Industrial solar in the desert

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: San Bernardino County, California

So yesterday afternoon we went to the Sierra Club’s Desert Committee meeting which was largely focused on renewable energy development on public lands. It’s a very interesting political situation—the national Sierra Club supports utility-scale solar in the Mojave, because climate change is a big enough problem that they’re willing to sacrifice. The California Sierra Club is opposed, and from what I saw at the meeting, a lot of their motivation is NIMBY related, but not necessarily wrong. So much infighting amongst the environmentalists there and so much anger in tone when addressing people on the same side. Maggie’s sociology-related theory is that that generation grew up wanting to stick it to the man and had to fight for recognition of environmental issues. Our generation grew up knowing the system was fucked—we didn’t have to realize it in college. We’re about dialogue and compromise, so we listen. I think it has a lot to do with politics too. Republicans are a right-wing party whose rhetoric is even further right (like Tea Party). Dems are centrist and talk center-left sometimes, but they mostly backpedal and capitulate. So no one’s even paying lip service to the far left, much less enacting policies that they support. And that leads to frustration.

So I don’t like their rhetoric, but I’m glad someone is fighting for the desert. I’m glad someone will be watchdogging any large-scale solar and wind projects that do get approved on public lands, because those corporations need to be held accountable with the same level of scrutiny we would apply to any other project. I worry about the precedent we set by allowing large utility companies to develop projects on public lands. I think I’m willing to sacrifice the desert tortoise for the greater good, but after talking to Jim Harvey this morning, I’m not convinced it’s necessary. Feed-in tariffs seem to make sense, though I really want a better knowledge of PV materials and manufacture before I start getting excited about rooftop solar. The Solar Done Right guy I talked to at the meeting said the Department of Energy was doing a cradle-to-grave analysis of PV vs. concentrated solar. God, I want to see that, and apparently they might not release it. Freedom of Information Act…

We also talked to Jim Harvey this morning. He made a pretty compelling case for doing feed-in tariffs and distributed generation rather than utility-scale solar on public lands. I still want to look into PV and also his claim that deserts sequester a ton of carbon and that benefit goes away with power installation. I find it disheartening that none of these new power facilities/installations—not the rooftop proliferation in Germany and not the large projects proposed in the Mojave—have actually closed any coal plants. And overall, I think environmentalists need to be more proactive about these sorts of issues. I love Alex (Wilderness Society dude)’s acronyms—Nowhere on Planet Earth (NOPE) and Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (BANANA). These are the new NIMBY, and we have to be more than that if we want to make progress.

I guess one of the things I’m wondering is if we accept that large utility-scale projects hurt the desert and that solar rooftop is a better solution, what is our best course, as activists and environmentalists? Do we acknowledge political reality and recognize that climate change is urgent even while feed-in tariffs are infeasible in a market dominated by big utilities? Or do we stall large projects and right the system, fight for the desert? I’m tempted to side with political reality, yet I know that if the project in question were Glen Canyon Dam or a nuclear plant, I’d right to the bitter, bloody end to keep it out of the desert. Maybe. Or would I? Maybe climate change is so serious that radioactive waste, flooded canyons and decimated salmon runs are worth it. Except we’re not closing any coal plants when we add all this solar and wind. And while that’s discouraging in terms of ever stabilizing our climate or having a future with pikas and Bangladesh, it does mean that we should do solar right the first time, even if it takes longer.

A feed-in tariff makes sense whether the utility scale stuff happens or not. So I want to look into that, into getting an initiative started to get that going in Washington. That seems like the perfect thing to bypass the state legislature with and go straight to the people, yet Jim seemed confused and taken aback when I suggested it. We’re not good at being proactive, which makes sense to an extent, because a lot of people get into activism by opposing something close to home, something where they never believed the corporation would take it that far. We fight and oppose, but we have trouble being proactive and finding good alternatives. We don’t recommend alternative sites, because everything is sacred. We don’t try to pass initiatives that would pave the way to a brighter future we imagine. We don’t go after coal plants. If Bill Gates shifted his entire foundation and fortune towards repowering the US, it would be done. We could close the coal plants and still guarantee all the employees their salaries for the next five years. We don’t have that kind of money and we’re used to seeing ourselves as underdogs with no real cards to play besides emotional appeal. But we’re past that. This problem goes beyond a hippie concern for trees and Gaia. So we need to use that lever and push for what we want, not just against what we don’t. And I’m serious about that initiative. You have to start somewhere.

