California Dreaming

from Energy Tribune
Solar Isn’t Green Enough For California


The greatest threat to any perfect dream is to have it become reality. That’s because when pie-in-the-sky comes down to Earth it usually doesn’t taste nearly as good as the dreamers thought. And in the case of alternative energy, many dreams have turned out to be about as tasty as cowpie in the sky.


That’s certainly what’s happened with biofuels, as their true costs give lie to the idea that the world was only a few seeds away from eternal green energy. And that’s what may be starting to happen in with solar energy in California.

California seems like the ideal place: the land where abundant sunshine meets abundant environmentalism. But when solar makes the transition from perfect dream to needing an appropriate building site, it’s no longer green enough for the purists among the greens.


In response to public policy, nearly two dozen companies have proposed building solar and wind facilities on tracts of California’s sunny and windy Mojave Desert that were recently purchased from the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroad. And what has been the response of the advocates and even the actual authors of that same public policy?


"This is unacceptable," according to Diane Feinstein, the Democratic US Senator from California who beseeched Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to “suspend any further consideration of leases to develop former railroad lands for renewable energy or for any other purpose." David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy, was less supportive than Feinstein, stating that the proposed energy facilities "would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem.”


Funny, I thought solar was supposed to save ecosystems. Apparently, it might need to pave over some of them.


Also, I thought deserts were bad things, since Feinstein and other global warming prophets constantly threaten “desertification” as one of the most disastrous consequences of global Warmageddon. Which is strange, because it now seems that Feinstein believes deserts to be so precious that we cannot spare even a small fraction of just one to make clean, renewable solar energy. Maybe after global warming causes all that desertification, we will be able to build some solar plants in the new deserts?


Unless some tortoise wanders into them, because one of the great concerns with these solar plants is that they might do an unspecified harm to the desert tortoise. What, global warming is not as important as a single tortoise? I thought we were in a race for the life of the whole planet here. I guess we now see who wins in a race between the tortoise and the air.


To stop the building of government advocated solar energy plants on government land, Feinstein wants the government to declare the whole area a national monument. I suggest we call it the “National Monument to Energy Hypocrisy.”


This is not just because of the hypocrisy of advocating solar be built in sunny places and then claiming that deserts can’t be spared. But also for the hypocrisy of believing that crowding out a sliver of desert for alternative energy is unacceptable, while simultaneously subsidizing the destruction of far more productive grasslands and rainforests to make biofuels.


What’s the difference between these two destructive land uses? Well, besides biofuels also causing far more pollution to water and adding gobs of dreaded carbon dioxide to the air, the real difference is location. Biofuels occur in flyover country. Energy production, whether it is oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, or biofuels needs to be tucked away into dreadful places like Iowa or Texas. It is just too unsightly, too unclean and too imperfect to occur in the homelands of the well-off, sensitive advocates of alternative energy – whether its solar panels in California or windmills on Cape Cod.


The situation in California prompted California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to comment "If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave desert, I don't know where the hell we can put it.”


Well, let’s see… possibly acceptable sites might include: 1) the back corner of Greenie dorm rooms. These are already spoiled by development and heavy air pollution and I can tell you from personal experience that there is enough sun exposure that some students manage to grow alternative crops on the windowsills. 2) on top of the burned remains of Rush Limbaugh’s house. This ground is already spiritually unclean, as far as Greenies are concerned, and building solar there would satisfy the real purposes of most alternative energy advocacy: punishing those the left hates and advancing other political aims.


But even if solar were built in such potentially acceptable areas, it would be only a matter of time before someone in a more environmentally sensitive location – say the other millionaires in Limbaugh’s neighborhood – complained of the glare from the solar panels disrupting their prime nature views. No hardship is too small not to stop energy production. The fight against glare pollution must be right around the corner.


The standards to which energy is held by environmentalists are so high that only some sort of magic spiritual energy could meet them (assuming the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t rule that subsidizing spiritual energy violated the separation of church and state.)


If only worry, fantasy and hypocrisy could power generators, alternative energy might actually have a chance.