Environmental Extremists Block Solar and Wind Energy Projects to Protect Rare Animal Species

My new friend the lawyer writes in:

I appreciate what you are doing. Somebody got me a subscription to Audubon magazine recently…maybe they are telling me I’m a birdbrain! I read a story in there yesterday which cheered the fact that huge solar development programs are being shut down and delayed to save some squirrels and turtles in the Mojave desert. We are talking a few dozen animals.

I had already heard an engineer bemoaning the costs and delays, and even the scrapping of large solar projects because of environmentalists concerns over areas most people consider as dead zones. I knew it was happening. I love animals and nature, but I can sure understand the frustration you feel towards lawyers.

I’d make soup out of the turtles, and use the solar power to cook them up! We can’t afford to spend billions of dollars and delay vital energy products for years while field armies of biologists and animal experts create a Rubics cube of bureaucratic hurdles that substantially slows down our efforts to lower carbon emissions. These big storms and out of control wildfires we have seen recently are, quite possibly, only the beginning of devastating and rapid climate change. We also need desperately to eliminate the energy deficit.

Efforts to protect exotic species in the southwest are desirable, but not at the expense of significantly hindering or delaying solar and wind energy development. They can spend a few million, not billions, and delays should be measured in days, not months and years.

I respond:

I agree with you 100% here. Whenever I hear that environmentalists are blocking wind and solar in favor of protecting some rare species I’m totally amazed. Having said that, I need to be fair and admit that all this is a bit more complicated than that. For example, it really would be best if we could site wind farms in areas that already have a human footprint — even it that raises the costs a bit.

I suppose the real question is how we make it attractive financially to do the right thing.  It all goes back to governmental participation: ending subsidies for fossil fuels, creating a level playing field, forcing the oil and coal companies — and those who consume their products — to pay the complete costs (including the most obvious externalities). As I’ve told my kids ever since they were toddlers: It’s OK to make a mess, but it’s Not OK not to clean it up; it’s not MY job to clean up YOUR mess.

But how to make that happen when the presidential candidates are elbowing each other out of the way, trying to be the first to dismantle the EPA? This really IS a mess.