S2E5: The Problems with Desert Solar

Uncorrected Transcript

[0:01] Hey y'all, Chris here. We're getting this episode to you significantly later than we would have liked. Life has intervened for both of us in work and home life. If you'd like to help us get this out more often and more on time, you can do that by going to 90milesfromneedles.com and clicking on the button that says, Become a Desert Defender.
That will take you to a donation page where you can throw a little cash our way. Thanks and here's the show.

[0:29] Music.

[0:55] Hey, this is Chris. And this is Alicia.
And welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. And we're going to do some chatting about solar energy today.
Those of you who have been listening to our podcast for a while will have noticed us speaking in less than universally glowing terms about utility scale solar projects in the deserts of the Southwest.
And once again, I'll point out that this is not because we have a problem with solar, but it's because we think that there are better ways to do solar and that solar in wild desert habitat has environmental impacts that we can avoid and we want to avoid.
It seems like large solar power plants in old growth desert seem to be the method of first resort for people that are making decisions about these kinds of things.
What we have in mind here is just a general overview of why we think the things about desert solar that we do.
And the reason that this is coming up is because in December, 2022, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that it was going to reopen a process called the Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Solar Energy Development in Six Southwestern States.
It's also called the Solar PEIS. PEIS stands for Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, and that's what we'll call it.

[2:21] The PIS statement? P-I-S. P-I-S. P-I-S.
The Solar PEIS covered the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.

[2:31] It set aside 285,000 acres in those six states to prioritize for solar development in what were were called solar energy zones.
The acronym for that spelled S-E-Z.

[2:44] 285,000 acres devoted to solar development. That is just slightly smaller than the Los Angeles city limits, at least the land portion.
So it's a large amount of land.
In theory, the Bureau of Land Management picked places that had not all that much environmental value to them.
The truth is more complicated, but that was the intent, is to direct solar energy production, to the places that had the least environmental impact.
The PEIS also set aside 80 million acres of BLM lands in those six states called exclusion areas, which were closed to solar development for all kinds of different reasons, resource protection, the wrong kind of topography.
The slope is too steep for these large solar thermal plants that were the popular technology back then. Cultural interests of tribes, things like that, wildlife value, just whatever it was.
So 285,000 acres that were put your solar here and we'll help you out.
80 million acres, by far the largest part was barred from solar development.

[3:52] And then 19 million acres of what were called variance lands, which basically were places where they didn't really have the time or energy to make decisions.
They just said this 19 million acres, we will take each case on an individual basis and you'll have to go through environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. So there were a lot of problems with this. Industry didn't like it because they didn't like any of the solar energy zones for the most part, exception being in Southern California and Riverside County. The Riverside East says has seen a lot of solar development, since, but there are a bunch of solar energy zones that have no solar development. Pretty much everything that's gone in since 2012 when this document was finalized have gone in these variance areas where there was supposed to be no incentive to develop solar.

[4:42] So this is getting really into the weeds, but basically I think the context is necessary to have a discussion of what has come up, which is that we had this huge process, took years.
There were some places like the proposed Iron Mountain CES in Southern California, where we recorded our very first episode out in Sand Draw and Bullard Wash, which is another amazing place.
And we need to actually head out there and record an episode.
It's a road trip. It'd be an overnight. There would be Wickenburg.
There's a really good coffee place there.
Our wish list for overnights is getting longer and longer. Yep.

[5:17] But Bullard Wash is a place where Joshua trees and saguaros grow in the same place.
Those of you who have listened to every single one of our episodes will remember that we were at the other end of that zone with our friend, Jan Emming, at his place in Yucca, Arizona.

