It’s a big news day, many things with which to keep up, what with all the Oscar speeches and all.
But some events are not so fantastically immediate – or their impacts and causes are more indirect, slow moving and perhaps irreversible within the time frames we now perceive everything.
Take, for example, this green versus green pseudo argument, which is no doubt real, though perhaps over-articulated:
Now, I might ask whether any landscape could be less often-fragile than a desert, but the fact is that big solar projects are dropping like final-consonant g’s in a Republican prime time Deebate. The same massive solar projects that desperately need to break ground because they take years to build instead spend their first couple of years of existence as a case in a court docket, doing no one any good except for those who don’t want solar projects or much of anything else to change and I’ll stop right there. Any aspersions cast are your own. In other, perhaps related news, Juan Cole has the latest updates on the rapidly churning oilpacoplypse.The legal tussle over putting large solar power plants in often-fragile desert landscapes underscores the difficulty of pushing forward projects crucial to fighting climate change and meeting California’s ambitious renewable energy mandates.
The five lawsuits currently pending against five solar thermal projects licensed by the state and approved for construction on federal land represent a multiplicity of interests.