2. Inexpensive natural gas is being preferred to coal in the US, so that coal electricity generation has fallen 19 percent in the past year and now accounts for only 36% of US power. Natural gas is cleaner than coal, though it still pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is sort of like getting the good news that you’re being poisoned, but it isn’t with arsenic but rather something much more slow-acting.

3. Coal burning in the US will likely soon be phased out, since natural gas will likely stay inexpensive and EPA limits on carbon dioxide emissions are harder and harder for coal plants to meet. This according to a new Blooomberg Report.

4. The average American is willing to pay a 13% premium for power from wind and solar, over dirty sources such as coal, petroleum and natural gas.

5. A new design for a power-generating buoy powered by ocean waves is showing promise.

6. ReNew Power Ltd. is investing $1.1 billion in wind farms to generate electricity in India. Indian has little petroleum or natural gas so far, but enormous potential for wind and solar power generation.

7. “Big Solar” ran into some problems in the US, but the wave of the near future may anyway be “small solar”.

8. Saudi Arabia is investing $100 billion in solar energy for domestic electricity generation. Since it doesn’t have so much gas or coal, Saudi Arabia uses petroleum to generate electricity, which is relatively rare. But the more its uses its oil for such domestic purposes, the less money it can make from selling its oil abroad. Hence, solar for electricity generation in the kingdom.

9. Eight automakers have agreed on standardized electric vehicle charging.

10. Two geothermal companies have signed contracts worth $700 million to explore geothermal energy in Kenya. Underground steam could bring electricity to many parts of rural Kenya.

Two suspected US drone strikes have killed up to 12 civilians in the south of Yemen.

Reports vary but between 14 and 15 people have been killed in a double air strike on the southern city of Jaar. Of these, as many as a dozen are being reported as civilians. Up to 21 civilians have also been reported injured.

Witnesses said the first strike targeted alleged militants meeting in a house. Civilians who had flocked to the impact site were killed in a follow-up strike. Although the attack is unconfirmed, if accurate this tactic would echo the grim hallmarks of US drone tactics in Pakistan.

Earlier this year the Bureau exposed a CIA practice of ‘follow-up’ strikes in an investigation with the Sunday Times. On at least a dozen occasions twin strikes killed at least 50 civilians. The civilians died when they rushed to help victims of an initial attack and were hit by a second, follow-up strike.

While the CIA alone is responsible for the American drone campaign in Pakistan both the Agency and US special forces launch attacks with pilotless aircraft in Yemen.

Two to three suspected ‘al Qaeda militants’ were killed in the double strike which Xinhua initially reported as ‘a botched air strike carried out by Yemeni warplanes.’ But three Yemeni security officials have since told CNN it was a drone strike.

This is the highest number of civilians killed in a strike in Yemen attributed to the US since 30 died on 14 July 2011 in a strike on a Mudiya police station.

These are the first civilian strike victims reported killed in Yemen since March 30. The Bureau has recorded up to 753 people killed in US strikes in the country since 2002. As many as 117 are civilians, 24 of them children.

EU Attack
In other developments, today the European Union anti-piracy armada off East Africa launched an attack on the coast of Somalia. Helicopters and ‘maritime aircraft’ attacked an alleged pirate base in a night-time raid that destroyed five fast-attack boats with no reported casualties.

An EU force has been deployed in the seas off Somalia since 2008. On March 23 this year the EU Council voted to expand the fleet’s mandate so it can attack pirate installations on shore.

The commander of the EU fleet Rear Admiral Duncan Potts said: ‘The EU Naval Force action against pirate supplies on the shoreline is merely an extension of the disruption actions carried out against pirate ships at sea.’

The fleet is made up of nine ships and five reconnaissance aircraft supplied by six EU member states including Germany, Spain and France. Fleet spokesman Timo Lange told the Bureau he could not reveal what forces took part in the raid.

This assault is also not the first time action has apparently been taken against pirates on land. On April 17 two reported fishermen were injured when a two unidentified ‘warplanes’ fired on the coast of semi-autonomous Somali region of Puntland. Initial reports said the mystery jets fired missiles on a suspected pirate base.

A spokesman told AFP the EU ‘was not involved whatsoever.’ The French and British governments denied any involvement in this mystery strike and the US Department of Defense told the Bureau it was aware of reports of the strike but would not comment on operational details.

The United States is known to have at least two aircraft carriers in the region and is understood to have aircraft and unmanned drones stationed at an airbase in Djibouti, to the north of Somalia.

For the past five years the US military and intelligence services have been fighting a covert war against the al Qaeda-linked group al Shabaab.

The Bureau has identified at least ten US operations targeting militants. American air strikes by manned aircraft and unmanned drones as well as ground operations by special forces and a naval bombardment have killed between 58 and 169 people since 2007. Up to 57 were civilians, at least one of them a child.

_____

Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Some 80% of university students attend public colleges and universities, which were set up to provide inexpensive education.