[5:33] There's this band of Arizona where the range of Joshua trees overlaps with a range of saguaros, and that's a really precious place. I don't know that this was what caused the Bullard Wash proposed says to be dropped, but in 2010, I did have a meeting with Ray Brady, the BLM guy in the Washington DC office who was the lead on the solar PEIS back then, and said to him that I thought Bullard Wash ought to be excluded.
And he seemed interested and he took some notes. It may be that there was a campaign in Arizona that I just didn't hear about to keep this place off of the books as a solar energy zone. And if so, thank you, because it's a beautiful place. At any rate, so we got this document in 2012. There has been a lot of change since in California. There's been this whole subsidiary project called the DRECP, which again, nobody pronounces phonetically because it would sound like Drek P, but it's the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation plan, which we just found out is going to be left out of the consideration for an updated solar PEIS, which was announced in December, 2022.

[6:43] The scoping period for that, which is the initial comment phase on any project that's going through the NEPA process has just closed.
And the good news is the DRECP is going to be left as it is.
There's good and bad to say about the DRECP, but it is a stronger protection for a lot lands than the solar PEIS of 2012 was. But here's what's happening with the solar PEIS with the update. They're talking about adding five more states to make it the entire West.

[7:11] So in addition to the six southwestern states, there would be Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington. Because solar technology has gotten more efficient and even with the less sunlight that people have up in places like Bend, Oregon, and the Snake River Valley, still make sense.
They also want to take a second look at some of the definitions of exclusion areas.
The original PEIS excluded from consideration any land with more than a 5% slope.

[7:42] It needed to be pretty flat, pretty level. Now they want to see if they can consider lands with up to a 15% slope.
The idea being that now that everybody's doing photovoltaic panels, you don't need absolutely flat land to put those in.
And they are also thinking about just changing the way they approach the variance areas.
So this is going to be a big thing for the next year. Department of the Interior, which is an agency that BLM belongs to, is trying to fast track this, But it really needs to take a while.
There really needs to be some good thinking put into this.
And the potential downside is if it's done badly, it could open up a lot of areas that are very ecologically sensitive or have important cultural resources that need protecting to industrial development.
If it's done right, it could save us from having to play whack-a-mole with one project after another in the variance lands or wherever for the rest of our lives.
And I'm not just talking elderly me, but somewhat younger people like my dear co-host here.
She's on the edge of...
Four T.

[8:48] Music.

[9:12] So anyway, that's a lot of words, but this is why we want to talk about solar because as happens pretty much every time solar energy in the desert, especially, comes up as a news item. And there are people like myself and like Alicia and like a lot of our friends and colleagues who don't 100% support every possible implementation of large scale solar in the desert. When we start to have our words out in public, we get accused of not taking the climate crisis seriously, we get called shills for the fossil fuel industry or shills for the Koch brothers or...
Or even simply just being accused of being naive.

[9:57] The favorite thing I've gotten called for having a nuanced view of renewable energy development is a useful idiot.
And my immediate thought, this was some years ago, my immediate thought was, this guy's half right.
And you can decide which half. We just wanted to go through sort of the 30,000 foot view level.
This is just problems with desert solar 101.
We will probably be doing episodes in depth on some of these issues, but just to give you the introduction to some of the things that can go wrong if we put solar in the wrong place in the desert.
The main bullet points. Yeah.
Here we go. We want to start with a broad level view. The big overriding assumption that goes into the siting of these solar plants is often that there's nothing there worth saving, protecting, or preserving.
That assumption has definitely bothered me. It's like this idea that the desert is like a blank canvas that it's all like the playa at Burning Man just waiting for us to build our stuff that we have there for a blink of an eye in a geologic timescale. It just, it's, we've talked about this before, but it's like, how do you justify killing living things that are potentially millennia old for a project, whether it's a solar project or a supermarket or I don't know, a parking lot that has a useful lifespan of maybe 25, 30 years. It just seems like hubris.

[11:20] Greed and profits. You know how I feel about this. It's the end of every rabbit hole we go down is greed and profits. You mentioned Sandra earlier, just one of a dozen examples I could think of off the top of my head of places that have been put on the chopping block and are either saved from or still waiting to be saved from inevitable development. And The things that we see when we go out there may not look like much to the average eye, but if you spend...
Anytime outside of your car, instead of driving down the road at 75 miles an hour, you'll start to see so much light in these places from the soil, the cyanobacterial communities that live with the lichen and on the rocks. Everything is literally alive out there. Every hole has.

