Every time I start to think we might be at a social inflection point, where people in general begin to understand that there is value worth preserving in the desert landscape, that arid lands are not just blank slates upon which it is legitimate for us to scrawl our fleeting but destructive whimsies, I get brought up short.
Today, the Bureau of Land Management released its final Environmental Impact Statement for its Western Solar Plan. It spells catastrophe for the desert.
I’m going to drill down on the problems with the Plan in the next episode of 90 Miles from Needles, which should be out on Tuesday September 3. In the meantime I will be spending more time digging into the document to find gleaming nuggets of bad news. Or good news, if there is any.
But the elevator version? The plan basically puts a sixth of all BLM land in 11 western states on the chopping block for solar development. We’re talking the states in this map:
The BLM land in those states is shown in medium drab gray on the following map:
The BLM manages just over 296,000 square miles in those 11 states, which for perspective is roughly the same size as Texas with enough land left over to cover the state of Maine as well.
The Final EIS for the Western Solar Plan would put 49,572 square miles of tht BLM land up for grabs for solar developers. Here’s a screenshot of a spreadsheet I threw together this morning:
In case my intent with this spreadsheet isn’t clear, I took a large city in each state and compared its land area to the amount opened for streamlined solar applications in each state. Nevada is taking the brunt, with the equivalent of 130 Las Vegases being offered up. What’s that look like on the map?
The areas shown in green on the map are open for solar, assuming the BLM approves the plan. That’s six percent of the state. It’s huge.
If the 49,572 square miles approved for solar in this plan was a state, it would be the 32nd largest in the union, right between Mississippi and Louisiana size-wise.
Other desert states don’t fare much better. Thirty-three Albuquerques worth of solar land in New Mexico. Seventy Salt Lake Cities in Utah. Eight point five new Phoenices in Arizona.
Ah, but the climate crisis is upon us, you might say, and extreme measures are most definitely called for. I can’t argue with the sentiment. We can’t afford to burn fossil fuels any longer. We actually needed to stop in 1990, but the world wasn’t listening to people like me back then, and Greta Thunberg was 13 years away from being born. Even with our current emergency setting, however, this Western Solar Plan is so beyond the pale that the word “overkill” seems tame in describing it. Don’t hold me to this, because it’s a back of the envelope calculation, but by my tentative reckoning the land set aside for solar in this plan, if most or all of it was developed, would generate something like 18-25 times the energy the US used in 2022. Call it ten times just to be conservative, and to account for an increase in electric vehicles and other such new tech.
Once we get close to generating as much solar as we need, it will be harder and harder for companies to secure Power Purchase Agreements from utilities interested in plugging into their solar panels. Without Power Purchase Agreements, lenders won’t front the money for building the solar power plant.
That means most of this land will never be developed. Which you’d think would be a good thing! Solar developers, however, seem to chose sites based on reading of chicken entrails or Nancy Reagan’s astrologer’s recommendations or something equally unconnected to the reality on the ground. The Plan thus becomes a recipe for solar sprawl, wth 3,000-acre plots and 7,000-acre plots scattered widely across a landscape. That’s more disruption of habitat for shy wildlife. It’s more introduction of invasive exotic species from each construction site. It’s a recipe for an archipelago of edge effect destruction.
If this was being carried out to benefit almost any other industry, there would be a significant outcry. TV news crews would pay attention. Huge lawsuits would be filed as soon as the Department of the Interior formally approved the plan in a Record of Decision. People would be printing t-shirts and organizing vigils. Proposed permanent landscape changes on this scale have precedent in recent history, with the orgy of venture-fund-driven old growth forest clearcutting in the west in the 1980s and 1990s. But that campaign of ecological ruin was met with a counter campaign of civil disobedience, litigation, lobbying and other advocacy, sabotage of equipment, and — not coincidentally — one of the largest police disruption campaigns in US history aimed at the forest activists.
I wonder whether there’s even a chance for a mass movement to oppose this wholesale conversion of the desert, given that solar wears a bright green coat of metaphorical paint and people are worried about the optics of opposing it. Maybe pointing out that this is effectively privatization of public lands for corporate benefit would work? The BLM stopped privatizing its land for the general public when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act repealed the Homestead Act in 1976. But FLPMA doesn’t forbid BLM from handing over all the ecological value of immense tracts of land to solar corporations, or for that matter mining companies, who then replace centuries-old wildlife and flora and cultural sites with toxic wastelands that will never be restored to what they were.
When it comes to BLM land, Woody Guthrie might have said, some people rob you with a six gun, and some with a business plan.
Anyway. In workaday bureaucratic terms, the fact that this Solar Plan offers up something like 10 or 20 times as much land as the country could conceivably need for energy production means just one thing: The administration is deliberately bending over backwards to please industry by giving them more than they could possibly want. Otherwise, some middle-level clerk would look at the draft, say “hey, we’re only going to need 1/20th of this land, we can rule out more sensitive areas and protect more places!”
The venality of it all brings a bad taste to my mouth. And I’ll save the rest for the podcast.
Don’t forget: On Sunday, episode two of Burning Birds, my essay for paid subscribers, will drop. You can read it (and episode one) by signing up for a paid membership here, if you haven’t already:
Also! You might consider checking out Desert News, which we put out every Monday. we scan news media sites for news from across the North American Deserts and compile links so you can learn more about topics uyou find interesting. Here’s a link to the most recent missive:
Thank you all.
Thank you. I m in the Midwest ish, I was in Nevada/CA last month and saw some of this. The repercussions of these Solar developments will be irreversible at least in our lifetime time. I’ll look forward to the coming desert news and continue with my own research - I need to understand your paragraph on purchase power agreements. Meanwhile can anything be done to stop this?