Election night

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: near Santa Fe, New Mexico

Election night! And what a shitshow it is. Dems were down 42 house seats and 7 governorships when I went to bed. Murray will pull through, Joe Manchin got West Virginia (!), Rand Paul in Kentucky (crazy shit), Blanche Lincoln is getting her ass kicked and Tim Fucking Eyeman’s stupid anti-tax bullshit is winning as we vote to repeal taxes on soda and candy, not give schools money for energy efficiency and nor impose an income tax on people making more than $200,000 a year. We’ll keep the Senate, the House is fucked, redistricting will be a Republican wet dream and our government will continue to be center-right and full of crazy people. I’m comforted by the knowledge that even if Democrats controlled 535 seats in Congress and Obama was still in office, we wouldn’t be doing shit about climate change anyway.

I should mention Kendall* and aspen and climate change. How water is stored best by aspen, how they’re in decline for a number of reasons, many of which go back to climate change. How she said a lot of people in her forest don’t care about or even accept climate change, but if you start talking water shortages, they pay attention. I wish we could get people motivated about mitigation as easily as adaptation. The climate is changing and people see it. Show them problems and they’ll support solutions Ascribe causality to those problems and you’re a communist trying to destroy the American economy. So even for mitigation, we learn to be bilingual—green jobs, energy security, savings via conservation. This is our Esperanto. Mention habitat, polar bears, ocean acidification or taxing carbon and you become the enemy, hostile enough that the best response is to shoot first. And so it goes—locally, people see things and can talk about solving them, but nationally, James Infhoe will chair the House Committee on Energy and Whateverthefuck once Dems lose. And so the long defeat marches steadily on. Half the army has yet to see the cliff.

*Kendall Clark, Supervisor for Carson National Forest, who we met with.

Climate nihilism

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: with Bill deBuys, Northern New Mexico

I am the last generation to be born and raised on cheap energy with the promise of a better life.

I am the first generation slated to be poorer and die sooner than my parents.

I drive past clear cuts, open pits of coal, landfills, smokestacks belching black clouds into the air. I am seduced by the vision of industry, impressed by the sheer magnitude of the changes we have made on this land. I don’t want a world without city-sized industrial fortresses or Superfund sites, because then I would have nothing left to fight.

I know we’re past the point of saving the planet. I hope we’re past the point of saving ourselves. I’ve always wanted to watch the apocalypse.

I like the idea of fighting a losing battle. Winning is black and white, its narrative a simple recollection of events. The story of losing requires nuance, character, tragedy. I’ve always found the Trojans a more compelling people, Hector a better hero than Achilles. Valor and heroism are determined not by how many victories you win, but by how your defeat finally occurs.

I find the world a more beautiful place with such clear imperfections. I like the causes, but no the effects. I find smokestacks terrifyingly beautiful, but not dissolving coral reefs. I see moral contradiction written on every landscape.

I know industrial capitalism is killing the planet. I don’t want industrial capitalism to go away because I want to see this awful comedy play out until the bitter, bloody end.

I’m tired of being sad and too numb to be angry. Some days, all I want is a house with a garden and lot of books so I can come home to someone I love and put all the frustration and passion and uncertainty I have into loving them, before we make dinner together and ignore the fire raging all around us.

Walking through a coal plant

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Page, Arizona

context: This was written the day after we visited Navajo Generating Station, which is the sixth largest coal plant in the country. I ended up writing my final epiphany for the program about NGS. You can read it here and see a video of me reading it here.

The things we do and the scale we do them on completely defy comprehension. Speaking about the environmental ethics of a coal plant seems like talking about Hitler’s vegetarianism. This is ground zero for climate change; this is where the battle will be fought and slowly lost. Does your ppm SO₂ reading matter when the future of civilization it at stake?

But it does. I know it does. Less acidic skies and rain and forests matter. Community health matters. How many children get asthma matters. Those 545 full-time jobs matter for the Navajo. But it would still be cheaper to pay them their salaries to not pollute. $52 million a year in payroll benefits seems like a small price tag for one-quarter of Arizona’s emissions.

But reality. Civilization. Seven billion and counting. Las Vegas needs water. Phoenix needs water. Tucson needs water. And you need power to pump it there. More people should live in Page, still more should live in Western Washington or Vermont or never have been born at all. When does the planet and our collective health start to matter? How far are we willing to go in our quest to postpone our day of reckoning? The Second Coming seems easy by comparison. Jesus left us a whole manual on how to live on earth. No one told us how to feed seven billion people or raised cities in the middle of deserts.

