Cartoon by Emily Greenhalgh, NOAA Climate.gov
For the sake of argument, let us agree with the Obama Administration that the Earth is warming up. Should we respond by being scared or cautious and, if scared, exactly what should we be frightened of?
Frankly, I am frightened of my president, who goes about justifying huge conversions of our public lands to subsidize wind farms and solar power plants.
Recently announced, a photovoltaic solar project at Soda Mountain, California, is just the latest among dozens to win approval. Has no one in the administration advised the president that two wrongs never made a right?
Now 69 years on this planet, I have yet to see the oceans “rise.” They of course surge during storms and hurricanes, but I remember storms just as big from the 1950s. They are only worsened now because of sprawl. Mother Earth has never lied to us about the tide line, which developers along our seacoasts still ignore.
Of course Super Storm Sandy was super. She had millions of targets from which to choose.
Like Goldilocks in the Three Bears, a host of “experts” now insists that our sea level must be perfect—not too high, and not too low, but comfortably suited for everything we have built.
The problem is: It is indeed our plan and not the Earth’s. Nor has Earth ever given ample warning before deciding to go on a rampage. Hey, humans! I have a 9.0 earthquake coming. Get ready to rock and roll!
Granted, new methods of prediction have helped. Still, as Jay Leno advises, the only sure way of predicting a tornado is to visit the nearest trailer park.
It’s dark humor, but so true. Development has increased the drama. These days, there are simply more structures for storms to reach and destroy.
As for the storms themselves, they are no worse than they were historically. When I was growing up, cities were smaller, fewer in number, and farther in between. When a big hurricane hit, as in 1900 at Galveston, Texas, it left many thousands dead—in Galveston perhaps 12,000. P.S. No one in the country blamed global warming.
The problem is that developers don’t read environmental history—or think critically about it if they do. For them, as for alarmists, every natural disaster becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We demand the country “do something” before Earth exceeds its “tipping point.”
Here the alarmists are entirely speculating. Going back hundreds of millions of years, we know from the geological record that the Earth has warmed repeatedly—and cooled repeatedly. Fifty-six million years ago, palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle. But again, why should anyone be bothered with geology—the grandest history of them all?
“Tipping point” has nothing to do with science. It is rather preferred by politicians, developers, and corporations to scare us into doing something stupid.
Such as parting with our public lands. But zoning 40 million acres for alternative energy? Again, how will that make us smart?
Spread across 4,000 acres of BLM land southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, and in close proximity to the Mojave National Preserve, the Ivanpah solar-thermal power plant is the world’s largest, and but one of dozens of varying technologies proposed or under construction on the public lands. Environmental impacts of this plant include the excessive use of natural gas to keep it operational, as well as bird kills above the mirror fields (heliostats) caused by temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees/Google Earth
Because we are the problem, they administration persists. We started this warfare with Mother Earth by suffocating her with gobs of CO2.
Mother Earth still has news for us—and for the administration. She will keep adjusting even if we can’t. Nor despite our best intentions will she necessarily adjust the way we want.
She simply doesn’t care. Even as we “model” her she refuses to be modeled. It’s a computer model, after all, showing but a pittance of her incalculable behaviors.
A better explanation for all of this modeling is money. A cabal of green energy developers is getting rich. Face it. Few politicians agreed to this “reform” without first being strong-armed by the industry.
When did President Obama go all out for green energy? The record there is deep. His chief adviser has been Jeffrey Immelt, the Chairman and CEO of General Electric. Now there is a top scientist for you.
And you, Senator Sanders. Just call it green. Wave your arms in the air and shout a lot. Tell them you’re not connected to Wall Street. It will be our secret, senator.
Just don’t mention that some people in Vermont are wising up, seeing wind farms as “moronic.” General Electric has billions on the line here, senator. Forget the tourist revenue.
There is your tipping point—money. News flash! Green acne grips the public lands. Not to worry, the lobbyists say. Lady Liberty won’t even notice the pimples because the rest of her face will remain “pristine.” The pimples, that is, the turbines, will require just five percent of her skin.