These public institutions are increasingly expensive, however, in large part because [pdf] state legislatures have systematically cut their contributions to their state universities since 1990, by 26%.

At the same time, states have vastly increased their prison populations and prison costs, primarily because of the so-called ‘war on drugs,’ which everyone throughout the Americas recognizes as a complete failure except Barack Obama, Eric Holder and most other US politicians of both parties. Many of us suspect that the liquor corporations or private prison owners are bribing them through campaign contributions to keep marijuana illegal.

So here is a fix for the student debt crisis and the crisis in public education funding.

1. Legalize marijuana (Belgium, the Netherlands and Peru have not suffered from doing so, and it has been decriminalized in places like Portugal and Argentina with no ill effects; Portugal’s drug addiction rate has actually fallen).

2. Tax marijuana farms and dedicate the tax receipts solely to public higher education and student debt forgiveness

3. Pardon the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in state penitentiaries whose sole crime was using or selling marijuana. Save $40,000 per year per prisoner. Dedicate savings solely to public higher education and student debt relief.

4. Allow multiple sclerosis sufferers to use medical marijuana as a treatment, and let those with cancer, glaucoma and other conditions proven treatable via marijuana by science to use it for that purpose (as even conservative Arizona is now doing).

5. Tax medical marijuana clinics and dedicate their receipts solely to public higher education and student debt relief. (In California alone, pot is a $12 billion a year industry, and a ten percent tax would yield $1.2 billion a year to state coffers, helping save the University of California system).

6. Employ fewer narcotics police, achieve savings, apply those to, you guessed it.

7. Finance the education of new poor but outstanding students with the tax receipts on the marijuana industry, helping restore some of America’s former upward mobility.

These steps would not only solve the student debt crisis and allow universities to lower tuition, but would strengthen higher education in the US and allow us to remain competitive with Europe and rising nations in Asia (we are not keeping up). Our current declining investment in higher education will otherwise cause us to start falling behind in scientific and technological innovation and in cultural contributions, so vital for a dynamic democracy.

Translated by Juan Cole
from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, [pdf] Whinfield 129

Note that there are 1.5 billion Muslims and only 310 million Americans, and Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia are now in the G20, so this is not a fight you’d want to pick with the Muslim mainstream.

Spencer Ackerman of the Wired War Room reported on the course and also shared some of its powerpoint slides on line.

Aljazeera English also received material and broadcast on the controversy:

What is odd is that the US military is deeply dependent on Muslim allies, and Muslim officers train all the time at places like Ft. Bragg, where I have met them. That is, American officers and Muslim ones are most often colleagues and do a lot of things together. How could they sit there and listen to Lt Col Matthew Dooley’s bull crap?

In my experience, the US officer corps is made up largely of very bright people and most of them are well informed, about the Muslim world and many other subjects. I’ve had the privilege of addressing them myself at think tank events in Washington DC on subjects such as al-Qaeda’s recruitment videos and the fringe groups’ ideas about cosmic war. But since there are lapses in any organization, here are some helpful suggestions to the military about courses on Islam:

1. Such courses should be taught by people with academic credentials in the study of Islam. Many officers do a Master’s degree in Middle East studies at major universities (I’ve taught them at Michigan). They have the training to teach. But why not also bring in civilian university teachers with Ph.D.s from good universities?

2. Bringing in the Imam of the local mosque, or better, doing a field trip to a mosque, should be an essential part of such a course. Meeting living breathing American Muslims is necessary if Americans are to understand Islam.

3. Some bigot who happens to have been stationed somewhere in the Muslim world, has read Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes and Brad Thor fiction, and has a lot of crazy ideas is not a proper teacher of such a course.

4. The less our officer corps sounds like Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, the better.

5. Deliberately killing civilians is a war crime. Officers who openly advocate such a course of action should be cashiered.

6. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt now has the largest number of seats in parliament in Egypt. It is not an extremist, violent organization, and US political relations with Egypt now depend on Washington getting up to speed in understanding it. A kindred group, the Nahdah or Renaissance Party, has the prime ministership in Tunisia. Officers who provoke international incidents with foreign governments by making false allegations against their parliaments should be drummed out of the service.

7. If you can’t say it about Jews or Catholics, you can’t say it about Muslims.

8. The one thing that would guarantee a century-long war of religions and massive terrorism against the United States would be for it to bomb Mecca. Why Muslim-haters are fixated on this tactic baffles me. Would Christianity disappear or be weakened if someone nuked the Church of the Nativity? Sunni Muslims don’t have a pope-like figure or a central bureaucracy, and neither is at Mecca. It is just a place they visit on pilgrimage. The Kaaba or cube-shaped building that they walk around has been destroyed many times by flash floods and they have just rebuilt it. By destroying it, you’d just enrage them (the very threat enrages them) and provoke them to revenge on the US, without weakening them in any way.