[12:10] Been occupied or is occupied by somebody and that pack rat mittens are a great example that I like to use. The National Park here, Joshua Tree, has carbon dated middens to 30,000 years of continual use. And, you know, to me, there is no justification to come in and say, this 30,000 years that you all have been living here, there's really no value to that to me.
And I own the land. So I'm going to put in a solar field because I think the value that this provides humans is more important than the 30,000 years of history that you and your descendants have here. And for me, that's the hardest part to reconcile with human development, is that we eradicate communities that they've been intact for tens of thousands of years, if not longer.
It's really striking just how hard it is to get people to see what's out there sometimes.
And there's that quote, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair. You also just have sheer honest ignorance. And what I mean by that is we're all ignorant of a bunch of stuff, no matter how educated we are.
You can be the most brilliant rocket scientist in the world and know not a single goddamn thing about Mesopotamian poetry.
Being ignorant is not a bad thing.

[13:30] We all start completely ignorant of everything except how we're feeling.
And some of us are ignorant of how we're feeling.
But the more you sit in a landscape and the more you get to know how that landscape works, the more you understand about what we're going to lose.
If we alter that landscape radically. Alicia and I were taking a walk earlier today to emotionally prepare ourselves for recording.
Walk down this wash near where I live.
And when I first walked this wash, I was overwhelmed with the trash that was in there.
It's a wash that feeds out of a flood control channel that basically drains all of 29 Palms.

[14:11] And so pretty much every time a, like a deflated soccer ball or styrofoam cooler or whatever ends up in the street and gets washed down somewhere in a monsoonal rainstorm, it ends up in my neighborhood.
And there's a lot of off-road tracks going through back and forth.
And when I first saw this landscape, I thought, oh, this is a lot more impacted than the neighborhood I used to live in, which is further uphill and in Joshua Tree and surrounded by judgmental, environmental-leaning neighbors.
And I mean judgmental in a good way.
But we're out there and all that stuff is still true, but we were seeing the holes that kit foxes had dug maybe three years ago and then abandoned.
Have to keep moving and keep digging new burrows because the coyotes find them and coyotes do eat kit foxes. You'd think they'd have canine solidarity, but they don't. We saw, and we will put these in the show notes, we saw tracks of adult quail with little aimless skittering tracks of baby quail among them and accumulated seed pods from acacia trees that had been basically just piling up under a shrub near the acacia for the last several years.

[15:24] It looked like the tree received a thorough sand blasting because the pods were all blasting off in the direction of the prevailing wind.
It was pretty funny. It was a one-sided, the wind had the wind, wind won, tree zero, tree won, I guess, because they get their seeds out.
Yeah, the tree and the wind were both winners. It was a wind-wind situation. Wind-wind.
There is a site of an old homestead where the chimney had fallen over and Packrat had said this is a perfect place for me to build a little house.
Don't forget the Verdon nest. The Verdon nest in the Acacia.
And yeah, the landscape is definitely affected by careless people and not always by careless people doing bad things. Sometimes they set a styrofoam cooler on their front porch and it blows away and they didn't really mean for it to happen.

[16:12] There's still an immense amount of not only ecological activity and wildlife using the area's habitat, but even beauty out there. And that's just what people don't see when they just look at a map, find a flat spot that's near some transmission lines and say, okay, this is all BLM land. We're going to propose our solar project here. And they're thinking about it in terms of empty space where this abstract number of solar panels can go. And just even talking about the value of what's there before the developers come in is a revolutionary act, giving voice to the landscape that can't speak for itself in a way that registers on the stock exchange.
When they think to themselves, it's the perfect place out there in the desert. Nobody's using I think the nobody that they're thinking of are humans.
There are so many bodies out there using it. And I feel like that's one of those levels of separation that humans use to separate themselves from the rest of the natural world. Nobody else is using it.

