Political opportunities

Despite the widespread sense of vast technological possibility (much of it imagined), the racist backdrop of genetic engineering provided little political opportunity in the era of civil rights for geneticists to push their social educational... 

Kitschelt, Herbert P. 1986. Political opportunity structures and political protest Anti-war movements in four democracies. British Journal of Political Science 16 57-85. 

Meyer, David S, and Suzanne Staggenborg. 1996. Movements, countermovements, and the structure of political opportunity. American Journal of Sociology101 1628-1660. 

But if legislative practice begins to be guided by political opportunism, and if special laws are passed to which jurisprudence must bow, then the administration of justice becomes a tool of politics. 

In the middle of the growing controversy over the best way to develop an atomic industry, the AEC issued the PRDC provisional construction permit. Even Democrats with short memories remembered that nine days earlier the Republicans in the House, with strong administration backing, had narrowly defeated the Gore-Holifield bill, the Democratic attempt, with labor support, to bolster the civilian power program by directing the AEC to construct and operate six different prototype power reactors. In this heated political context, and with the fall election on most politicians minds, the PRDC decision took on a new dimension. Anderson and Holifield as well as several labor leaders recognized that the AEC decision on the PRDC reactor offered both the Democrats and the AFL-CIO a political opportunity that could be exploited to embarrass the Republicans. But the best tactical course to pursue was less obvious. 

Element 101 is named Mendelevium in honor of the great Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev. The youngest of seventeen children, he was born in Tobolslca where his grandfather published the first newspaper in Siberia and his father ivaj the high school principal. Dmitri received his early education from a political exile, but when his father died, his mother traveled west in search of better educational opportunities for Dmitri. 

When Hank Uhrig, heard that Joe Blair had approved my request, he clearly felt that I was being disloyal. But from my standpoint, the opportunity to conduct and publish important research was being lost in a bureaucratic fog of administrative headaches. I remembered how Hank had once told me that he wanted me to replace him as laboratory chief when he retired. To me this was not an enticement. It seemed like a step up into more administrative and political... 

The situation may be illustrated well by the development of the public discourse on hydropower in Switzerland over the past few years. As 60% of Swiss electricity generation stems from hydropower, its environmental impacts have time and again raised political debates over the past 50 years. More recently, the liberalization of electricity markets has opened up new windows of opportunity for the development of new approaches of mitigation. One example of an integrative concept was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the late 1990s. It has been implemented in the currently operating eco-label for sustainably produced electricity in Switzerland (naturemade star). 

The attractiveness of production of liquid fuels from biomass lies in the renewable characteristics of biomass. As a consequence, the costs of an industry based on biomass conversion would be more or less predictable by inflation forecasting, and essentially independent of external political factors. With the incorporation of municipal solid waste as a biomass feedstock, such an industry also presents the opportunity of developing improved methods of recycling and waste disposal. 

---