Sage and Sand: Clean Energy & Biodiversity At a Crossroads in the Desert Southwest
We desperately need carbon-free energy. But our decarbonization goals are on a collision course with biodiversity conservation goals in the desert southwest, putting both in jeopardy.
There’s crisis in the air on public lands across the Southwestern U.S. Clean energy and biodiversity have come to a crossroads, with the fate of our planet hanging in the balance. While the need to transition off of fossil fuels is dire and urgent, there are many paths we could follow toward decarbonization. And the one we’re following right now is bringing public lands and biodiversity to its knees, while temperatures continue to rise.
As the federal government continues to bestow billions upon billions in subsidies; as the agencies prioritize permitting renewable energy over all other priorities; with the dominance of the techno-optimist Silicon Valley bro approach to decarbonization; with the apparently entrenched societal norm that biodiversity threatens business, and not the other way around… We are hurtling toward a breaking point on southwestern U.S. public lands that will either result in an unfathomable loss of biodiversity and public lands resources; or a much-too-slow response to the climate crisis that means +3°C or more in warming, spelling doom for our civilization.
Things came to a head recently in the Amargosa Basin, where I live, with a proposed lithium exploration project within a few thousand feet of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and the springs there which harbor 25 endemic or near-endemic species. I’ll spare you the suspense – we sued and forced BLM to withdraw their approval of the exploration project. Hooray! I’ll have a more detailed run-down on the details of how we stopped them in a future edition of this missive. But the episode really highlighted the gravity of what we’re dealing with here. Instead of threatening some remote location only known to a few people or some obscure species only known to a few scientists, this project threatened Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most biodiverse and beloved landscapes of the whole desert Southwest. It threw into sharp relief the stakes of what we’re dealing with in the clean energy biodiversity crisis.
There are more than 120 lithium projects proposed in the Western U.S. There are nearly 100 utility-scale solar projects proposed just in Nevada. Four transmission lines criss-crossing the Great Basin are under simultaneous permitting or construction. Geothermal projects are proposed adjacent to damn near every hot spring in Nevada and Utah. Hell just last week there was celebration over a new geothermal fracking project coming online near Fallon. Geothermal fracking! Pumped storage projects are proposed at numerous rivers, lakes… even in hyperarid endorheic basins.
And these projects are poised to permanently and fundamentally alter the trajectory and ecology of public lands in the Great Basin and desert southwest. Including the treasure trove of biodiversity at Ash Meadows, I am tracking 59 narrow endemic species threatened with extinction or significant localized extirpation by clean energy projects. Pupfish, buckwheats, toads, springsnails, chubs, bearpoppies, even a delicate rare orchid.
It’s not just the strange endemic creatures I’m so fond of that are at risk though. Iconic landscape-scale species like the desert tortoise, the Southwest willow flycatcher, the greater sage-grouse, and the Lahontan cutthroat trout all face incremental losses of habitat and population viability from clean energy projects. Some of the most beloved landscapes of the West – from Canyonlands National Park to Lake Mead National Recreation Area to Black Rock-High Rock National Conservation Area to Death Valley National Park are all facing significant levels of development pressure directly on their borders, threatening to destroy the very things we hold dear about these places.
And so what? Who cares about some arid, dusty corner of the American West? Who cares that a bunch of alkali-crusted desert weirdos are upset about it? There are several reasons that this issue is of critical importance to the American public as a whole. Even if you care not one whit for the desert, or tortoises, or pupfish, or buckwheats, or a wild and free Great Basin, you still need to care about the increasing conflicts between clean energy and biodiversity conservation.
First, biodiversity is an essential prerequisite to all life on Earth. Biodiversity, the sum of all the species on Earth and their interactions, is what makes our own lives possible. Biodiversity gives us clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. Biodiversity puts food on our plates and gives us a roof over our heads. Biodiversity is the very building blocks of life itself. Without biodiversity we are nothing. The extinction crisis puts biodiversity at risk. There are over 1,000,000 species at risk of extinction according to the U.N. Biodiversity has been likened to a Jenga tower, with each species forming a critical link in the pillars that support life itself. Each time we lose a species, pull a piece from our Jenga tower, it starts to destabilize. Each extinction could set off a series of chain reactions that shake the very foundations of our ability to survive on Earth. Each extinction is an unfathomable loss, yes… but each extinction also brings us ever closer to a tipping point where our own existence is jeopardized. So, maybe folks don’t care about pupfish and buckwheats but they damn well care about their own future and that of their children and grandchildren. No pupfish, no future.
Second, and perhaps more practical for our current societal predicament, is that conflicts between clean energy and biodiversity put the clean energy transition at risk. You’re likely familiar with my own work, and that of the incredible attorney I work with Scott Lake, to defend biodiversity in the Great Basin. From Tiehm’s buckwheat to the Dixie Valley toad to Ash Meadows, our administrative and legal actions to save species from extinction inevitably run up against clean energy. And it’s not just us. The issues around harm to the ecology and cultural values of Thacker Pass has reached up to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals – becoming a potent symbol of the clean energy transition leaving communities behind. Other groups or communities have prioritized pushing back against solar projects destroying desert tortoise habitat in the Mojave Desert. Sometimes, they are successful. Sometimes not.
