Solar sprawl is tearing up the Mojave Desert. Is there a better way?
latimes.comPeople are really fighting against solar farms because of the potential to disrupt the habitat of some tortoises, sparse plants, and beetles. In the desert.
And they’ll cook up a story about how the loss of these species will cascade into a tragic disaster. The same story that a handful of conservationists trot out every time anyone tries to do anything except build on an existing dirt lot.
The fact is there are ~9 million species of Eukaryotes on Earth. ~5 billion have already gone extinct, long before humans were running around. And life went on just fine following a million prior species of desert beetle, rare plant, and tortoise dying out.
If an organism is so rare and limited in environmental tolerance and geography that a solar farm threatens its existence, it’s an evolutionary dead end anyway.
Keep a founder population somewhere if possible, put a collection in a -80 freezer, do a few lanes of illumina sequencing on them and move on.
It’s terrible, and I’m terrible for saying it, but it’s also more practical than thinking that biodiversity has to or can be held constant from the time of Darwin until eternity.
I know the arguments against what I’m saying, being a biologist for 15 years. It is what it is, and no I’m not advocating for wanton extinction.
> The fact is there are ~9 million species of Eukaryotes on Earth. ~5 billion have already gone extinct, long before humans were running around. And life went on just fine without a million prior species of desert beetle, rare plant, and tortoise dying out.
There is a big difference between nature selecting a species for extinction and humans artificially destroying a habitat required for that life.
If you think that human comfort is more important than the turtles and beetles, then be honest about your willingness to exterminate other species. I’m not here to make a statement about the ethics of that one way or the other, but framing the argument here as a natural process is disingenuous.
I think the real question is how do you feel about the intellectually honest framing of your assertion here, which would be something like “I think it is acceptable for us to exterminate other species so that we can continue to live our current lifestyles unimpeded, while potentially making progress towards repairing the existing damage we have done to the climate.”
I’m not claiming it’s a natural process. I’m refuting the idea that as-is everything is perfectly balanced and serves some greater purpose in an ecosystem, which is what people offer up as emotionally charged arguments for preserving everything extant in perpetuity.
I’ve been involved in the establishment of several large collections for the long-term preservation of biodiversity. I’ve published on the advantages.
How do I feel about that framing?
It’s fair, and the focus should be on mitigating loss. Beyond never building anything anywhere I don’t see an alternative since the discussion at hand is about sand dunes and that’s still considered problematic.
Humans arent the only species to do these things. A black walnut tree poisons the earth around it to stymie competition. Grazers prevent forest growth. When photosynthetic life first emerged, the resulting surplus of oxygen nearly wiped out all life on the planet.
In these contexts, what we do to the planet is relatively insignificant. So long as we aren’t jettisoning carbon and organic material into the sun and energy is added to the system from space, life on earth will always be around.
> There is a big difference between nature selecting a species for extinction and humans artificially destroying a habitat required for that life.
Is there though? Humans are part of nature. What’s the difference between human solar farms killing them all and a snake eating them all?
I don’t think we should just go around extincting things, but humans are part of nature’s cycle and not really that much more important than the 5 billion other reasons why other species went extinct.
This is completely manufacturerd outrage. Someone must be pushing this angle as there's been multiple stories on the same subject recently.
When those came up a glance at Google maps revealed green golf courses in the desert next to these solar farms that were of equal size, and vast expanses of empty desert surrounding them.
I'm generally in favor of rooftop solar as it has lots of benefits from being distributed and minimizing transmission. Deserts aren't actually that great for solar PV, but this is still astroturfed FUD.
I don't get this. The Mojave desert 81,000km² according to some random page on the net. How can 20,000 panels make a dent in that? Are they building in some crucial sectors? I imagine they're building in the zones that have steady sunshine all day.
Environmentalists do this all the time.
My town has a large popular off highway vehicle park open for at least 50 years. It's probably less than 0.1% of the surrounding area that basically gets zero use.
They now want to close down this off-road park, to preserve the land for future use. They're finding rare special lizards there. A rare butterfly. Who knows. People are starting to think they import these things and then "find" them and use it as an excuse to close the place down.
Thousands of people have enjoyed this off-road park on their dirt bikes for decades. But now leftists want to preserve it for future generations, damn the current ones. As if the other 99.9% of dirt hills around the off-road park aren't enough.
That trick requires a very rare butterfly or something, which is another way of saying that it doesn't work while there are still 99.9% unaffected areas. It only works when most habitats have been ruined already, thereby making the species very rare.
