or wind farms, for that matter. We should stop building terrorist targets and move to point of use and local generation/capture of energy.

the Grand Canyon will be opened to commercial drilling interests.

Dams would be useless, of course, since they don't actually create water and the Colorado River rarely reaches the ocean, but dams!

And they should blast out a highway from they South Rim to the bottom so people don't have to walk, take rafts, or ride mules to admire it.

"The Maopa Band of Paiutes is currently pursuing additional renewable energy opportunities, including development of the 300 MW Eagle Shadow Mountain Solar Farm.[11][12]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moapa_Southern_Paiute_Solar_Project#Tribal_benefits_and_opportunities

I don't see an issue with this project.

This particular project would be at the primary gateway to the Valley of Fire State Park. Near the protected Muddy Mountains wilderness area.

The Muddy Mountain wilderness area is to the south-southeast of the Valley of Fire State Park. Looking at Google Maps, there's some distance between the proposed site and the state park and wilderness area.

Almost no one comes up through Overton to visit the Valley of Fire. It’s a big tourist destination and recreation area for visitors and locals alike. How should I feel about the first thing they’ll now see is a feel of industrial development instead of wilderness?

So maybe this is not the best place for a solar farm. But if we are truly going to replace fissile fuels with solar and wind then we have to expect solar farms and turbines just about everywhere.

Too many people have the idea that green energy is environmentally neutral. It is not. And can you name a wild area or empty area in this country that has no value? I can’t. I share John Muir’s belief that nature has value outside of man’s use for it.

Take Florida where I live. Perfect for solar. And our dry land is all disturbed and of marginal if not awful farm value due to the climate and sand soil. So solar farms are going up like crazy. Good, right? But what about the idea of replanting the Longleaf Pine and Wire Grass ecosystem Europeans found? That would be the environmental home run. But there are 20 million of us here. Even if every home had solar panels, which I support, there would still be the need for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of acres with solar panels. And wind is a non-starter in Florida. We just don’t have enough.

That is why I still support Nuclear Energy. It has it drawbacks and risks. But seeing my state covered in solar panels, destroying hundreds of thousands of acres potentially native land is not just a risk, but an abomination.

This is not something many on the left like to talk about. But we need to realize where we are heading. And plan for.

We need this



Not this



Every single parking area canopied, required by law.

Not nearly enough to meet our energy needs.

If we were going to truly replace fossil fuel’s with green energy, which pretty much means solar and wind, we should expect to see hundreds of thousands of acres covered with solar panels. This is not totally free energy. We deny the fact at our own political peril.

As a scientist I’m curious to see what new forms of life will evolve underneath all of this shaded area. And I do want to stop using fossil fuel’s. But there is a cost. And it is not small.

The govt. already has the right of way. Doing some really rough, back of the envelope calculations, if we put solar canopies over every two lane interstate highway, that' come out to about 900 square miles or 575,000 acres of solar panels. An area the size of Isle Royale National Park.

I like parking in the shade.

jeebus.
put them on brownfields, or spent farmland.

And as an agronomist, there really is no spent farmland. Only poorly managed land. Spent farmland is routinely made productive again with proper soil management.

If you believe John Muir, which I do, nature has value outside of man. Every acre we put solar panels on is spoiled land. I will never be able to regain the flora and fauna evolution gave it.

Not saying I disagree with it, but we need to realize green energy is not environmentally neutral. It totally removes huge swaths of land from ever being natural. But perhaps harvesting energy is as important as grain?

Pretend that going green has no cost will eventually kill us politically.

i had to build the soil on my urban farm from scratch. much can be done.
they tell me in e&e that soil building is impractical at the needed scale, but i contend that is totally false, and can even solve other environmental problems along the way. so....
but shitty farm land is still better than pristine wilderness.

there are also a lot of built spaces, like parking lots, where a solar roof is an asset. all industrial buildings should have solar on roof tops and parking lots.

and the brownfields. shit, we still have the u.s. steel southworks sitting idle here, because it needs so much remediation. 600 acres.
strip mine sites and flattened mountaintops.
abandoned mining areas.

c'mon people. we're supposed to be the smart ones.

