Monday, May 22, 2023

In the name of Green, we must kill birds

and bats and insects, destroy habitat, destroy archeological sites, and still have unreliable and expensive electricity!  It's for the CHILDREN!!"  Etc.
Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.
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But there’s one thing that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – the agency tasked with facilitating these projects on public land – doesn’t seem to have fully taken into account: the desert isn’t quite as empty as it thought. It might look like a barren wilderness, but this stretch of the Mojave is a rich and fragile habitat for endangered species and home to thousand-year-old carbon-capturing woodlands, ancient Indigenous cultural sites – and hundreds of people’s homes.
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Kevin Emmerich worked for the National Park Service for over 20 years before setting up Basin & Range Watch in 2008, a non-profit that campaigns to conserve desert life. He says solar plants create myriad environmental problems, including habitat destruction and “lethal death traps” for birds, which dive at the panels, mistaking them for water.

He says one project bulldozed 600 acres of designated critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise, while populations of Mojave fringe-toed lizards and bighorn sheep have also been afflicted. “We’re trying to solve one environmental problem by creating so many others.”

And on, and on.  But it's all good, because Green Energy!  Unreliable, and damaging, but Green!

2 comments:

Rick T said...

I've driven by this abomination many times, and they scrape down to bare soil before starting to put in the panel mounts. It takes a thriving desert ecology and destroys it. Plenty of shade, but no water, no plants, and probably no animals...

Anonymous said...

We have some of them cropping up in Maryland. Abominations filling up useful farmland and creating eyesores.
Ed