With all eco-eyes focused on the action (or, more properly, inaction) on a climate bill, other critical components of a clean energy economy can be overlooked. That was the case on Monday as the dominant news story concerned speculation about whether Republican members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Public Works would show up for Tuesday’s climate bill markup session (they didn’t).
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Environmentalists concerned about potential damage to desert ecosystems, electric utilities wanting to expand into the growing solar energy market, and anyone else for that matter, have been given until September 14 to tell the government their concerns about a plan to open some 670,000 acres of federal land to development for large-scale solar power facilities. The change adds 45 days to the original public comment period.
In announcing the change, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, explained:
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Solarone Power Plant
It’s partly the florid language that makes me and some other Westerners uneasy.
“Arizona, the New Frontier! Armed with an abundance of sunlight, Arizona is the land of sunshine and opportunity.”
That palaver could have been lifted from a 19th Century swindler’s sheet, written to separate greenhorns from their golden coins. But, in fact, I just cut-and-pasted it from the Bureau of Land Management’s current website. The BLM controls vast areas of the West, (68% of Nevada, 40% of Utah, 17% of Arizona) and is pitching the opportunities for “solar development companies, or ‘prospectors‘” in the old New Frontier of the American Southwest.
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