Greenies are always for alternate energy sources in the abstract but often against the means of delivery. Heads up post, Josh.

Ah...the Salton Sea. That accidental salt-water lake in the middle of a desert. I think HCN had a article a few months back on the folks that call that place home. It's an interesting place that is best left to be consumed by mother nature.

The frustrating part of the Green Power plan is indeed the NIMBYism but I suspect the local resistance has less to do with the power lines and more to do with the curmudgeons that call the desert home and LADPW's sordid history of heavy handed tactics and land grabs.

The alternate route for power lines to avoid critical habitat is a good idea but at the same time, the footprint and existence of those power line towers is far more benign an impact once in place than say an oil or gas pipeline, natural gas and oil well pads. The biggest downside to the power line towers is the impact to the view corridor. Perhaps an ugly tax can be applied to such ascetic affronts to pristine areas (desert, mountain, prairie or shoreline) and use the tax for local habitat improvement and future habitat corridor purchases.

Serious omission from this post: even running off of an old-fashioned, pre-clean coal, smoke-belching coal-fired power plant, plug-in cars are still significantly cleaner than anything else on the road.

Are Environmentalists an Obstacle to Green Power?  Yes.

Environmentalism might have more aptly been named "naturism" if the latter didn't already refer to folks who like to take their clothes off outdoors.  The environment, i.e. the HUMAN environment, the set of natural conditions required to sustain human life and civilization, has always been a secondary concern to environmentalists.  They've focussed more on the preservation of pockets--sometimes large pockets--of non-human nature.  

But the climate change crisis is of a different order.  For the first time people are beginning to question whether the environment--and I mean OUR environment--can be expected to sustain civilization even through a single lifetime.  The solutions to these problems, if they come, are going to be industrial.  They are going to involve MORE aggressive human cooptation of nature, not less.  We'll have costal vistas dotted with wind turbines, power lines crisscrossing the wildlands, oilgae ponds and solar farms spread across the badlands of the American West.  Look out for a lot more pissing and moaning from the crunchy granola types.  Too many of them just don't get it.

Yes.

An intelligent, flexible, in-touch envrinontalist movement would have figured out ways to get smart legislation passed years ago. It's obvious that we need more clean power AND more drilling off the coasts and in ANWR. The elements of a successful, win-win compromise are all in place now. It's the nutjobs who dominate each of the ideological extremes that are blocking progress today.

what aeromonas said. More wind turbines, please-- they're quite beautiful, imo, like a Calatravas bridge.

Good points.

And Tep is correct - except for one thing.  There's nothing nutty about opposition to drilling ANWR.  Because this source of oil is not expected to make an even a dent in our dependence on foreign oil and would only serve to postopone serious efforts to develop alternatives, it's quite reasonable to argue for a political push in other directions instead.  It's about priorities.

But if there is one issue that divides the likes of the old-school-crunchy-granonla environmentalists described by aeromonas, and the newer ones who focus first and foremost on climate change, it is nuclear energy.

Some see nuclear energy as the cleanest, most feasible and efficient option on the table.  And in terms of carbon, it probably is.  But the old guard of environmentalists cannot shake the dangers and legitimate drawbacks of nuclear power.  Opposing nukes is in their DNA.

It's so funny that the folks who call for more of the same aren't the ones who live next to the very places that suffer from energy extraction policies that put energy extraction first. Having family and friends that live next to areas that have seen natural gas rigs put up on land they own or live right next to and watch the quality of the landscape degrade. Ranchers in the West like Wyoming (a hot bed of liberalism and crunchy granola types if ever there was a place) have been resisting the increase of natural gas wells that go in on their land without either proper environmental protocols, remediation and/or proper reparations to the land owners for damage caused by extraction. This includes the Federally owned land which tends to have more clout but uses very little if any.

www.orionmagazine.org/.../186

www.hcn.org/.../hcn.Article

www.hcn.org/.../hcn.Article

Natural gas extraction uses a method called frac'ing or fracturing. Which is basically injecting a toxic liquid mixture into underground seams to force the gas out. As the gas is forced out, more liquid is injected until you've "filled" the seam. That toxic mix then makes it's way to underground aquifers, taints groundwater sources. The roads put in cut through private ranch lands and sensitive wildlife areas. Gas emissions increase in the area along with marked decrease in air quality. Oh and these are measures by which we use to determine impacts on OUR environment. I haven't even talked about the "natural" environment. I'll spare aeromonas the details of that.