[17:19] You know? Yeah. And that kind of argument also excludes a whole lot of humans because first off, the Native people are still here.
Yeah. We ignore that at our peril. the first solar PEIS, I talked about that whole Riverside East area, Eastern Riverside County being developed as a solar energy zone. That's a hugely important area to local tribes.
And their input was not solicited nearly enough. They have legal rights to being treated as government to government co-equals. And that was done only on paper. And a huge amount of important cultural sites have been and are being obliterated by development out there.
And it's not even just individual places like this tiny piece of a hill is a sacred site.
It's like the entire landscape. This landscape is not just full of wildlife habitat and rare plants and interesting rocks and blow sand habitat for French toad lizards and dry wash woodland like at Sandra. It's also full of culture. The phrase that I've seen is that the mountain doesn't belong to us, we belong to the mountain.
And if you have a culture in which you don't really see clear dividing lines between your people and the landscape that you live on.

[18:40] And the other things that live on that landscape, and your culture, your songs and your stories, and your religion.

[18:48] If that's all just one kind of big, interrelated nest of connections, then paving 3,000 acres of that landscape in solar panels is an attack on all the different parts of your culture and your self and your being and your people.
And we need to take that seriously. I've just got to share what I'm thinking based on what you just said.
But it harkens back to the episode we did with Melissa Del Bosque on the Border Chronicles and the issues we were dealing with Ducey and the border wall.
It seems like at some point, the white colonial mindset decided that migration is a sign of poverty or low class or it's a bad thing.
Rich people can afford to stay in one place and rich people can afford to have the resources brought to them.
And somehow living in symbiosis with the land and moving from place to place to get what you need and to survive became not okay, look what we did to the native population of this continent as an example. It is just such, to me, it is just the natural way. And if we eradicate all of these areas to bring the resources to the rich people, all of these animals who don't have a voice, they're not rich. Native tribes who don't have a voice, they're not rich enough. People like me, not rich enough. I feel like it really boils down to classism in a way, that's a repeated theme that I see, that it's somehow low class or lowbrow to live off the land and to be in symbiosis with the land.

[20:15] Music.

[21:47] We have to be reminded by law that has been imposed at great cost by activists to consider how sand moves in the desert if we're gonna put a project in. We don't want to think about that. You put up a chain-link fence that stops the flow of sand, you wouldn't think so because chain-link holes are really big, sand grains are really small, but even that just minor interruption causes sand to pile up at the bottom of the fence and that changes the way the sand flows. We don't like to think about how bighorn sheep move across the landscape from place to place. It's only the fact that we are bound to by law that keeps us on track doing that. We don't like to think about the way tortoise genes flow across the landscape over significantly longer time periods. Wait, tortoises wear jeans?
Levi's actually. They're old school. I think that for a while in the 70s they were wearing tort dash.
I'm just trying to find something that rhymes with Jordache.

[22:48] But tortoises don't migrate much. They have their territory and they stick to it.
But they mate across those boundary lines and so the genes can flow back and forth over generations.
When we ignore nature and try to work against it, eventually we're going to see consequences.
Nature bats last. Yeah. And if we'd only pay attention, I feel like we'd save ourselves a whole lot of trouble.
So we could talk about some of the really specific case by case things that have been issues with solar projects.
A big one right now is there are people trying to protect the Western Joshua Tree.
We've had Brendan Cummings on this podcast a couple of times talking about his efforts there.
And one of the reasons that's been complicated is because people want to put solar projects where Joshua Tree Forest now are.
And that's just a really huge example.

[23:38] Is visible from space example of the kinds of ecosystems and organisms that get replaced.
There's all different kinds of wild organisms that have been harmed by solar development.
We talk about the Ivanpah solar plant, which is the, it's a big concentrating solar power tower development South of Vegas, just inside the California line. Hundreds of thousands of mirrors around three power towers. And what people usually think about when they, to hear about that in wildlife is the briefly worldwide story about how this plant fries birds in midair by focusing sunlight. Sort of the ant with the magnifying glass thing that kids sometimes do. I'm sorry, ants. Focusing concentrated sunlight on living things sometimes is nice and warm and toasty and comfortable and sometimes it singes your feathers off and you plummet to the ground. So people will think of that story, which incidentally I I broke at KCET.
People that were paying attention will think of tortoises.
A lot of tortoises had to be moved or...