Those people in Vermont are right. Green acne is moronic. Five percent or even a tenth of one percent, the public lands were never meant to be picked over like a scab. These are life-giving lands—critical lands—demanding our everlasting respect.
The Obama Administration must believe in Clearasil. Unfortunately, these scars will not soon be undone. Destroying the beauty and biology of the American landscape is never an excuse for “action.”
Granted, global warming is not a hoax. But yes, the statement is designed to deceive. We are not supposed to ask: If global warming is for real, for how long has it been for real? The answer, at least for human civilization, is the better part of the past 15,000 years.
The Ivanpah Solar facility located southwest of Las Vegas "stands to destroy valuable desert tortoise habitat near Mojave National Preserve while also impacting the viewshed," the National Parks Conservation Association said in a 2012 report.
Nor are we supposed to see the deception here: 97 percent of scientists agree about global warming. Of course they agree. After all, they would have to agree. Now with us for 15,000 years, global warming is just about as certain as gravity.
That’s not what we mean, the cabal protests. We mean human CO2 emissions only. We get to say what is causing climate change. No wonder American education, especially higher education, has turned into another mess.
Again pardon history for violating everyone’s “safe zone.” For giving us a Northern Hemisphere virtually free of ice sheets and full of freshwater lakes, we owe thanks to the Big Melt. Without it, Western Civilization would not exist.
What will green energy do to reverse the melting? Not a thing. Are we making the melting worse? Again, what is meant by worse? On a warming planet, ice melts. It is neither better nor worse as far as Earth is concerned. It is simply something that she does.
As for what is meant by “we,” eight billion people on the planet is a pretty big we. With all of those people exploiting resources, we do have a tremendous impact.
However, that especially is what universities mean by a "safe zone," where anything controversial is banned. Lest even a single person in the room be offended, the real problem is out of bounds.
Certainly, there is little chance of going back to “us”—that sweet spot in the middle of the twentieth century when the United States stood virtually alone in the developed world. When I was born, there were just 145 million people in the country and everyone could get a job. Now the entire world wants what America has, nor will they let some Paris “emissions treaty” stand in their way.
What most countries don’t have are public lands. It’s up to us to use common sense. We set aside our public lands for a very specific purpose, at once both biological and aesthetic. They were never meant to be industrialized.
We’ve done enough of that already looking for oil, coal, gas, and minerals. Breaking faith with biology—wilderness—we break faith with America the Beautiful period, undoing the wisdom of some of our greatest leaders, especially Theodore Roosevelt and FDR.
As an exceptional history, it remains immovable, and so yes, the green energy cabal is stumped. Getting their way with the White House and Congress first depends on silencing us. Give it up, Dr. Runte, lest we next throw you to the wolves as a denier and card-carrying member of the three percent!
Here again, I grew up with black-listing and commie-baiting. I know censorship when I see it. “I have a list,” warned Senator Joseph McCarthy. “Be careful your government doesn’t put you on it.”
The ancients called it hubris, filling their mythology with the inevitable result. Nor will the gods now be appeased by mere mortals showing no respect for creation.
How big is a wind farm? As initially proposed east of Searchlight, Nevada, between the town and Lake Mead National Recreation Area, 161 turbines (262 feet, 415 feet with blades), 35 miles of service roads, and 16 miles of transmission lines would have been spread across nearly 19,000 acres, equivalent to the city of Las Vegas. Here imposed in yellow over Las Vegas, the footprint of the wind farm is shown. Last October 30, U.S. District Court Judge Miranda Du, citing a woefully inadequate EIS, vacated a scaled-back version of the project (87 turbines, 9,000 acres) pending a rewrite by BLM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Mojave Desert Blog
Pummeling the American landscape is hardly less criminal than emitting CO2. As George Perkins Marsh first reminded us (remember that Vermonter, Senator Sanders?), the public lands are America’s antidote to what happened to Greece and Rome.
