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http://thehill.com/opinion/internat...isis-tehran-sows-the-seeds-of-its-own-decline
once again : Iran, invest in green tech, not weapons tech!
you're on the right path in solar power, now do the same for water please!
READ THIS, IRANIAN LEADERSHIPS : https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/wate...ns-and-their-neighbours.547222/#post-10301457
It appears to now very much apply to you too.
And needless to say, so it does for any country with water shortages or an increased need for farming (without resorting to extortion-based (neutered!) genetically modified crops!).
http://www.euronews.com/2017/07/31/largest-solar-power-plant-in-iran-opens
In Iran’s water crisis, Tehran sows the seeds of its own decline
BY TZVI KAHN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/26/18 10:00 AM EDT
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
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© Getty Images
“I have returned” to Iran, tweeted a newly appointed environmental official charged with resolving the country’s water crisis, “with the hope of creating #hope.” Within months, however, that hope evaporated – and he found himself arrested, interrogated, and facing a government-coordinated smear campaign.
Kaveh Madani, a Western-educated Iranian water expert, formally resigned in April in the wake of spurious charges of disloyalty to the Islamist regime. The rise and fall of the deputy head of Iran’s Department of the Environment not only reflects Tehran’s chronic mismanagement of its water resources. Rather, it also mirrors the years-long drought of talent in Iran, which continues to face a spiraling “brain drain” as its citizens flee the regime’s repressive rule.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way. Born in Tehran in 1981, Madani first left the country after college, obtaining a master’s degree in water resources from Sweden’s Lund University and a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California. He quickly gained a global reputation for his research and expertise. He won prestigious awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers and the European Geosciences Union. He conducted a TedX talk about global water scarcity. He appeared in Al Jazeera and BBC documentaries. He received a professorship at Imperial College London.
Eventually, his work caught the attention of the Iranian government, which faced a burgeoning, decades-old environmental predicament of its own. Nationwide water shortages, which Madani described as “unprecedented,” had generated widespread social discontent. Key rivers dried up. Millions of Iranians moved from the countryside to cities. Long before nationwide demonstrations began in late December of 2017, protests routinely punctuated affected areas. If the water shortage persists, warned Isa Kalantari, the head of Iran’s Department of the Environment, in a 2015 interview, 50 million Iranians will need to relocate to survive.
Madani placed the lion’s share of culpability on regime mismanagement. “The government blames the current crisis on the changing climate, frequent droughts, and international sanctions, believing that water shortages are periodic,” he wrote in a 2014 paper. However, he noted, “these exogenous issues are only crisis catalyzers, not the main cause of the water crisis.” Iranians, he argued, “have failed to invest sufficiently into developing a resilient water management system.”
In September 2017, Tehran announced Madani’s appointment as the deputy environment chief. The development constituted an unusual milestone for Iran. First, it represented an implicit, and atypical, acknowledgement by the regime of its own failures — not to mention a willingness to consider the counsel of external critics. Second, it marked the rare return of a prominent Iranian professional from the diaspora, to which millions of Iranians have retreated since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
President Hassan Rouhani has repeatedly pledged to reverse the exodus by respecting democratic norms and improving economic opportunity in Iran. And before long, Madani became a symbol of expatriate return, a role he willingly embraced. “There are a lot of people abroad, waiting and watching closely to see what’s going to happen,” he said in December. “If I succeed, we might see more people coming back to help the government.”
But it was not meant to be. Notwithstanding Rouhani’s efforts, Tehran has long regarded Iranians with Western ties, particularly dual nationals, as potential threats to its entrenched Islamist ideology. In this conspiratorial worldview, the West seeks to undermine the regime by infiltrating the country with foreign values contrary to Shiite Islam. Although Madani lacks citizenship in another country, his years living in the United States and Europe proved sufficient to trigger intense suspicion within the clerical regime.