Accepting defeat

We’ve spent the last three days in Aspen, Colorado, talking about climate change and renewable energy. Among our speakers was Auden Schendler, head of the environmental division of Aspen Ski Company and author of the recent book Getting Green Done. Auden was by far the most inspiring speaker I’ve heard about the issue of climate change. His point was simple: we’re going to fail at solving this problem.

If we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, it would take decades for our planet to stabilize. We’re already seeing rising sea levels, glaciers and ice sheets melting far more quickly than they were supposed to. Bjorn Lomborg, one of the most influential climate skeptics (meaning he questioned the urgency scientists were speaking with and the predictions being made, not the fact that climate change is occurring and human-caused), just completely changed his position and said we need to invest $100 billion a year in research and development to stop climate change. Several Pacific island nations like Tuvalu are looking at purchasing land in other places because their entire landmass will be under water soon.

So all this is already happening, and we’re still emitting carbon. US emissions have gone down a bit because of the recession, but once our economy picks back up, our carbon footprint is more than likely to follow. The political climate in the US is such that passing any legislation which will meaningfully impact emissions, like a carbon tax, will be nearly impossible. And even if we could, fixing this problem requires nothing less than redesigning our entire energy grid.

Auden likened our situation to fighting Muhammad Ali in the 1970s. You could cower in a corner, take the punches, get knocked out and dragged to the ER. You know you’re going to lose. You have no choice. But you still fight back, with everything you have. You fight to see how far you can get. You fight even though you’re unprepared and don’t know what to expect. You fight because you can’t just stand there and do nothing, no matter how much the odds are stacked against you. You know you’re going to lose—there’s no nagging worry, no uncertainty, just drive. We can’t fix this problem in the time we need to. Let’s go down fighting.

We can't solve climate change

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

context: We had just come from Aspen, Colorado, where the Auden Schendler, who’s the VP of Sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company, told us that we can’t possibly solve climate change and that we need to try as hard as we can anyway.

Auden Schendler is absolutely right, and I needed to hear what he said. Because we’re absolutely going to fail. We can’t fix this problem in the time we need to. We’re up against Exxon-Mobil, Citizens United vs. FEC, the competing attention the recession is getting, a half-Republican Congress, CleanCoal^TM and the Tea Party. We’re going down in flames. And that’s exactly why we need to fight. We have nothing to lose by trying. We have a moral imperative to try as hard as we possibly can. We can slow our defeat or lessen its magnitude, but it is coming. So we sigh, relieved—we know our destiny. It’s a march to the gallows with heads held high, a fight to the death, and you can’t give up until you’re lying face down in a pool of your own blood with seventeen bullets in your back. Until then, we keep fighting. We fight with the urgency this problem deserves, willing to push the envelope, willing to try anything to delay facing death a little longer. We fight as long as there is breath in us. We fight.

The importance of water

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

I feel like I’ve been so busy writing I haven’t had time to journal. I wish we had a longer segment on water, though I suspect it will come up again. Water and grazing seem to me to be the defining political issues of the West—almost everything else that gets people riled up can be tied back to one of those things.

I read books about dams—A Story That Stands Like a Dam over the summer, and now I’m starting Cadillac Desert. I find it so hard to imagine growing up in a world where there was no environmental conscience, yet I look at and listen to the Reclamation boys and politicians during the dam-building frenzy and I have to conclude they had no sense of looking at ecosystems or of seeing things in a way not tied to human industry and profit. Even the conservationists saw wildness and wilderness as spiritual refuge for men, a place not to be civilization, a place to calm our troubled and overworked souls. I don’t think the word salmon was mentioned once in the things I read, though I’m also not sure they live in the Colorado. But some other animal, plant, ecological function must have been imperiled when they closed the floodgates in Page. Why did no Rachel Carson spring up? Or if they did, why did history not remember them? I suppose the movement had to progress in a certain way. Maybe no one could conceive of ecology until we’d idolized wilderness as a spiritual refuge. Maybe no one thought to listen for the birds or count the salmon. But I have a hard time believing that’s the case. Native Americans, who fished the salmon, knew runs were declining precipitously, and so did other in the Northwest. And I don’t know enough about the ecology of Glen Canyon to say what anyone noticed when.

I’m worried about water, though. More than climate change, though of course they’re related. Some people somewhere will do just fine on a hotter planet, and because I’m among the rich and the privileged, because I live at 48˚N, I will be saved. Not that it’s not important to fight and mitigate, and not that we shouldn’t all be thinking about climate justice. But I’ve never felt that fear or panic that I’m supposed to. Where I get that fear is water, and once again I’m grateful to be on the west of the mountains. But Cali makes my food, and it does so artificially, pretending it’s not a desert by drawing on the Colorado and irreplaceable groundwater. When there’s not enough water to irrigate California, what do I eat? When we run out of topsoil from erosion, where will my food grow? These are the things that keep me up at night. Climate change will accelerate them, too. We can survive heat, tornadoes, hurricanes, cold winters. But we need water to live.