George Perkins Marsh would know what to tell the White House. No more wind farms and solar power plants on the public lands. If they worked, they would work just as well on private lands paid for by the ratepayers.
Of course, that explains the censorship. Suddenly, few of those plants would work. Without their subsidies, they are bound by physics. Perhaps “the battery” they need is just around the corner. Well, so was fusion 50 years ago. I’m still waiting for fusion, as I suspect the nation will be waiting for that battery years after I am dead.
Simply improving a technology does not make for a revolution. Those are few and far between. There will be nothing revolutionary about wind or solar power until their reliability is 100 percent.
It may happen, and we should hope it does happen. Then no one will need the public lands—or polluting fossil fuels. Investors will be speculating on a proven technology and laughing all the way to the bank.
The point is that until it happens we have no business acting as if it will—or has. Instead we are left crying as our public lands die piecemeal. For what? At this point, still at best for a costly experiment and at worst another scam.
Every time Mother Nature fails to cooperate, wind and solar power call for backup, in other words, fossil fuels. Wind not blowing? Fire up the gas. Sun not shining? Fire up the coal. Actually, keep the fire hot 24/7 because both can die in an instant.
Where, oh, where, is that perfect battery? Lacking it, proponents next talk about “improving” the grid. The wind will always be blowing and the sun always shining somewhere. We simply need enough projects that overlap.
In short, they plan for even worse. More pimples, more power. After promising to treat with Clearasil Ultra, bring on the concrete, asphalt, rebar, culverts, bridges, retaining walls, service roads, transmission lines, and more. Fence it all off for security. Put up floodlights to hold back the night. What? No CO2 emissions in any of it?
As for wildlife, let the arrogance flow. Demand from the government a legal “take.” Failing in that, fudge the numbers in the EIS. Eagles? Following a very “rigorous,” “comprehensive,” “meaningful,” and “responsible” assessment—that after consulting every “stakeholder”—we didn’t see a one. Well, maybe one, but it was flying away from us. We therefore concluded it will not come back.
What the Interior Department calls an environmental impact statement is just about that bad. All are fudged; all are rushed, unless some judge, refusing to be bent by politics, forces the department back to the drawing board.
We may hope that will happen at Soda Mountain. Certainly, green energy has flaunted every principle of stewardship, if by stewardship we mean do no harm.
Us? Harm the environment? If it lives, we first try to move it. If it dies in its new location, so be it. When the public gets suspicious, we know to repeat the mantra. We are being as “green” as we possibly can.
The immovable history remains: Nothing dismissive of life and the American past has any place on our public lands.
History will already venture this. If the Obama Administration persists in making tradeoffs—as if what the public has to trade is expendable—future generations will never allow that a pittance of national monuments “balanced” out the loss.
The urge to start someplace is no excuse for starting badly. Might we then elect for ourselves a president who believes in the public lands? There again, and especially in this election year, I join Mother Earth in not holding my breath.
An environmental historian and frequent contributor to the Traveler, Alfred Runte lives in Seattle, Washington, where he writes about the public lands. His books include National Parks: The American Experience (Taylor Trade) and Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness, which he is revising for a second edition.
Comments
Your news flash is nothing new. What you fail to comprehend is the climate of the Earth has not had an organism dig up billions of tons of coal, burn it, and in the process add billions of tons of C02 to the atmosphere. That is a process that has accelerated substantially over the last hundred and fifty years since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It is hard to take your comments seriously, or authoratatively when you refuse to recognize this fact. The burning of coal has also attributed to acidifying lakes forest and soils.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html#.V7Cyk1elgck
While a large scale thermal plant does effect and displace wildlife from the immediate area in which it is built these plants are sitting there absorbing the suns energy and transfering that to the grid.. The only use of fossil fuels is in the development, and the transfer of the the equipment that goes into an array. Once that process is complete, the plant will do less damage to an ecosystem than coal plants over a 30 to 50 year scale. These plants are not being placed in tropical rainforests, or areas of high co2 absobtion. In fact, most plants of this nature would not work in rainforests. Let's not get carried away.