Thus, the regime began spying on Madani as soon as he returned to Iran, breaking into his personal computer and accounts. In February, Tehran briefly arrested and interrogated him. Days later, the newspaper Kayhan, which Iran’s supreme leader controls, accused him of spying for enemy governments and incorrectly identified him as a dual national. On March 31, Tasnim, a news site affiliated with the regime, posted a photo of Madani dancing at a private party with a woman not wearing the mandatory hijab, or headscarf.
In mid-April, Madani resigned and left Iran, confirming the news on Twitter. “Yes,” he wrote on April 17, “the accused fled from a country where virtual bullies push against science, knowledge and expertise and resort to conspiracy theories to find a scapegoat for all the problems because they know well that finding an enemy, spy or someone to blame is much easier than accepting responsibility and complicity in a problem.” The regime remained unmoved. On April 22, Kayhan published an article titled, “His debauchery aside, Madani’s primary crime was espionage.”
The grim story of Madani’s fleeting career in government offers a potent metaphor for the ideologically driven myopia that lies at the heart of the Islamic Republic. At a time when nationwide protests – animated in part by the water crisis – continue to threaten the clerical regime’s viability, Tehran’s anti-Western paranoia has stymied its ability to enact the very measures that not only would help stabilize its grip on power, but also would ensure the country’s very survival. In the name of self-preservation, the government effectively sows the seeds of its own decline.
“This is a lesson for Iranian experts living abroad!” tweeted Iranian lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi after learning of Madani’s resignation. But it may offer a more troubling lesson for Iranians still living at home. As Iranian journalist Nahid Molavi put it, “It might be a simple thing for you to resign and leave, but for us it means the extinction of the last flickers of hope.”
Tzvi Kahn is a senior Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter @TzviKahn.
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once again : Iran, invest in green tech, not weapons tech!
you're on the right path in solar power, now do the same for water please!
READ THIS, IRANIAN LEADERSHIPS : https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/wate...ns-and-their-neighbours.547222/#post-10301457
It appears to now very much apply to you too.
And needless to say, so it does for any country with water shortages or an increased need for farming (without resorting to extortion-based (neutered!) genetically modified crops!).
http://www.euronews.com/2017/07/31/largest-solar-power-plant-in-iran-opens
IRAN
Largest solar power plant in Iran opens
By Euronews
last updated: 31/07/2017
Largest solar power plant in Iran opens
The newly opened Mokran Solar Power Plants Complex is the latest proof of Iran’s ambitions in renewable energy.
The country’s biggest solar plant was constructed in the eastern province of Kerman in six months and has a capacity of 20 megawatts.
Made up of two 10 megawatts photovoltaic units, it was financed with 27 million dollars by the Swiss company Durion AG, and supervised by a German company, Adore.
The complex has been built with a total number of 76 thousand and 912 solar panels, each producing 260 watts in an area of 44 hectares.
A number of countries including Switzerland, Germany, Spain, China and South Korea have shown interest in investing in renewable energies in Iran. The Iranian Energy minister. Hamid ChitchianI, says there have been offers of over 3.5 billion dollars in foreign investment so far and ii is the most attractive field since the nuclear deal.
President of the German Energy Watch Group, Hans Josef Fell, says “now solar and wind technologies are very, very cheap. Cheaper, than energy from gas, oil, coal or nuclear so, we can replace the conventional energy systems with 100 percent renewable in the future.”
Mokran Solar Energy company has also started the construction of a 100 megawatts solar power plant, which energy experts bet will be Middle East ‘s largest.
With over 300 sunny days and an average of 2800 hours of sunshine, Iran is considered one of the best countries for producing and using solar energy.
This potential and the incentives offered by the government have provided worthy opportunities for investing in this field.
Iran planned to use renewable energies two decades ago, but its progress has been sluggish. Out of the 76 thousand megawatts capacity of Iran’s power plants, only 12 thousand megawatts come from renewable energies, with the largest share from hydroelectric energy.
However, solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and small hydro turbines have been increasing recently.
