Letter From the Desert: Wild Nevada on the Solar Chopping Block

Folks, I am angry

I was reasonably certain, in the run-up to the last Presidential election, that our pitched efforts here in the desert to do our part to toss Orange Voldemort out of the White House would be repaid by at least four years of all-out assault on the desert by the energy industry.

My suspicions have been borne out. It’s worse than I pictured. Hundreds of square miles of solar projects are being proposed in Nevada along the Death Valley National Park boundary. The proposals are by companies speculating that a new long-distance transmission line will be built. If that line, Greenlink West, does see the light of day, the speculators intend to install tens of millions of solar panels on intact desert habitat, profiting off public land while irreversibly increasing the effects of climate change on the northern Mojave and western Great Basin deserts.

And this is all happening as regulators try to squelch the obviously superior alternative: decentralized solar in urban areas, on rooftops, parking lots, and other places with little habitat value. And using less goddamn energy to begin with.