Talk about getting carried away. . . Quote: "The only use of fossil fuels is in the development [of these plants]." No. At Ivanpah, natural gas backs up the entire operation, generally for four hours every day. Every wind farm here in the Northwest is also backed by natural gas or hydroelectric. The grid is getting slammed trying to accommodate all of the fluctuations. As for wildlife "displacement," large raptors tend to migrate. So do bighorn sheep. Allegedly, thermal power plants working on molten salt require no extra energy for operation. But again, I am aware of only one of those--at Tonopah, and the plant still is deadly on flying birds.
As for the "facts" of coal, no one is disagreeing with those facts. But that does not make those "facts" any more relevant when used to defend wind and solar. If wind and solar cannot stand on their own (and they don't), how are they to offer any panacea to the problems of King Coal?
The other day, in Sprague, Washington, I watched a large coal train pass. Several pass through the town every day on their way to ships bound for China. We haven't told the Chinese this must end--or the Japanese, Indians, Indonesians, etc. We have rather accepted, on their say-so, that they will "stop" in 2030. In other words, 14 years from now--allegedly all of them "critical" years for the planet--the rest of the world will start doing the "right thing," too.
By then, I will be 83. It's quantifiable, to be sure. 69 plus 14 equals 83. Now a senior citizen, I am being told that when I am an old man the entire world will start getting ethical. Been there, done that, my first 69 years on this planet. Don't tell me what is good for me unless you are willing to do it NOW. And the government is not willing, which makes it a scam, because no treaty works like this treaty, giving half of the world a total pass.
I will accept my responsibility for the mining of all that coal. On the other hand, my country isn't topping off at 1.4 billion people, with India right behind.
No amount of destroying our public lands is going to reverse global warming--a few days or months, perhaps, out of an entire century. That is indeed the conclusion of other eminent scientists who have studied the price of our going it alone with Europe. And even if China and India started now, would we insist that they contribute at the price of their remaining vacant lands? No more tigers? No more pandas? Everything a wind farm from sea to sea?
Unique in the world, we have a glorious public domain. No one has convinced me we should give it up. However, I do believe, when I turn 83, China, India, et al. will still be saying they can't comply.
Against that likelihood, why would we take the risk? To prove our sincerity and/or to assuage our guilt for having led the Industrial Revolution? Now we are to apologize for what we have? What country in the world has ever believed in doing that? Sure, poorer countries would like us to feel guilty and give in, but give in to what? The same poverty and lack of opportunity that drove their best and brightest to our shores?
Regardless, in any marriage, both parties take the vows. So far, those saying "I do" on our behalf have forgotten what a treaty--a world marriage--is.
I'm left to draw the conclusion, that you have no solutions, other than we shouldn't use public lands, or any land for energy development. That's basically the extent of all this back and forth. You still haven't provided any solutions to prove if this opinion is wise, simply based on quantified data that allows an informed reader to conclude that throwing up our arms and say "we don't care" is the right opinion.
I'm left to conclude, by your opinion that global warming just happens, and it will surely end with a global cooling event, and all will remain fine. That we shouldn't have to worry that one day the planet's atmosphere might resemble something like Venus and in the end nothing will be able to survive on the planet, because your opinion will prove otherwise even without any quantified data to back up such an opinion. Of course, your only example is that cooling and warming periods on the geological timeline have yet to point to an "end game" or "tipping point" so why show any concern? Of course, the Earth never had an organism digging up large amounts of coal, and burning it in such a short time period, which through quantified data by monitoring atmopsheric conditions, organizations like NOAA and NASA are proving that such activities are changing the atmosphere. And of course, an astromically large amounts of scientists that study these data patterns tend to agree that these activities are changing the atmopshere and over a long enough time period could threaten our survival on this planet.
