Posted on 02/07/2012 10:26:43 AM PST by opentalk
Funny how some projects attract the EPA like flies to, well, you know and others? Meh. The LA Times reports:
Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.Interesting. No EPA interference. The Enviro crowd rolls over. The project has all of the things which in normal circumstances (i.e. if it was a petro-chemical project) would have it tied up for years both in red tape and court cases.
Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors — each the size of a garage door — are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California’s eastern border.
BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah solar power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater processing facility and a gas-fired power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert tortoises, a move that some experts say could kill up to a third of them.
Despite its behemoth footprint, the Ivanpah project has slipped easily into place, unencumbered by lasting legal opposition or public outcry from California’s boisterous environmental community
But for this?
Nah.
Endangered species? Fuggitaboutit. This is important ideological agenda stuff for the “enviro” crowd.
Away from public scrutiny, they crafted a united front in favor of utility-scale solar development, often making difficult compromises.
Compromises? It is full-scale capitulation. It is abject hypocrisy.
(Excerpt) Read more at qando.net ...
...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.
Sorry not CEO, Chairman of the Board.
If you are out in this desert on an ATV and run over one lizard or break one cactus the feds and state cops, EPA and environmental lobbyists will go nuclear on you.
This “solar energy” company gets to turn 3,500 acres of the same public land into something uglier than an auto junk yard and the company is celebrated for saving the environment and creating a dozen or so green jobs. It’s not a double standard it’s insane mass hysteria.
--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!
Even the solar company admits it needs gas-power for general, consistent use...:^)
Globalism
Meanwhile, Bryson is co-chairman of the PCIP, which was founded in 1995 in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations.
The group says it is the “premier international affairs organization focused on policy issues of special resonance to the West Coast.”
Its goals include “building our network of globally oriented business, civic, and government leaders.” Also, the group aims to convene exchanges with global policy makers and opinion leaders while partnering with organizations around the world to “promote mutual understanding and coordinated action.”
The PCIP is funded by the Ford Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation.
....In 1970, Bryson co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, with a $400,000 seed grant from the Ford Foundation.
The group is also funded by the Tides Foundation, to which philanthropist George Soros has donated more than $7 million over the years.
Wind turbines kill thousands of birds and solar projects tear up fragile desert habitats. A coal or natural gas power plant takes up a fraction of the surface area and provides reliable, economical power regardless of wind or sun conditions.
Yes they are hypocrites. Here in NM, the environazis were quiet when X-governor Richardson built his railroad up the fragile La Bajada cliffs south of Santa Fe. An environmental assessment was quickly performed and accepted with little controversy and the RR was built. Try to build a new highway and see what happens. BTW, as noted elsewhere in a post earlier today, that RR has little ridership, takes about twice as long to get to SF as does the highway and loses millions each year with the taxpayers picking up the difference.
Ping.
Feds find BrightSource solar project will not jeopardize desert tortoise
... --I wrote that it was unlikely the expected population explosion would derail Ivanpah, given all the political and economic capital on the line, including a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee and a half billion dollars from Google, Morgan Stanley and other investors.
And sure enough, late Friday the United States Fish and Wildlife Service allowed construction to proceed, finding in a revised biological opinion that Ivanpah would not jeopardize the continued existence of the tortoise, which is listed as a threatened species under the U.S. and California endangered species acts--
Absolutely. The whole green movement is a huge scam. It never was about conserving our flora and fauna.
It's always been about pushing the global socialist agenda.
And our public schools and universities are raising an entire new generation of useful idiots... but that's for another thread.
Very creepy that this administration can just give it away to their cronies, plus finance it with federal grants.
Obama mentioned more of this to come in his State of the Union speech.
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?
Obama it seems has learned from Harry Reid.
You wouldn't believe the corrupt backroom real estate transactions and land swaps that are tied to Dingy Harry in Nevada.
They should all be locked up.
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