“At a time when we are trying to protect habitat, provide for recreation, maintain the expansive beauty of the desert while providing for responsible growth, not to mention the expansion of desert military bases, we cannot afford to surrender vast areas of public land to solar energy projects,” Mitzelfelt said in a news release. “We are not opposed to alternative energy; we just need to be careful and judicious when we are talking about taking away hundreds of square miles of land that belongs to the American people.”
Per the Victor Valley Daily Press, "Mitzelfelt supports the Programmatic EIS as the best way to take a broad overview of the challenges posed by developing these sprawling, land-intensive projects."
The usually shy and unvalued Mojave continues to show up in unexpected places as the rush to Big Solar permeates the news - especially the financial news. Fortune Magazine enters the act with a scary but highly informative article about the players and the "hot real estate" involved:
A solar land rush is rolling across the desert Southwest. Goldman Sachs, utilities PG&E and FPL, Silicon Valley startups, Israeli and German solar firms, Chevron, speculators - all are scrambling to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of long-worthless land now coveted as sites for solar power plants....It's not just a federal-land grab either. Buyers are also vying for private property. Some are paying upwards of $10,000 an acre for desert dirt that a few years ago would have sold for $500.
Solar prospectors tend to be as secretive about their land as forty-niners were about the veins of gold they discovered. Most bids are placed by limited-liability corporations with opaque names that conceal their ownership. And no one has been as quick to move into the Mojave - or as tightlipped about it - as Solar Investments. That entity, it turns out, is Goldman Sachs's (GS, Fortune 500) solar subsidiary. The investment bank's designs on the desert are a topic of intense interest and speculation. Goldman declined to comment.
Highlighting the tremendous challenge facing desert communities and conservationists to get their views understood, Forbes Magazine portrays the triumph felt on Capitol Hill when the BLM lifted the moratorium. Quoting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.:
"I am glad the Bureau of Land Management has arrived at this good decision. Nevada is the Saudi Arabia of solar energy and is poised to lead a global clean energy revolution. We need to do all we can to encourage public and private investment in projects to develop this amazing potential."
The Las Vegas Sun provides even more detail on the drama behind the reversal:
The onslaught of media and political attention...made the moratorium all but unsustainable... [G]rowing criticism of the moratorium stretched as far as the Daily Telegraph of London and the Economist, which headlined an article “Freezing the Sun.” When The New York Times picked it up Friday, the end was near. The story line that emerged was politically poisonous in an election year.
But closer to the action local concerns are beginning to penetrate the media. In "BLM Stirs Up a Desert Storm" the San Bernardino Sun quotes Joshua Tree resident Jim Harvey, a founding member of the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, on the BLM lifting of the moratorium:
"This is horrible news, devastating news for the well-being of the Mojave. I want to see it (solar) on our rooftops, and I don't want to see it in our wilderness. They are going to kill millions of acres of wilderness all for the sake of profit."
MORE INFO ON THIS TOPIC: On the Energy page of the MBCA Website. Previous blog posts: Energy.
