it is a democratic state."
Improving The Performance Of Solar Thermal Power (The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand)
- * Avoid environmental conflicts and transmission line costs by building smaller plants on brownfield sites near cities.
We have a strategy at eSolar to never impact pristine land. And the way we address that is several-fold. First, we have a higher output per acre, so we take a smaller footprint. Second, we’re economical at a smaller size. We can be fully economical at our 46-megawatt size. Those two things combined let us use a small enough footprint that we can locate on private land closer to population centers.
So rather than needing 2,000 acres contiguous to make the economics work — which you almost only can find far away on pristine land or [federal] land — we can locate on only 200 acres very close to a city and we can buy previously disturbed farmland or other properties that’s already been developed so we’re not causing any disturbance to natural habitat. And that’s an important part of our philosophy. It gives us an economic advantage because we’re locating closer to transmission. That’s probably even a bigger factor.
It takes years and years to build the transmission out to the pristine lands. [But] the power plant, for example, in Lancaster [California], is across the street from a transmission line. We didn’t have to build miles and miles of transmission, which takes years and years to get people to approve.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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