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Freeze On US Solar Plant Applications Lifted
necro81 writes "Barely a month ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a freeze on applications for solar power plants on federally managed land, pending a two-year comprehensive environmental review. After much hue and cry from the public, industry, and other parts of government, BLM has today announced that it will lift the freeze, but continue to study the possible environmental effects. To date, no solar project has yet been approved on BLM land."
We'll just figure out what the effects are after we're hooked up to your juice.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Solar power sounds great and is very trendy. Why evaluate the possible consequences for our actions when we can plow ahead blindly? Going ahead with energy policy without considering the environmental effects has worked well for us so far!
Besides, being in favor of solar power helps you score with hippie chicks.
I wonder if the BLM has approved any oil wells on BLM land......
While we whine about 'environmental considerations' of grabbing free energy from the sun, other countries are actually doing something about it. I was just in Germany where solar cell farms have been built in many places along the autobahns. Further, there are huge windmills everywhere (turning VERY slowly--Any bird which hits one of these is not paying attention. In France they've gone whole-hog nuke for electricity. There isn't a project alive that we can't make take ten times longer and make ten times the cost over our 'concerns.'
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
funny thing-- i predicted this is almost exactly in the first thread-- but got modded down as 'flamebait'.
eat my photons.
davejenkins.com |
this was mostly misreported by news agencies. They made it sound like nobody could build solar power plants, when it only applied to "federally managed land."
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
We're so lucky that the solar cells can now be grown on trees, and don't come out of some high energy use chemical process anymore. That's finally really clean energy.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
I have to wonder how many of the corporations/people who are asking for permits actually have the intent (and ability) to build solar array farms, or are they just hoping to grab the land rights now so that they can hold it hostage and sub-lease it later to others?
Someone give me some possible downsides to solar energy. I'm not being sarcastic - I've never heard this line of thought that solar energy is bad for the environment and would like to hear the reasoning behind it.
They're still not going to actually _approve_ any of these applications. Instead, they'll just let them pile up while they "study" the issue.
If the Department of the Interior were in control of Saudi Arabia there wouldn't be a drop of oil coming out of it...
Hippies with money don't care about the poor trying to get by with high heating oil/energy costs.
"Hippies with money" is an oxymoron. PETA isn't hippies, it's yuppies. Upwardly mobile professionals with too much money and not enough compassion.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Sorry when the facts bother you, but solar only recently made it past the "break even" point in regards to energy produced over energy put in during production. It's like "clean" electric cars, they are pollution free on the road, the pollution has just been moved to power plant. ...
Now, a nuclear plant however
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
But what exactly about them shows a "lack of compassion"? Because they'd ban animal testing? That's not a choice I'd agree with, but it has legitimate moral arguments.
How about assaulting people over their choice of clothing? Controlling something through fear... oh yeah, it's a terrorist organization. Wow... compassion what?
My main complaint is environmentalists who don't care about the environment. Near where my mother lives, there were plans to build a bridge which would take traffic away from the city centre. One of the main reasons for this was that the traffic spent a lot of time stationary, pouring out pollution for no no gain. This was held up for almost five years by a very small number of protesters who were complaining that it would destroy habitats for a few birds (none of which were endangered or even rare). The amount of damage to the environment caused by making cars go further, and spend more time stationary with their engines running, for five years is a lot more than the amount that the bridge caused.
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If birds are part of the environment, why aren't people?
We're both living organisms that shape the world around us.
No, this isn't a troll. I've written essays on this topic and it gets quite interesting.
nothing like the people that are against everything.
Doesn't matter how good a proposal is, there will always be downsides, and there will always be people that will use these downsides to block anything and everything just to show they have power.
If the 1800's would have been like that the world would look a whole lot different today.
There would be no railroads, probably no roads/cars and aircraft/airports and certainly no space travel.
Progress requires sacrifice, the tough bit is that lots of stuff got sacrificed to profits, not to progress and we're not facing the backlash of that.
The pendulum once disturbed never quite regains its balance.
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Keep in mind, one of PETA's VP's is a Diabetic.. So its a little funny to be arguing against animal testing when your alive BECAUSE of research done on animals.. (go look up penn and tellers "bullshit" episode on PETA)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I hope you realize that you are reasoning emotionally, not analytically.
The target of your polemic are (a) hippies with (b) money who (c) care about rare birds and (d) don't care about poor people. Just because somebody demonstrating caring about rare birds doesn't mean he doesn't demonstrate caring about people in other circumstances. That's an assumption you are making for polemical purposes, so that you can brand anybody who disagrees with you on an issue as a hypocrite.
