...It is an example of why the environmental community is seen by many as more ideologically driven than environmentally driven. It explains why their motives are suspect.
Take a look at this page in which you’ll see a conception of the finished project, the impact it has on the desert and the number of projects being developed in California and then just ask yourself what that same environmental community would be doing if the name of the developer was Exxon-Mobil instead of BrightSource.
"The scale of impacts that we are facing, collectively across the desert, is phenomenal," said Dennis Schramm, former superintendent at neighboring Mojave National Preserve. "The reality of the Ivanpah project is that what it will look like on the ground is worse than any of the analyses predicted."
In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team. Yet barely a whimper raised by environmentalists over the scale and impact of these projects on what they claim to hold most sacred.
Hypocrites!
That unusual collaboration — along with generous federal subsidies and allotments of public land — has sparked a wholesale remodeling of the American desert.
..Mainstream environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have been largely mute, having traded the picket line for a seat at the table when development plans were drawn.
The Center for Biological Diversity, one of the nation's most aggressively litigious environmental groups, has not challenged the Ivanpah project.
It signed a confidential agreement not to oppose the project in exchange for concessions for the desert tortoise — mandating that BrightSource buy land elsewhere for conservation.
Former CEO for Brightsource - John Bryson now our Commerce Secretary.
$1.6 Billion in loans.
--a solar energy company that recently received a $1.37 billion federal loan guarantee – the largest the Department of Energy has ever given for a solar power project ..In June, BrightSource Chairman John Bryson was nominated by Obama to head the Commerce Department.
Bryson co-founded an environmental activist group that is a member and funder of the controversial Apollo Alliance.
Apollo is run by a slew of socialists and radicals, including Jeff Jones, a founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization. Jones himself boasts of doing work for the environmental group founded by Bryson, the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Damn straight!
These environazis are always lying hypocrites.
As it so happened, last spring I was out in the Mojave Desert doing bird surveys with another surveyor and we came across a large group of people walking across the desert. Thinking they may be doing wildlife surveys too, we stopped and talked to them. They said they were doing tortoise studies. To determine the number of tortoises, they fan out across the desert and walk -- literally.
We asked them why they were doing the studies here, and they said that a huge solar power project was in the works to be built near the area. We were stunned.
But interestingly enough, the half a dozen people we talked to didn't seem pleased by this huge solar project. Later, I talked to my bird surveyor partner about this, and she said that schisms are forming in the environmentalist movement regarding solar power and the large tracts of land they require. It seems civil wars are brewing in the leftists camps.
Idiot vs Idiot.
Thanks for the post!
Ping.
I always wonder about the shenanigans that must go on behind the scenes whenever public land becomes private land. How does a city fairgrounds or an airport turn into a shopping center?
But this seems even more blatant than usual. Because you would think that the desert has some environmental protections. And would the project even be economically feasible if they weren't getting an extraordinary deal on the land from Uncle Sucker?