[24:40] Honestly killed. Sonia Dillard-Richardson Slowly killed. Dr. Richard McKeown Or quickly.
Sonia Dillard-Richardson In an attempt to relocate them. Dr. Richard McKeown Or quickly killed.
They didn't get all the juveniles out. There's no way they got all the juveniles out of there before the construction started.
What people don't usually think about, unless they are desert botanists, is that most of the California population of the white margin penstemon, penstemon albomarginatus, was on that site and is now no longer in existence.
Sonia Dillard-Richardson Jesus. Dr. Richard McKeown It's not a common plant.
There are people trying to protect it legally even as we speak.
And it's just one of the casualties of this stuff. At Sand Draw, we have the beautiful dry wash woodland with the ironwoods and the palo verdes and acacias and a mesquite or two and smoke trees.
And that ecosystem is under direct threat from solar development.
And it occurs all through the desert. concentrated where there is enough water to go through washes, where the topography sort.

[25:41] Of funnels the water from various sporadic rainstorms or monsoons, things like that.
That's an ecosystem that's under serious threat. There are a lot of living things that depend on that. To depart from solar for a minute, but not too far from the Ivanpah project in.

[25:56] An area that is almost certainly going to be protected very soon as the Avikweme Spirit Mountain National Monument, there's a company called Kolneng Wind that wants to put up wind turbines right along the state line, right where a Vico-May National Monument would meet up with Mojave National Preserve and Castle Mountains National Monument. They want to put up giant wind turbines in this area that is one of the best pieces of habitat for golden eagles in the Mojave Desert. So there's all different kinds of wildlife that is affected by renewable energy development if you put it in the wrong place, and they have to be taken into account. We can't just say, oh, the eagles and the tortoises have to take one for the team. We need to get off of fossil fuels for power generation, which is true.
We do need to do that. We need to decarbonize our grid. Yes, that's true. We do need to do that. And so the eagles and the tortoises need to take one for the team. No, we have to look at how much power we're using first. We have to look at where we're generating it, where there are places that solar panels could go that have almost no habitat value.

[27:06] The tops of logistics centers, those roofs or parking lots that need shade for the cars that park there, whatever. I'm not going to say that's no habitat value because there's something living everywhere, but it's minimal habitat value. We haven't even looked at just things that occasionally make the news like putting solar covers over the aqueducts in the state of California and Arizona even more.

[27:28] There's all these other places to put solar that are just a little bit more expensive.
Desert solar is usually about the bottom line rather than about saving the planet.
And I feel like that's the masquerade. Yeah.
They know that they're doing dirty because they want to do it for cheap and make as much money as possible. There's a term for that. They're greenwashing it. Yeah. How else do you expect us to save the environment? It's even defensive and righteous.
Yep. I had a conversation a dozen years ago or so with one of the long-term staff people for the House Natural Resources Committee who said that solar developers would come in and meet with people on the hill and demand indignantly that they be exempted from environmental laws because they are saving the planet, damn it.
God damn it. And they shouldn't have to worry about trivialities like wildlife because they were saving the world. Why are we like this? Where did humans go astray?
We forgot that we belong to the mountain.

