Housekeeping

After a long dry spell, we’re posting again.

Here’s something we meant to post earlier:  It seems that the US government shares our worries about the  environmental impact of solar power projects on desert environments.  Not that we’re against them completely — just that it’s good to know what costs you are imposing on the planet, even when you figure they’ll be outweighed by the project’s benefits.

And here’s something from Mark Morford’s wonderfully provocative Notes and Errata column in the SF Chronicle.

In the face of so many people, media outlets and corporations jumping on the Green bandwagon, Morford wonders if things aren’t just a little more complicated.  After all, he notes:

Truly, before you get too cozy with your low-VOC paint and organic grass-fed burger, it takes but a split second to shatter that green lens of hope and replace it with a crimson one full of blood and pollution and phthalates and cheap copper wiring in the form of e-waste in the slums of China and India, as the residual plastic floats out to the Pacific Garbage Patch and further chokes the collapsing fish and seafood stocks of the world.

“How bleak do you want it?” he asks, before suggesting the most likely environmental reality we face is “gray and murky and strange.”

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– Solar Power and the destruction of desert ecology

Solar thermal power plants are being built at an increasing rate across the dry American south and west.

As the New York Times reports today, in addition to two prototype plants that recently started operating, a further 10 are in the advanced planning stage in California, Arizona and Nevada.

“On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors,” says the Times.

Accompanying the article is a photograph of a solar thermal plant stretching for what seems like miles into the Nevada desert. Up to its edge, plants adapted to desert conditions clearly thrive. Where the solar reflectors are installed, the soil has been scraped flat and clear of all apparent life.

While deserts may perhaps look dead, they are — of course — thriving ecosystems.

Solar thermal power may well be less globally harmful than power generated by coal, for example. But it’s good to be reminded that it also comes at its own environmental price.

Wikipedia currently has this to say about the impact of solar power on the Mojave Desert landscape:

Solar thermal power plants are large and seem to use a lot of land, but when looking at electricity output versus total size, they use less land than hydroelectric dams (including the size of the lake behind the dam) or coal plants (including the amount of land required for mining and excavation of the coal). While all power plants require land and have an environmental impact, the best locations for solar power plants are deserts or other land for which there might be few other human uses.

Sure, not many people live there. But let’s not forget the impact of our actions on the snakes, spiders, hawks, owls, jackrabbits, bighorn sheep, coyotes, etc. for whom the desert is home, not to mention the extraordinary plants that flourish in dry environments.

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