Reply #6: I had an interesting chat yesterday with a dude who works for the CEC

[XemaSab]

I was at Petco to trade in a muzzle for a bigger size (long story) and I stopped to look at dog toys. There's a company called Fat Cat that makes toys that the dogs don't shred immediately.



This dude came around the corner with a dog that looked like an Australian cattle dog/dalmatian mix. Since all natural resource professionals recognize one another as fellow travelers on sight, we got to talking.

His sense on the matter is that many companies putting forth renewable energy proposals in the state of California are just trying to skim taxpayer and investor dollars, and very few of these proposed projects will ever be built. Furthermore, he's totally opposed to handing the desert over to people who want to blade the whole thing for light industrial development.

You insist that I'm totally opposed to renewable energy, but I'm not. I'm totally in favor of geothermal and rooftop solar, and I'm excited about the future of tidal energy. Hydropower is problematic in many ways, but since we already have dams, we may as well get as much energy out of them as possible.

I'm not a fan of wind; it's unpredictable, hard on the grid, and the siting issues are a CF. I'm also not a fan of massive corporate solar plants that destroy habitat and contribute to erosion and groundwater depletion. We need renewables, but replacing a corporate coal plant with 20 corporate solar plants built on public lands is not the way.

To be perfectly honest, a big part of my cynicism towards corporate renewables is the fact that the battle against climate change is over, and we lost. If we were going to take climate change seriously, I might be willing to make some concessions towards things like desert landscapes, but right now the projects that are planned seem to just add a loss of desert and grasslands to the loss of tundra, mountaintops, and oceans that our energy consumption habits are already accelerating.

I also think that the first step in a new energy future is making EVERYTHING as energy efficient as possible. I know that I am not the poster child for this, but I am hopeful that we're all in the beginning stages of a long journey towards a greener future. :)