Monday, February 23, 2009

Could green kill the desert?

From the LA Times:

California's desert lands are in some ways a perfect fit with the renewable energy industries necessary to combat climate change. There's sun. There's wind. There's space. But without careful planning and regulation, these "climate solutions" could irrevocably damage the planet they are intended to protect. The biologically rich but arid desert ecosystems are remarkably fragile. Once topsoil and plant life have been disrupted for the placement of solar arrays, wind farms, power plants, transmission lines and CO2 scrubbers, restoration would be cost-prohibitive, if not technically impossible. And widespread desert construction -- even of projects aimed at environmental mitigation -- would devastate the very organisms and ecosystems best able to adjust to a warming world. Nevertheless, there is a public land rush underway. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is processing more than 180 permit applications from private companies to build solar and wind projects in the California deserts. One such venture, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, will begin construction this year in a beautiful valley near the California-Nevada border in San Bernardino County. It will occupy 3,400 acres, and that doesn't include the land needed for transmission lines. Most projects are even larger, averaging 8,000 acres, with a few exceeding 20,000 acres. The total public land under consideration for alternative energy production exceeds 1.45 million acres in this state alone. The scale of some proposals borders on fantasy. One Columbia University scientist, Wallace Broecker, has proposed installing 60 million CO2 scrubbers, each a 50-foot-tall tower, throughout the world's deserts -- 17 million of them in the United States -- for the purpose of capturing greenhouse gases...Such large-scale effects cannot be addressed on a project-by-project basis, as is done through the existing environmental review process. We need effective, desert-wide planning that engages the major public and private stakeholders that determine the fate of California desert land. The costs of industrializing the biologically rich California deserts will be measured in terms of species extinction, ecosystem degradation and the perpetuation of human self-deception...

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