Look...I'm not one to say we don't drill or extract NATURAL resources for energy. What I am saying is we should and can do it in a more responsible manner so that when we're done drilling, digging, scraping and scaring the land, it can heal itself when we leave it.

I"m sure Tep will comment that these folks chose to live near Federal lands but even those on private land in the west many times don't own the mineral rights below. I rue the day that those who claim we should drill and screw every place for energy and it ends up your backyard. You might own the surface rights but I doubt very much that you own the mineral rights under your house.

I for one am an environmentalist but one that sees the built and natural as interconnected and not separate as aermonas likes to think it is. We're a part of the natural world whether you like to admit it or not. Humans can't engineer and industrialize an environment and make it work as good or better than the natural world .If you want a good example of how we can't research the Biosphere 2 project. en.wikipedia.org/.../Biosphere_2

Even when we think we understand the basics of a complex system called Earth we fail at trying to engineer it from scratch. So get used to the fact that we have to live within the means of the NATURAL environment if we want to be around longer than 1 lifetime. We need to get better at efficiency and developing how to get more from the limited NATURAL resources that we depend upon to build OUR environment.

A quick note on a busy day:

With regards to plug-in hybrids potentially being just as dirty due to the electricity source, that depends in part on when they're being charged. I read an analysis a while back (I believe in American Scientist) that suggested most hybrids' recharging needs would be met at times other than peak use. Given that power plants have to generate a certain amount of power at all times, and are not necessarily flexing up and down to exactly meet demand, charging a fleet of hybrids in off hours might not create that much more generation need, and might in fact help the efficiency of the power grid. One way to achieve this would be to fit the hybrids and/or the plugs with net-metering devices that allowed vehicles to charge whenever the power supply needed, just like the current programs in which air conditions are turned on and off automatically to balance the grid.

Also, as nobodyx points out, even if the emissions balance out, you're removing smog and local emissions from widespread areas and concentrating them in a single place (the stack) where you have a better chance of dealing with them, whether through filtering, sequestration, or other methods.

I have little to add to the rest of the discussion. I come down on the rational environmentalist side, that difficult compromises are going to have to  be made. I have no patience for Greenpeace and the more radical fringe, which block useful progress as surely as James Inhofe.

single - you mistake me. We're in agreement, I think, on this one. IIUC, most Texas ranchers and probably most ranchers elsewhere view wind turbines as far more attractive overall than natural gas or oil drilling. So build a million turbines.

I believe we should drill off the _coasts_, as the Brazilians are now doing off the coast of Rio and the Chinese (!) are reputedly about to do off of Castro's er Cuba's coast.

BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

Tep.. .you're right. Sorry if I stepped on toes there. I think on the whole everyone would like to have a sound energy policy and a place where you can take your kids and it not be an open mine pit.

Off shore works well and I have to admit that sometimes....sometimes the off-shore platforms do give you something to look at out on the ocean after the sun sets. OTH the best places always seem to be the hardest to get to or in the direct path of tropical storms and/or hurricanes.

Russia is busy staking claims to most of the northern polar region as part of their oil reserves land grab! Meanwhile America get distracted by Wright-gate and SUV discounts.

Run silent, run deep. The fate of the Kursk tells you all you need to know about Russia's real military capabilities. All their extraction equipment is imported, too. Colossus with clay feet

singelspeed, I left you a long response that got lost when my wi-fi connection went phttt.  I don't have the time to reconstruct it, but I would like to say this:

I think you misunderstand me when you say that I see Nature and Man as fully distinct.  I too see the built and the "natural" world as being highly interconnected and both manifestations of nature.  My point was that I don't believe many traditional environmentalists see things this way; I think THEY fail to see the connections between the built world and nature.  Too often they stay focussed on fighting to preserve sections of the undeveloped landscape as-is, mainly in service of romantic notions of the wilderness.

To environmentalists who oppose power lines through the desert, I'd like to say, "Chill out.  The desert is far more durable than those power lines.  In a million years the power lines will be gone; the desert will still be here.  The entity whose survival you should be worried about is Los Angeles, and you should be worried about whether it'll still be here in a hundred years, much less a million."

