For many years, Mad magazine ran a cartoon send-up of Cold War espionage called “Spy vs. Spy.” A recent report made me chuckle to think that with energy policy, we now have (as the article puts it) Green vs. Green.
On one side of the fence, you have those environmentalists who just love solar power. This includes of course the Obama regime, whose Energy Secretary Steven Chu has pushed solar with a vengeance. Recently, with a grand flourish, Chu announced a $2.1 billion federal loan guarantee to a company intending to open a 1,000 megawatt solar farm in the California desert. Earlier this year the regime granted $1.37 billion in federal loan guarantees for another solar farm in the California desert. Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) now crows that “California is the national leader in clean energy, and our great state is poised to become the world leader in renewable energy generation.” Of course, California is also the national leader in budget deficits, and is poised to become insolvent in the next economic downturn. It is (next to Greece, perhaps) the world leader in fiscal mismanagement.
These California projects are just two out of 11 large solar farms approved by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and local agencies in California and Nevada. Almost all are being built on land managed by the BLM. These solar farms are projected to produce roughly 4,200 megawatts of power — which sounds like a lot, but is only equivalent to the energy generated by two medium-large nuclear power plants. Naturally, the nukes produce power all the time, not just when it is a cloudless day, and they require but an infinitesimal fraction of the land (precious, protected, government-managed land)that the solar plants will.
And more than a dozen other large-scale solar farms are awaiting approval, all in the Mojave Desert.
The massive tracts of land taken up by the ugly solar farms are a source of anger to another group of environmentalists. For example, Janine Blaeloch, executive director of the Western Lands Project, commented dolorously that “these [solar] plants will introduce a huge amount of damage to our public land and habitat.” The concerned energy analyst Christine Hersey put it in this way: “The irony is, in the name of saving the planet, we’re casting aside 30 or 40 years of environmental law. It’s really a type of frenzy.”
Yes, Christine, it is. It’s the frenzy of an administration that has shut down as much domestic drilling as it could, and is desperate for other sources of power.
One of the concerns harbored by the last-mentioned enviros is the plight of desert animal and plant life, such as the desert turtle, that live in the Mojave. Another concern is the prospect that the massive solar installations will threaten thousands of Native American sites said to be regarded as sacred. Indeed, the non-profit group La Cuna de Aztlan Sacred Sites Protection Circle is suing federal agencies and four of the solar farm companies on this basis.
With Big Solar, it’s Green vs. Green. But why did anyone suppose that environmentalism wouldn’t have as many schisms as any other religion?