I was in Iceland a while back. When a volcano sends out lava over a landscape anything we have done to the land pales in comparison. The land is desolate and useless. But in a couple of hundred years it is very fertile and good land.

Even mountain top mining given time can revert to a rich landscape. It what the earth and evolution does. And not hundreds of years.

We have to realize that solar farms remove that landscape as much as a parking lot. Well, at least the land still drains under panels.

I support green energy. But if you lived in Eastern Kentucky and the green hill that used to be a mountain, which has trees returning and wildlife reappearing suddenly turns into a silver covered mountain, you might not be happy.

And realize there are large parts of the country where solar is not a great deal. Like in Florida wind is a nonstarter.

I’m not against green energy. We have to do it. But it will have its own high cost. We need to be honest about it.

but you are assuming we have a hundred years.

All the areas you talked about putting solar panels will not happen without the support of the locals.

It’s just talk.

I agree we don’t have hundreds of years. Not if we want to maintain society as we know it.

But there is time to do it right. And the only feasible alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear. It has huge risks. But is the only viable option we have. But not as big a risk as continuing to use fossil fuels. I was anti-nuke my whole life. But can’t see a visible alternative in a Democratic society. People will not vote for a reduction in lifestyle. By the time they might it will be too late.

Your smart. Do the research on how many acres of solar panels we will need. I just can’t see that happening. Wish I could.

Sorry to be a Debbie Downer. But I just don’t see a achievable alternative.

maybe you are so pessimistic because you live in florida, where solar is penalized. got a couple of big sisters in the villages, and they are so pissed they cant get solar. both have money for their retirements, and would love to invest it in solar instead of wall st paper.

but germany has stopped burning coal some days. all days soon.
all the other signatories to the paris accords are making great strides.
solar is cheaper, better and safer than nukes.

wind may not work in fla, tho, srsly? w the ocean winds? it is getting more efficient, and adapted to lower speeds. you could power a lot of the state w small wind, i am willing to bet.
but it works really well in a lot of places. i could probably power myself w solar plus small wind. if the sun isnt shining, the wind is blowing. i do have lake michigan breezes, but there are a lot of windy spots in the country.
there is a walgreens near me that is trying to be net zero. i dont know how they are doing, but they have a couple vertical turbines on the street that seem to be spinning along most times that i go by. some of what they are harvesting are breezes from the cars zooming by.


anyway, something occurs to me in this discussion-

seems like we are only counting mostly 2D space here on the surface.
what if we looked at this allocation of space in 3D?
what if we counted the atmosphere, the depths of the oceans, the cubic miles of the dead zone in the gulf and elsewhere?

this would make us take the full extent of the stuff we are belching into the atmosphere, and dumping in the ocean.
then what would it look like? pollution isnt just ppb, it's a cloud around us.

i think nukes have a pretty damn huge cloud, from mining to decommissioning. (tho, this would be a lot less damaging if they started getting their fuels from the glowing fracking waste we are spreading through that space.)
there are better ways.
we know that.

and we havent even touched the subject of conservation.

out of the full, 3D environment that we are talking about, as redeemable as old farm land is, you have to rank it at the bottom of the "worth saving" inventory. ranking pristine wilderness above that is just a no brainer. sorry.
you are wrongly presuming that is an either/or since farmers are one of the biggest beneficiaries of the expansion of wind.
you cant take a drive to the country w/o seeing at least a couple of rows of dancing turbines.

i think you are making a binary out of something that is extremely complex.
it is not zero sum. at.all.

They are mostly devoid of life, and rarely wet, even then for very short periods. There are better alternatives.

The life that has evolved there will be destroyed. I am not willing to make a judgment about which life has the most value.

Of course, I’m employing hyperbole to make the point we all need to realize and be honest about. Putting up hundreds of thousands of acres of solar panels to eliminate fossil fuel will have a huge ecological cost.