Four points about this "only as green as the grid" notion:  (1)  Energy use is more efficient when it's used to charge a battery.  You only use what you need.  Cars waste a lot of energy today.  (2) The ability to store power in a battery will allow these electric-driven cars to get vastly increased mileage, *even if you never plug them in, and never use the grid* -- think, 50 mpg vs. today's average of, what? 23?  (3) Solar panels on your garage, anyone?  Bypass your grid.  Use what you don't use to charge your car to power your house.  Sell back any leftovers.  (4) Energy diversity and flexibility.  Right now, we're tied to oil, 'cause that's the only thing these suckers will run on.  These new cars will run on coal, nuclear power, solar power, wind power, natural gas, hydroelectric, as well as gas (which could be a bio-fuel).  I come from Chicago, so my car would run largely on nuclear power, which, of course, emits no greenhouse gases.

These things are really the closest anyone's going to get to reinventing the car in the foreseeable future.  If GM can actually pull it off -- be first out of the gate with the car of the future (the iPod of cars, as they first conceptualized it from a marketing standpoint accoridng to the fascinating Atlantic article) -- they might just resurrect a dying American industry besides.

And the answer to the headline question is, Yes, some are, and Ahnold is right on this one.  Luckily the environmental movement is transcending the movement, as climate change and national security issues motivate many who don't give a rat's ass about the habitat of the endangered spotted-assed rat.  Now, there's a definite danger in dismissing such concerns.  The complexity and delicacy of eco-systems (and the unintended consequences of fucking with them) as well as the ethics of species death do not strike me as trivial concerns, although I admit I don't know a whole lot about either issue.

But it seems to an outsider looking in that the parochial and (to me, anyway) downright weird enthusiasms of some envionementalists can lead them astray.  What rubs me the wrong way is the denigration of humanity as somehow unnatural and therefore bad, and the quasi-spiritual elevation of the vast, cruel earth, which, you know, is actually indifferent to us, all creatures, and even to its health and existence.  The vision of a pristine planet constantly under attack by an artifical human presence strikes me as totally incoherent.  The planet's ours, dammit!  Now, we can be stupid and destroy our own home or not.  There's a lot of desert out there.  We could get all of our power from the sun.  We shouldn't obsess about tiny footprints in the sand.

aero...got you now. Yeah I think sometimes on these topics under E&E it can be hard to read between the lines because the Environment (man-made and natural) isn't black and white though many people think of them that way (natural=white, man-made=black). I've always tried to seek a balance between the two because I see the beauty and harshness in both and my understanding of the integrated complexity of the whole grows everyday.

When I moved to DC, I had a hard time adjusting to the density of everything here. Growing up in Colorado and being able to see 25 miles in any direction and then moving to a place where your vision is bound to 100 feet sometimes was tough. Further coloring my views was the neglect of the "natural" areas around the DC metro areas. But it also gave me a greater appreciation for what I left and that we have to think about the big E as a whole.

You're point about the desert still being there long after LA disappears is a valid point. Just look at the towns around Chernobyl. They've been assimilated back into the landscape and the wildlife has thrived. I think the good thing is that the 21st century will herald a new found realization that man and nature are interconnected and now...after several millenium of human activity and impact are in some instances dependent upon our stewardship both for our physical sake and spiritual sake.

Josh-- what's the difference between the Sempra thing and Sunrise Powerlink? Do you know? I'm confused. Also it IS maddening when people seem hypocritical, but it's hard to sort out priorities sometimes. In that speech Arnold mentioned that one of the reasons why some clean-energy operation in CA (I don't remember if it was the solar panels in the Mojave or not)  was being stalled was that the land was potential habitat for endangered squirrels who might or might not have been using it. Arnold made this sound ridiculous, and I agree it does sound kind of ridiculous, except that it turns out that unoccupied habitat can for various reasons be as critical to species survival as occupied habitat.  And so we have the Endangered Species Act, which people seem to have agreed is a priority, but what is doing more good: protecting one species of squirrel or reducing carbon emissions slightly and thus contributing to the protection of thousand of species? You see, it's really hard to figure out what the right position is. It's harsh to blame people for trying to protect what is tangible to them, when they see potential other options for accomplishing clean energy goals. Anyway it's confusing.

PS

Arnold also spent the first ten minutes of that speech talking about how bodybuilding is similar to environmentalism. Apparently they are both up-and-coming trends.

One of the biggest challenges renewable energy has to overcome has less to do with science than with

The national grid doesn't get nearly enough attention when people talk about energy policy. Maybe