Below are two satellite images, courtesy Google Earth, of different pieces of the Ivanpah Valley. Both photos show land at around 3,000 feet in elevation, at a resolution equivalent to 1,500 feet up.
One of the photos is of land whose wilderness habitat value was important enough that in 1994 Congress designated it part of the Mojave National Preserve.
The other shows land deemed “heavily impacted by human use” by the developer who wants to build a massive solar generating facility thereon.
Can you guess which is which? Feel free to click through to the Flickr site to see the higher-resolution versions if you think that’ll help.
In the meantime, I’m off to Death Valley first thing in the morning for a meeting, and then Sunday afternoon I hope to swing by the proposed solar generating site to get some photos from six or fewer feet above the ground. See you all Monday.
Here’s an on-the-ground photo of the area, for those of you who might be visiting here (from BIL or elsewhere) while Chris is gone:
Ivanpah Valley
The Ivanpah Solar Generating project would scrape 4,000 acres of this desert to the ground. This area is scenic to some of us, but that’s not really the issue. It’s home to the desert tortoise, California’s state reptile and a threatened species. Do we really know enough to say that “we have to kill some of the tortoises to save the rest of them”? Even if this facility would create significant greenhouse gas reductions (such as preventing the construction of a new coal-fired plant, which is debatable) there’s just no way to know if that trade-off is worthwhile. We need to do as any doctor would do with a sick patient: “First, do no harm.”
There are better places to produce solar energy, chiefly all the rooftops and parking lots with which we’ve covered southern California.
Nice comparison. I happen to know the best-protected square mile in the Ivanpah Valley, surrounded by a cattle- and vehicle-exclosure fence since 1978, and it looks just the same. That is primo desert tortoise habitat, some of the best left in the East Mojave.
WTF?
Solar is CLEAN green power!
The desert ecosystem that’s already there is cleaner.
LOL! Sven FTW!
Good point. “Green” in the climate debate, but not always in the biodiversity debate. It`s the same with hydropower and windmills.