Who needs hover boards….

byHabib Battah
Mar 28, 2013
1 minute read

While the film “Back to the Future II” promised the futuristic floating skateboards would be the norm by 2015…

as seen on the time machine dash board:

In Lebanon 2015 will be the year people can dream of having 24/7 electricity, according to Energy Minister Gebran Bassil.

He made the promise this week from a power generator ship, hoped to help alleviate Lebanon’s decades-old electricity shortage:

He’s not the first energy minister to promise solutions to our chronic power crisis. But let’s hope Bassil’s words will be truer than the fiction of the 1989 film; which is sure to let geeks down all over about 18 months from now.

Habib Battah

Habib Battah is an investigative journalist and founder of the news site beirutreport.com. Battah has covered Lebanon and the Middle East for over 15 years and teaches journalism and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is a contributor to Monocle, The Guardian, BBC World, Al Jazeera and others, a former fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and two-time recipient of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award. Battah's investigative work was recently recognized for outstanding local reporting by the Columbia University Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting. Battah earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Near East Studies and Journalism from New York University.