A bird's warning

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: rim of Hell’s Canyon, Wallowa County, Oregon

Today on our hike, a bird began frantically chirping, sounding an alarm as our group passed by. I wanted to reassure it that we posed no threat to its existence. We weren’t there to hunt or log or extract precious metals. We bore it no ill will, no desire to conquer nature via the death of an inferior being. But I had to stop myself, because I realized we pose a much greater threat. Our existence as a species directly threatens everything that bird has ever known. We’ve created a civilization so complex and so blind that we’ve fundamentally altered our planet past the point of repair, and our actions have and will continue to impact the habitat of every single living thing on earth. A few months of years from now, the forest will be a different place—slightly warmer, with thinner trees and more beetles to eat their bark. The bird will do its bets to adapt to its new habitat, one it never evolved to live in. Will it survive? Will its children and grandchildren continue to live here? Or will they be added to the swelling masses of human and nonhuman climate refugees? I might never know the answers. Neither will that bird. But maybe it can sense that something is different. Maybe it can see the changing tide. Maybe, just maybe, it cried out in sorrow, asking one last futile time for us to wake up.

Valuing life

Our society is not sustainable. Our culture is not sustainable. Our civilization is not sustainable. And technology is not going to save us.

I don't want to believe this. I really want to listen to Al Gore and the Sierra Club and Obama telling me that if we redesign our grid and recycle and get hybrid cars and eat organic food, we'll fix the planet.

Here's the thing. I believe we might be able to fix climate change with technology. Obviously, the easiest way to stop climate change would be to simply and unconditionally stop burning oil and coal and natural gas and watch out civilization crumble. But I do believe that within a few decades, we could get our emissions under control enough to stop us from killing ourselves, via increased awareness, more energy efficiency and non-carbon emitting power sources. There will be enormous human costs along the way--we're already seeing some of them in the South Pacific and Africa--but we'll get there with our society largely intact if we put enough minds and manpower behind it.

Here's what a lot of environmentalists aren't telling you: climate change is not the only environmental problem we face. The computers that are going to save the world by preventing us from having to commute to work and providing us with helpful green living tips require all kinds of resources to manufacture, many of which are toxic. Silicon Valley is home to 29 EPA Superfund sites, the highest concentration anywhere in the country. Dams have turned rivers like the Columbia from natural habitats into a series of lakes that salmon have a harder and harder time surviving in. Even those nice quiet Priuses need nickel for their batteries, and mining it uses land and toxic chemicals.

If all we want to do is make sure most (richer, more privileged humans) survive, then we can worry about stopping climate change and breathe a big sigh of relief when we get it under control. But if we care about life, if we believe all humans and non-humans have a right to exist, we can't stop there. Mining will always involve exploitation of human labor, will always involve toxic chemicals which shouldn't exist, and will always leave behind waste capable of killing living beings long after we're gone. Manufacturing anything, even solar panels or wind turbines, depends on finite resources, and no amount of "green technology" will be able to make their manufacture sustainable for a population of seven billion (and counting).

This is where you see a big rift in the environmental movement. All kinds of people who probably wouldn't have called themselves environmentalists five or ten years ago suddenly care about our climate. And that's great. But I hope for every hundred people we get to care about the earth, a few will realize that this problem goes much deeper than carbon emissions. I hope a few of them will start to think about the earth in terms of all living things, not just humans.

I was talking with my parents about dams, and about how they've decimated salmon populations. I said I understood that they're a marginally better power source than coal burning plants or nuclear plants, but I want people to understand that they're a stepping stone to something better, not a sustainable solution to anything. And my dad said he understood that we've built too many dams in the West, but he thought at some point, it didn't make sense to set aside everything in nature as untouchable. We could build some dams and flood a few canyons, ruin a few salmon runs, but we'd still have the rest, so it would be ok.

I told him this all comes down to a simple question--do you believe the natural world and other living beings are here for us to use as we best see fit, or do they have a right to exist independent of our desires? If salmon and rivers and every other living thing in the world had an equal voice and an equal vote in our political systems, I don't think a single dam would have been built in the first place.