Also, the implication is that anybody who has anything to say should just STFU if you think there's an issue that's more important. It's a BS position, because there's always a more important issue you can scrounge up. If you want to have any credibility arguing this position, you'd better show that you've dedicated your life to assisting the poor.
You can't be a serious thinker about issues and be a single issue person. The world doesn't work that way. Sometimes it's time to stand up for the environment, and sometimes it's time to stand up for the downtrodden. And quite often doing one is doing the other.
If you knew anything about environmentalism other than what you've learned from right wing bullshitters, you'd know that environmental problems fall disproportionately on the poor. Who breaths the most pollution? The poor. Who suffers the most from climate change or short sighted, locally focused water management? The poor.
The middle class don't do so great either, under the rape the environment philosophy.
But if you're wealthy, you get the lion's share of the economic benefits of that philosophy. Using that money, can simply move away from problems. Move to the outer suburbs, and buy a vacation home in Vail. If you despoil your native country, you can always go to Costa Rica to stay at a marvelous eco-friendly resort.
It's not that I have anything against the wealthy in general. I've known quite a few of them, and a lot of them are forward looking, socially responsible problem solvers. But this argument that environmentalists ignore the poor is just ignorant. It's worse than ignorant. It's willfully ignorant.
You don't give a shit about the poor, you're just exploiting them to make a rhetorical point. No person sincerely interested in the poor takes the attitude that nobody can have any other priorities but the poor.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree with you, although, I wouldn't want to be so alarmist. With a few notable exceptions, most nuclear plants globally have a reasonable track record of safety, so far at least. Be wary though, as the old saying goes: if you build a foolproof technology, they'll just breed a better fool...
/.'ers strongly believe that this is not a problem. I disagree. You're dealing with once in a million years events, geological, astronomical and political. Hell, a nuclear waste dump would be the ultimate dirty bomb. Now, beyond the ethical question of downloading this responsibility of maintaining our waste safely onto successive generations (another discussion in itself), who's ultimately holding the bag financially for this long term storage?
Joking aside, my problems with nuclear are many. First, it's not a green as proponents seem to think. Before you can generate steam, you must mine, transport and refine the uranium.
Next you have the issue of the waste. Eventually it must be transported and stored. Say what you will about our ability to store this stuff for a million years, frankly, it's an unknown. I'm aware that many
Another problem is that eventually someone has to decommission all the nuclear plants that have been built. How do you do this and has this cost been factored into the price? How many plants globally have been successfully decommissioned and who gets to pay for it? Is Yucca mountain designed to have old reactors tossed into it?
Finally, here in Canada, the nuclear industry has been plagued by major cost and time overruns and even once built, reactors are not achieving the up times that were promised. It's an industry that could not survive financially without government assistance. I suspect that the same is true for many other installations world-wide.
In the end, the most persuasive argument against nuclear for me is that we (especially in North America) simply don't need nuclear. As a society we would be farther ahead to put the effort and money associated with nuclear into a combination of Geo-thermal, Solar-thermal, Wind and one day even fusion.
"Therein lies your ultimate hypocrisy: you're talking about caring about the environment and then acting like you have a god-given right to drive around on dino juice"
No he isn't, he's talking about building infrastructure that will continue to see use after the end of gas powered vehicles. Electric cars still drive on roads.
If you look closely, it is YOU who is foisting the straw man of "dino juice" upon him. There are more kinds of pollution than what comes out of a tailpipe. Noise, heat, etc. Taking palliative measures to reduce these things, which still exist with electric vehicles isn't the vile idea your screed makes it out to be.
You just jumped on your high horse and assumed you had the answer, when you didn't even understand the question. If there's anything I dislike about this new environmentalism, it's how often I see people doing exactly that.
The issue is that there are a lot of people who work to the south of the town but live to the north, and (before the bridge was built) the only route between the two was through the centre of the town. This wasn't a direct route for most of them, and ended up funnelling a lot of traffic into small roads which were never designed for it (or for anything - the town is several hundred years old and the roads in the middle date back to when it was a village).
If you replaced every car with a perfect electrical vehicle which used no power when stationary, then you would still be creating more pollution because the downstream bridge was a more direct route and so took less energy.
Obviously, switching everyone to electric vehicles is not a short term solution, and the bridge does a lot to mitigate the problem in the short term until it is possible to do so. Unless you think the correct solution is a forced migration of thousands of families in the bottom income bracket to live closer to where they work (and forced purchase of houses for them to live in, since most of them would not be able to afford rent in that area due to large numbers of people buying houses as second homes and driving the prices up).
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