The theme here is that clean energy projects are getting delayed, and sometimes not built, even after years of development and costs, because they are sited in places that are unacceptable. For us, some places are unacceptable because they harbor exceptional biodiversity. For others, they are unacceptable because they fundamentally alter someone’s home and way of life. No matter the reasons, the fact that many clean energy projects are being proposed and sited without any regard for the biological and cultural values of the places they’re sited in is actually slowing down the clean energy transition. If developers were forced to site projects in areas with low biological and cultural conflicts, it’s likely we would be building more clean energy projects. As it is, clean energy developers are spending as much time in court arguing in front of judges why they should be allowed to destroy biodiversity as they are actually building projects. If they just proposed a different project somewhere else, perhaps they could spend less time in court and more time in construction.
“But the resources are where they are.” Yes, that’s true. But we don’t need to develop every single possible resource just “because it’s there.” To paraphrase David Brower, if there was a lithium deposit under the Sistine Chapel would we mine that? Would we cover the battlefield of Gettysburg with solar panels? The answer is obviously no. We need to extend that same reverence for the holy to biodiversity. There are certain places we just shouldn’t develop energy production facilities of any kind, regardless of their relative level of carbon emissions. Sometimes, we just need to say no.
But our system is set up to basically force agencies to say yes. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is structurally designed for agencies to say yes, somewhat predicated on the utterly false idea that basically every impact can be mitigated. We don’t have a system in place for revoking mining claims if they are in places too sensitive to mine. BLM argues they have no discretion about whether to offer geothermal parcels for lease – if industry asks, they must comply, they say. And those claims and leases confer the right to develop. So by the time it comes to NEPA and environmental review, the decision as to whether a project gets approved or not is functionally a foregone conclusion.
So, it’s clear that our current environmental regulatory regime is not up to the task of charting a new course for the clean energy transition. We need a plan for where and how to develop clean energy resources on public lands without destroying the biodiversity they harbor. And we need to ensure that our environmental regulators have the tools they need to say no when projects present unacceptable impacts.
Right now, there is no plan. There is no plan for where we will get all the lithium to power all the batteries in our new electric vehicles. There is no plan for which public lands are appropriate to cover in solar panels and which are not. There is no plan for how to conserve hot spring ecosystems and which are too special or sensitive to allow geothermal development near. The government is just evaluating each proposal on its own, dutifully processing the paperwork in a sort of grim Orwellian assembly line bureaucracy – no discretion, no real independent thought, just process the paperwork and move on. The results, as can be plainly seen, are not successful.
Planning can solve so many problems before they start. Endangered species aren’t some mystery – people like to accuse us of hunting around project sites trying to find species to block projects. This is an utter falsehood. Every state, or almost every state, in the country has a NatureServe affiliate which maintains a database of known rare species and their status. Tiehm’s buckwheat was well known to land managers and scientists long before Ioneer started drilling.
What we need is a government-led, large-scale, nationwide, geospatial planning and environmental analysis effort. Look at the whole country, figure out where the lithium resources are, where the geothermal resources are, where is sunny enough for solar, where is windy enough for wind, where has the right topography and water availability for pumped storage. And then analyze those locations – which are potentially appropriate for development? Which have conflicts with biodiversity values or protected areas such that development is inappropriate? Which are sited on or near Native American reservations or lands such that cultural values will be impacted? These aren’t hard questions to answer. The answers aren’t elusive, they’re right there in the biology textbooks and in the hearts and minds of the people, especially the indigenous people, who hold those places dear. Once we get those answers, we could direct resources and permitting authorities to prioritize those projects where impacts are minimized, and could deprioritize or forbid development altogether in those locations which would unduly jeopardize biodiversity or harm indigenous cultural values.
Developing such a plan, and prioritizing based on it, could address the two major issues I described above. Number one, it would help stem the tide of the biodiversity crisis that threatens all life on Earth. And number two, it would help accelerate the clean energy transition by focusing permitting resources on projects that will actually get built and won’t get mired in court for years or decades.
Our friends at Ioneer are a good example. Because of the existential conflicts their project presents to Tiehm’s buckwheat, they still haven’t built their mine, and even as we speak they have drill rigs out at Rhyolite Ridge desperately trying to find more lithium resources because protected critical habitat means protected critical habitat and they’ll have to move their mine away from Tiehm’s buckwheat. Better planning would have informed regulators to disallow any mining activity near Tiehm’s buckwheat to begin with. Go somewhere else, regulators could have said. And we could have avoided this whole mess, and maybe Ioneer would be producing lithium somewhere else without endemic species on it.
Unfortunately, we have no such plan. The government is just dumping trillions of dollars of subsidies into clean energy companies, giving marching orders to regulators, and hoping that the market will sort out the clean energy transition. In some ways our clean energy transition is playing out as a neoliberal market fetishist’s dream – not only is the government taking a hands-off approach to how clean energy is deployed, they’re greasing the skids with unfathomable amounts of tax dollars, supercharging the inefficiencies of the market as speculation is as much of a force as legitimate investment.