Even here in Florida. None of our dry uplands, which we actually have, are pristine. All were farmed until our sandy soils and unfavorable climate made most agriculturally marginal. So now the mainly grow genetically engineered pine trees worth almost nothing or single family homes, worth a lot. But left alone and with a little help, the longleaf pine/wire grass ecosystem would rapidly recover along with all the species now endangered due to environmental degradation.

If we cover them with solar panels, the ecosystem will as unnatural as single family homes. But to supply 22 million people with power, even if every house had solar panels will take thousands of acres if not more. And wind power is not viable here

I’m not saying we should not do so. But there is a huge cost and we need to be honest about it. Already on my drive to work 300 acres that were pine trees and other plants are now covered with solar panels and devoid of a natural ecosystem. No more gopher tortoises, eastern diamond back rattlesnakes, burrowing owlets and indigo snakes. Again, I like seeing them. But realize they came with a cost.

Nothing is without a cost, and we can find acceptable solutions with or without hyperbole.

Many can’t admit there will be a cost for solar power. But those microbes would disagree!!

But I agree with you.

Just as you can’t sterilize soil by digging, you can’t kill the resident microbes by digging post holes.
Hell, some of the little buggers literally eat arsenic.

Thousands of years from now when the solar panels are rusted and falling apart, the microbes will be going strong. Hell, we came from them! And 200 years or 200,000 year from now, if we are gone they will remain. To start a new evolutionary journey.

Our kids and grandkids should revolt and throw us all in a dungeon. Maybe they could salvage a little bit of their future. Maybe.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of land will need to be covered with solar panels. No getting around it.

Which ecosystem would you prefer being destroyed. Because green energy will not be environmentally neutral. We have to accept that fact.

Even if every home and office building is gathering solar energy we will still need huge swaths of solar farms. In my mind there is no worthless ecosystem. They all have value.

So something has to be ecologically taken out of the natural system. And ever area has its defenders.

I support green energy. But we must be honest about its cost.

Like 150 ft tall and they want to go over peoples property with a 100 ft right of way.

I lived off grid for ten yrs and now have my solar panels connected to the grid - so I love solar energy, but....... we have these HUGE companies who want to make huge bucks and are messing with all the little people to totally devalue their land and health.

I have had to become a mega activist to try and keep this stuff off my little 40 acres. In one case I did not succeed and have two 90 ft towers going across my land - wind power from NM going to Arizona (not used locally). This time, our neighborhood succeeded in keeping the 150 ft towers towers out of our area, but now other neighborhoods are organizing to keep the new route out of theirs. We also had to fight Kinder Morgan when they wanted to send CO2 thru here. We have a neighborhood activist group, Resistiendo, ready to meet within hrs notice to fight all this shit. Country people all across the US are having this problem.

The power companies profit most when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining and the lines are transmitting dirty fossil fuel energy, which is most of the time.

MUST MAINTAIN MONOPOLY
MUST MAINTAIN MONOPOLY
MUST MAINTAIN MONOPOLY
MUST MAINTAIN MONOPOLY

Continue to use fossil fuels, well probably decimate more of the planet.

Move to more wind and solar, probably decimate less of the planet.

Plus side, in California, they are shoving these things in on every roof they can find and over every parking lot as well.

But you will still see sections of desert still covered with Solar Panels. Where I'm at, they've been doing them in 2-5 acre lots. Our power demands are pretty high.

For example, at one town council in a rural suburb, a newly elected member brought forth the idea of putting in street lights. He was very surprised at the negative reaction that followed. Turns out, the small town doesn't like light pollution at night and enjoys seeing the stars.

Rooftop solar is far far greener and less costly.

It is often overlooked just how much environmental impact our tendency for a while to dam off rivers and create huge lakes behind the dams. There was alot of wildlife driven off by those lakes, and it isn't clear that the local ecosystems really could make valuable use of those large lakes.

There are plenty of parking lots and roofs that don't have solar yet.