More evidence they probably bring the species in themselves prior.
You can't tell me that with hundreds of thousands of basically untouched acres of hills available, this lizard or butterfly decided that a noisy area full of 2 stroke motorcycles was their best bet.
I don't know about your case, or where you live.
But generally you're not taking into account that the location of your town isn't random, it's probably the most desirable area for habitation in those hundreds of thousands of acres.
That's why people settled there in the first place, e.g. at the mouth of a river, an oasis or wetland in the middle of a desert etc, pick your local equivalent.
So it's entirely possible in the general case that some mundane area just outside of town is the only remaining habitat for an endangered species.
It'll be there because the species's original habit is where the town is now located, and that there's a limit to how far away they could get before being entirely unviable.
Likewise, the location of the off-road park won't be random either. Those tend to be located in areas with an abundance of certain landscape features.
Just as humans might pick those for recretation, some animals might pick them because they provide an ideal habitat.
And I think lizards and butterflies care less about noise or traffic than you think.
I get the impression that some people think there is a silver bullet that we are not using because the big bad corporations are keeping us down. But...there's isn't one, and there are no free lunches, you always have to break the egg to make the the omelette.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
We can’t have solar because it shades the desert. We can’t have wind power because it makes noise and strikes birds. We can’t have hydro power because it creates a floodplain. We can’t have nuclear power because burying the waste under a mountain is bad.
Now, I recognize that it’s not all the same person or group making all of these arguments. Still, it’s pretty frustrating because it seems like we have no solutions. We’re speeding down the road toward a cliff and any attempt to steer or apply the brakes is getting blocked.
That’s how the big oil industry operates, trying to make all the alternatives even less appealing.
I’m not so sure about that. Maybe, but they also operate much more directly, by buying up tons of renewable energy technology patents and sitting on them.
Yes, in the end continuing with fossil fuel will result in much more wildlife destruction though. I think it's always important to consider the alternative which in this case is really bad.
Oil spills, fracking and nuclear drama seem far more ruinous than shading an otherwise-inhospitable biome on track to get even hotter. Or putting up fans, or building dams.
Your point goes overlooked too often! We're destroying all ecosystems under the status quo.
We are distrupting ecosystems but you cant destroy ecosystems. The most urbanized or polluted place on earth is still an ecosystem. It takes time for an abundance of species to emerge that can take advantage of this ecosystem, but it will emerge. Consider the rock dove, evolved to roost in the very specific environment of a rock cliff. Today, however, ecosystems have changed, cities are more or less giant artificial rock cliffs, and pigeon populations are massive in cities as a result.
Or consider the fact that most of North America was under a thick sheet of ice only 10,000 years ago.
But now we're changing climates over the course of hundreds of years, not tens of thousands. We're not giving nature time to adapt (nor ourselves, for that matter)
Climate change is "normal" on our planet, yes. But it's not normal at the speed at which we are causing it now.
Theres been plenty of extinction events that were far faster and vastly more destructive than even climate change from us humans. These events serve as opportunities to expose ecological niches to new species. Its all part of life on earth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambo...
According to some people’s mental model of how the world works, an event like this should leave the entire earth a barren wasteland.
Instead the caldera itself is now a National Park known for its forests rich biodiversity, some 200 years later.
For now, sure. But consider the earth as a system and not a place where humans live for their one lifetime. Burning more fuel means converting long buried organic material into material that exists on the surface. The fact there are issues with this is that the processes to deal with this great excess haven’t yet organically evolved on their own, but given time taking advantage of the excess carbon in the atmosphere and a more energetic earth from greenhouse effect should see things like rapid evolution of microbial photosynthetic life, even extending to favor rapid evolution of macroscopic photosynthetic life as well.
I skimmed TFA and this is less about “environmentalist” boogeymen than it is about policy that leads to quick cash-in on incentives when better policy could make a more robust system that benefits more people. If we are going to have financial incentives let’s overpay for rooftop solar and neighborhood scale batteries, over-crop panels and rural batteries - and plonk a bunch of money down to get a grid that is more nimble. ex: Texas coal and oil electric plants are failing in the heat and the cold, we need more outrage there and a smarter grid to tap the renewables.
We will still be giving money to people/corps rich enough to own a lot of rooftop, but regular folks can benefit more. It should be easier to cool them down when overheated, they could help with blistering heat in parking lots etc.
It’s a desert. Let’s preserve the most interesting parts and cover as much of the rest as we can with solar panels.