9. If intelligent officers sit through a course in which the teacher seems to be a maniac and says hateful and implausible things, they should, like, object.

10. The Iraq War is over. The Afghanistan War is winding down. The US military is unlikely to be fighting ground wars against Sunni Muslims in the next decade. Turkey is a NATO ally that the US is sworn to defend from attackers. Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Bahrain and Afghanistan are non-NATO allies of the United States. An officer advocating war on mainstream Muslims is making policy that only a president and a Congress can make. He should be drummed out of the service.

But Bahrain and Syria are tied in destiny, since they are numbers 5 and 6 of the series of Arab Spring countries that staged major rallies against their government. (The successful such movements were Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen). Bahrain and Syria are in some ways mirror images of one another. Syria has a Shiite, secular ruling elite and a Sunni majority that is treated like a minority. Bahrain has a Sunni ruling elite and a Shiite majority that is treated like a minority. Syria is backed by Russia and Iran, and has given the Russians a naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartous. Bahrain is backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia; it has given the US a naval base as HQ for the Fifth Fleet at Manama, and has garrisoned 1,000 Saudi troops on its soil.

Both governments have brutally repressed their popular revolts. In Bahrain a little less than a hundred have been killed, whereas in Syria it is something like 9,000. But Bahrain is so small that proportionally the death toll there per capita is in the same league with Syria’s.

The United States government has blasted Syria over its repression of its popular movement for democracy, placing a series of sanctions on Syrian leaders.

The US has been virtually silent about the dirty little police state that is Bahrain and its outrageous tactics, such as trying physicians for so much as treating wounded street protesters. The US has not placed sanctions on Bahrain and has done no more than tut-tut the government violence.

It is now worse. The US is now selling Bahrain Coast Guard and F-16 jet equipment.

Just ask yourself if the US would sell coast guard and F-16 equipment to Syria today.

This unnecessary and pernicious arms sale has only one purpose, and it isn’t to beef up Bahrain’s defenses. It is to reassure the Sunni king and his uncle, the prime minister, that the US forgives them for their jack boot tactics and will continue to support them.

There is no difference between the US acting this way and Russia running interference for Syria. Each is following its geopolitical interest. Neither has any morality. They are great powers.

So US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice has just had her legs cut out from under her. When she goes to the UN and argues that Syria should be sanctioned, and she is blocked by Russia and China, you can be assured that Bahrain will be thrown in her face. The US is trying to make a case to other countries for the principled character of its stand. The Obama administration has just made itself a laughingstock in that regard, and I should think its Syria position will be a cause for snickering given that it is selling arms (albeit not crowd control supplies) to Bahrain.

The US and Saudi Arabia are afraid that the Bahrain Shiite majority leans toward Iran and that if it succeeds, that victory will benefit Iran. But most Bahrainis are Akhbaris and don’t even believe in ayatollahs, and they are Arabs and wouldn’t want Persian dominance. Bahrain Shiites are distinctive and have their reasons not to act as Iran’s cat’s paws.

The arms sale to Saudi Arabia is therefore bad for the Syrian opposition, since it announces the hypocrisy of American support for it.

Bahrain’s bloodthirsty government, long accused of using torture and jailing people for thought crimes, doesn’t need US coast guard cutters to protect it from Iran. That is the job of the fifth fleet. And since the US is doing that job for the king, Washington should expect a little cooperation on the human rights front, not to be further taken advantage of.

Meanwhile, the US statements on Bahrain sound just like those of Iran on Syria. It is all about fifth columns and hooligans and outside agents. It is a crock.

Aljazeera English has a video news report on the sale:

In an America where second-hand smoke has led to a ban on smoking in public places because it has bad health effects on others, especially children, it is truly bizarre that we still let people burn coal, oil and gas, which is far worse for people than smoking. Putting high levels of carbon dioxide into the air is causing global climate change, including extreme weather events already. There are some children born today who as elderly persons will live in a world where the average surface temperature of the earth is 2 to 3 degrees C. (3.6 to 5.4 degrees F.) hotter than now, and where the seas likely will have risen six feet to nine feet (2 to 3 meters). Even by mid-century, high winds and sea surges could inundate coastal areas with 4 feet of water from time to time.

And that’s only the beginning. As the decades roll by thereafter, the temperature will likely go up to 5 degrees C. more than now (9 degrees F.). The ultimate sea rise with run through the hydrocarbons is likely to be at least 50 meters (150 feet). If we do go up 5 degrees C. typically in the past every 1 degree C. increase has equaled 10 to 20 meters sea rise (about 30 to 60 feet). We’ll lose a third of the earth’s land mass, all coastal areas, and everywhere will be tropical. Much sea life will die of acidity. Many plants will die. It is not clear that human beings could survive such extreme changes.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is right that the big banks need to be reformed and held accountable. But the banks are a minor problem compared to Big Coal and Big Oil. Where is the activism around those issues? Where are the consumer boycotts of the people who are playing dirty tricks on us?