But I ask you – do you really think the market is just going to magically sort out the clean energy transition if we just dump enough money into it? Take a look at your health insurance plan – is that a model of an efficient, effective market? Or, go wander down the cereal aisle at the grocery store – is the market efficiently allocating our resources if there are a thousand varieties of cereal, most of which will give you diabetes? Or think about your nearly disposable cell phone, planned to break and be obsolete after just a few years – is the market really looking out for the best interests of consumers or the planet? The answer is, of course not. The market exists for one reason and one reason alone and that is to generate profit for shareholders.
And that, really gets to the crux of the problem – the political economy of our energy system. Large, centralized energy production facilities using resources derived from remote hinterlands, piped into large urban energy consumption centers where the impacts of production are remote and not felt or understood. All under the auspices of some of the largest corporations in the world, many of whom have been granted state-authorized monopolies, holding consumers hostage to the corporations’ primary focus – generating profits for shareholders.
Because we’re locked in to this political economy of energy, rather than prioritizing a clean energy transition that limits harm to biodiversity or exists in harmony with communities, we are prioritizing one that generates the maximal profits for shareholders. The purpose of Nevada’s energy economy is not to deliver clean energy to consumers, it’s to maximize profits for Berkshire Hathaway. So clean energy projects that maximize profits are the ones that get permitted and built first. Damn the tortoises. This same dynamic is readily visible at Rhyolite Ridge – the lithium (that the buckwheat grows in) is right at the surface - cheaper than other places one might extract lithium. Is cheap the highest virtue? It is when you remember that the primary purpose of our energy economy is to generate profits for shareholders.
The intransigence of regulators and the politicians who oversee them to come up with any sort of plan is directly attributable to the power of these market players. Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t want any encumbrances on their ability to generate profits for shareholders. They’re sure as hell not going to let some tortoise get in the way. And they’re not going to let some politicians get in the way by forcing them to deal with the tortoise. Which is why the energy industry is such a generous supporter of political campaigns around the country.
There is of course one notable exception. That is the Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan (DRECP), a planning effort similar to the one I envision above, carried out by BLM in the California desert. The DRECP looked at all the public lands in the California desert, some 11 million acres, and allocated several hundred thousand acres for solar energy development, while setting aside a couple million acres for conservation to offset those impacts.
At the time, we were horrified. It looked like an apocalypse of industrialization for our beloved desert. And in some ways, it is. But the genius insight of the DRECP was to focus those impacts in certain places, while keeping it away from other places altogether. This seems obvious, but no one had really tried this in a regulatory sense until the DRECP.
It was a bitter pill to swallow in 2016 when the DRECP was signed, but basically everyone swallowed it. Environmentalists with few exceptions felt like it was the best deal we were going to get, and so did industry. What’s the evidence of this? Nobody litigated. It was one of the largest land use planning efforts ever undertaken on public lands and nobody sued over it. If that’s not a metric of success, I don’t know what is.
And now here we are, 7 years later, and the DRECP looks inspired. Solar energy is being built in the DRECP-designated areas, whether we like it or not, and those projects are not getting litigated. Meanwhile, over 2 million acres of the California desert has been set aside for permanent protection as National Conservation Lands – a reserve of biodiversity to help offset the losses incurred for clean energy.
If you’d have told me back in 2016 that I would become an evangelist for the DRECP, I would have said you’re nuts. But slap a cheap suit on me and put a bible in my hands, folks, because I’m going door-to-door preaching about planning and the DRECP. Crazy.
So now what? We fight on. We continue battling in the trenches of course, duking it out with industry over rare species and irreplaceable landscapes like Ash Meadows. But the greater effort is, and must be, pushing for planning. Without it, we risk our clean energy transition faltering; and we risk losing the biodiversity that makes life on earth possible.
We’ll have a more detailed run-down of the latest news in a future edition of this missive. But I did want to point you to one highly relevant article…
I had a chance to discuss some of these issues recently with Sammy Roth of the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Roth and co. came to southern Nevada to look at the issues around utility-scale solar development here, and wrote a sweeping longform article a few weeks ago. The article is impressive in scope, bringing in many of the key players from across the spectrum of interests, and is accompanied by compelling photography and a great video. My discussions with Mr. Roth helped crystallize some of the ideas I discuss in this essay, and I think he faithfully represented my viewpoint in the article. I think most regular readers of Mr. Roth would agree that he tends to lean toward the clean energy side of the clean energy/biodiversity equation, but I feel like his position is more nuanced than perhaps he’s given credit for, and that very much came out in this article. I give it my highest recommendation.
We won’t solve all the problems today. But clearly defining them is the first step. Keep on down that long and dusty trail,
-Patrick
Thank you for your insights and clear articulation of what an actual environmental policy might look like.
Having read a lot of Reddit (sadly, need to kick that particular habit) the number of posts I see shift blaming environmentalists for you know caring about the environment while just hand waving away the biodiversity crisis is beyond infuriating.
Wonderful essay. The desert needs people like you to act and advocate on its behalf. The York Fire down in the Mojave is heartbreaking, but it at least is naturally caused I think. But human projects are equally damaging and preventable.