To conclude, let's give up. Have a party, and place our heads back in the sand, instead of converting marginal amounts of land to solar technology, life will be better to just reject everything, and even if we require energy, we shouldn't need it, nor should other countries.
Anon - It appears you have drunk the AGW kool aid. Perhpas you can answer the question that the rest of the cult have run from. If AGW is proven, if it is science, if it is undeniable, if it is "quantified data" why have all the predictions been so wrong.
I recall my first trip to Lawrence Livermore Labs outside San Francisco some 20 plus years ago and my discovery of the Altamont wind farm. There were 1,000's of Inoperative and rusting wind turbines as far as the eye could see. Yes, occasionally there was one actually rotating (and I assume generating a small amount of electricity). They scarred what was an otherwise beautiful landscape. I later learned these were actually built in the 70's thanks in large part to tax and investment credits given to people with big money. Fast forward 20 years and in my home state and across the country more and more turbines clutter the horizon and while more of them are functioning than 20 years ago there are still many days when they sit idle despite the wind.
Why the rush to subsidized "green" power before it is proven? Research can be accomplished with a handful of turbines or small solar panels until the technology has sufficiently proven itself. I don't disagree with EC that capitalism has created many great innovations but that is not what is at work here. Not when there are govt. subsidies funding (I would argue overfunding) everything every step of the way. Why would someone stand up and say this is nonsense when the money keeps flowing? Blame the over zealot "green" people who have good intentions but no common sense or understanding of economics or science. Blame the govt for handing out money like it was theirs to give. I am in favor of encouraging research and the govt can certainly play a good role in that regard but to throw billions of dollars when a fraction of that would do just as well or better is disgusting. Thanks for the great op-ed Alfred.
Go back in history and you'll find countless examples of people who fought hard against progress in their times. There were those who feared development of steam engines, electricity, elevators, and many other of the things we now take for granted -- and helped improve the quality of life for all of us. But just as was the case when reciprocating engines driving propellers on passenger airliners were rapidly replaced by more dependable and economic jets, the world moves on. Now NASA is working on development of electric propulsion systems. Some of the work may revolutionize aviation again. But even that has its detractors and naysayers.
Alternate energy sources are now taking baby steps. Baby steps that must be taken if there is hope of making those sources useful in the future. I'll bet that future generations will look back on those who now oppose these efforts and ask, "What on earth were they thinking?" That will be especially true if (or when) that generation is looking at a dry and dusty planet with massive die-off of plant, animal, and even human life because we failed to make any efforts to stop a calamity when we had a fighting chance.
We sit around and argue endless arguments. Fiddling while our planet is beginning smolder. How much more foolish can we be?
I'll bet that future generations will look back on those who now oppose these efforts and ask,
Noone opposes "these efforts". What they oppose is the government picking winners and losers and taking our money to do so.
Lee, it's called technology assessment. I am not opposed to technology assessment, but yes, I am opposed to losing our public lands over any assessment suggesting that two wrongs make a right.
Think about it. If indeed a planet like Venus is in our future, any delay in cooperating would be an act of war. But there it is--years of delay allowed to China, et al., and the US government streamlining the sale of coal to THEM.
When it takes fear to sell a pending catastrophe, at least be consistent when selling the fear. But we aren't consistent, are we? The president says one thing and allows another. Here, China, take our coal.
Under that scenario, do you not feel foolish arguing for Venus and tipping points? Or is it the Koch Brothers we should blame again? They are forcing our president to do this, and besides, it all started with George Bush.
No, it all started with the Industrial-Military complex originally outlined by President Eisenhower. When you want to sell Americans something, the best pitch is fear. Supporters also sold us on the Interstate Highway System as the National System of Defense Highways. We needed to get across the country to stop the Russians before they "invaded" Peoria, Illinois. Ultimately, all of that fear led to Vietnam, and we sure know how that turned out.
How will global warming turn out? A student of American history, I will venture at least one prediction. We will go broke before we know.