I've seen this before, when the federal government was deciding whether or not to remove the grey wolf from the Endangered Species List. The debate was between animal rights and conservation groups and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The conservationists argued that the wolf population wasn't large enough yet to be self-sustaining. FWS said it was, therefore it would be fine to delist the wolves and open hunting on them. Nowhere did anyone suggest that an individual wolf had a right to exist. If wolf population numbers are sustainable, if the killing of an individual wolf won't impact the species as a whole, that wolf has no right to live no matter which side of the debate you're on.

Our society, our culture, and our civilization are killing the planet. I don't want to admit this. It scares me to admit this. But I can't sit by and pretend it's possible to be neutral while we kill the landbase we depend on for survival, any more than it's possible to be neutral by standing silently as someone commits murder in front of you. You have to see this as personal, because it is personal. If my child was dying of cancer from a toxic waste dump that used to be a manufacturing plant, I wouldn't rest until I was sure no one else would get sick from the same chemicals that killed my child. If the park that I spend my childhood exploring, the park where I first tasted stinging nettle and saw deer tracks, was going to be bulldozed (sorry, "developed") to built houses or a coal plant or anything else, I would sit in front of those bulldozers for as long as I had to until they went away. I don't know the best way to fight for our planet, for the other living beings that don't have a voice in our destructive systems. But I know I have to.

Oil and responsibility

The Deepwater Horizon spill has many people looking for blood.Obama has BP agreeing to set aside $20 billion to compensate people whose jobs are effected by the spill, independent of any money they might have to pay for violating environmental laws. Even Facebook asked me, via paid advertisement, to join a group demanding that BP's CEO resign.

And while holding them accountable is definitely a good thing, it's missing the point.

Oil drilling has a long list of associated environmental disasters. Few, besides the Exxon-Valdez spill, have garnered this much public attention, and none have been this big and this visible for such a long time. But the history of oil drilling shows that such problems are not anomalies, nor are they preventable in the broadest sense of the word. And while companies have always cut corners and ignored environmental and safety regulation to turn a profit, eliminating these abuses would not stop all spills. Accidents can and will happen, especially in the dirty business of oil.

The irony of demonizing BP has been shown by consumers wondering if they should boycott BP in favor of other oil companies. Step away from them, and what are your options? Exxon-Mobil funded fake science reports denying climate change was occurring, then, when they couldn't pretend it wasn't, saying it wasn't human caused. They're responsible for what was the largest oil spill in US history until last month, and the actual cause of the spill had much less to do with a drunk skipper and much more to do with them turning off safety radar that was too expensive to operate than they'd like you to believe. Exxon and Shell both operate in the Niger Delta, where spills have been happening consistently for fifty years, completely removing people's ability to live off the land and politically destabilizing the region to the point where even peaceful activists have been executed. Chevron is there too, and they've left toxic oil byproducts and waste all over Ecuador, making it nearly impossible for locals to find clean drinking water. So, that ethical oil company you were talking about...?

The uncomfortable truth of the Deepwater Horizon is that the problem lies in our use of oil. We can fine BP billions (and we should), call for their CEO to be fired (and he should) and even pressure the British government to revoke their corporate charter (which we also probably should, but obviously won't). But ultimately, responsibility for the spill lies with us, the people of the developed world, and our governments, who have encouraged our total dependency on fossil fuels for the better part of a century. And obviously, business and government are intertwined to the point of being virtually indistinguishable, and individuals can only do so much to change the system. But what we can do, we should. Energy that doesn't use fossil fuels makes economic sense, and business sense when done right. It doesn't have to be a partisan issue, and we've got enough politicians paying lip service to it that if we push hard enough, they might have to actually do something.

We need a national calling, a scientific re-purposing. We need Kennedy all over again calling for the US to put a man on the moon. Only this time, we need to save our climate, we needed to do it yesterday and there's no USSR to bring out our competitive masculine streak. There's just us, and the rest of the world and a ticking clock. And I know science alone won't solve our problems and government probably won't solve any of our problems. But I want to see us try. I want us to take a tiny fraction of our defense budget and put it towards encouraging science and engineering students. I want FDR-scale public works projects to bring this country better mass transit and more wind power. I know all the reasons that won't be enough. I know we need to use less energy and reconnect with the land and live more locally and stop driving altogether and look at materials and waste and stop polluting our groundwater. But I think we also need to redesign our entire grid, and that's something we're up to if we get the entire nation behind it.

So call Obama and tell him. Tell him what your version of a better future looks like, tell him we seriously need to stop offshore drilling. His number is 202 456 1111. Call your senators. Cantwell is 202 224 3441 and Murray is 202 224 2621. And while you're at it, stop driving so much.