[28:29] I think, I think you're right. It's just, I feel like we're so quick to point the finger at the Industrial Revolution. But I'm well read enough that I know that the Greeks thought we already screwed the pooch. The Greeks! Do you know how disheartening that was to read to think that 2,000 years ago we were already feeling guilty about messing with the systems and we thought we had ruined it then? What would the Greeks think of us now?
Oh boy.
Let's see us back in the weeds again. Sorry. That's okay.
Weeds are awesome. I love weeds. When I was a young adult back in upstate New York and borderline homeless and unemployable and having a very limited income, I ate a lot of roadside weeds.
Lamb's Quarters, Keno Podium album, it grows everywhere in the city of Buffalo.
There's so much of it. So I think we've probably covered the interruption of wild habitat pretty well.
One thing that is really important that we will have an episode on, hopefully this year, I would love to set that up, is active sequestration of carbon in long-lived inorganic form in desert soils by ecological processes that are interrupted if you bulldoze the desert.

[29:38] Dr. Robin Kobaly would be a great guest. She's just extremely busy, but she's so engaging, I really want to get her on. But basically, and she can, Robin, if you're listening, I would love for you to call in and correct me if I get any of this wrong. But basically, you have mycorrhizal networks throughout the desert. 80% or more of plants that have been examined of known species of plants everywhere in the world, not just the desert, have relationships with soil fungi in which in a lot of cases the soil fungi will grow into the roots of the plant and they exchange different things. The plants are photosynthesizing, taking sunlight and water and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into sugar and starch. And, so they give sugar and starch to the fungi. The fungi extract nutrients from the soil more efficiently than the plant roots can do by themselves. Sometimes they fix nitrogen and feed that to the plants. And so it's this symbiotic relationship that has been in place for hundreds of millions of years. It's obviously changed through that period. Most of us in old relationships have seen how they've changed over the years. But one thing that plants do, they suck carbon dioxide through the leaves and sometimes through the stems like in Palo Bring it into the plant.

[30:55] And they do that because sunlight allows them to take carbon dioxide and turn it into these longer polymers of carbon that we call sugars.
The roots don't do that.
The roots only breathe out carbon dioxide. They take in oxygen. Plants breathe in oxygen too. They respirate through their stomata, which are occasionally on their trunks, but usually on their leaves.
And some plants will get some oxygen through other means, dissolved in water or whatever, but in the roots they only take in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
So you have this thing where there's some carbon dioxide being brought into the plant up top and then it gets pumped down into the soil and breathed out.
So it's essentially a pump from the air into the soil of carbon dioxide.
Every plant does it, every time it photosynthesizes, any time there's light on a living plant, it's pumping carbon dioxide into the ground.
A lot of that comes back up out.
But for plants with relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, a lot of times those fungi will have coating on the little tendrils of the networks in the soil.
It's a coating of something called glomalin.

[32:07] It's a polysaccharide for those of you who want the chemistry.
And basically it's really long-lived. It's got a great shelf life.
It is made up largely of carbon. It's a polysaccharide, which means a sugar polymer, and it can last a very long time in soil. And so if the fungi are secreting this glomalin, carbon gets deposited in the soil.
Okay, so there's that.
The fungi and the plant roots also will sometimes mineralize carbon.
They will make little crystals of calcium carbonate.

[32:41] And this sounds far-fetched, but when you think about how living things work, you have really simple animals that mineralize calcium carbonate as if their life depended on it because it does, because they're clams and they need shells.

[32:54] They turn free-floating carbon and available calcium into calcium carbonate in enough volume that they have this tidy, really strong shell protecting them.
And we do that. We have... Bones.
And teeth. Living things are really good at taking things out of the air and the water and the soil and turning them into organic chemicals, but we're also really good at turning them into inorganic chemicals like calcium carbonate. And when mycorrhizal fungi do that, they create these layers of calcium carbonate in the desert soil. When it builds up enough and it gets thick enough, we tend to call it caliche. That's long-term carbon storage in the soil. Desert soils can sequester enough carbon this way that let's say a thousand acre patch of desert soil that has intact habitat on it can sequester tons of carbon per year. And that's both in organic matter that's in the soil, the glomalin and the plant roots and things like that. Plants grow, they send down roots, they die up top and the roots will stay down there. They'll decompose a little bit, but a lot of the carbon will stay down there for a long time. But there's also this inorganic carbon, this calcium carbonate that the desert ecosystem builds up and sequesters down in the soil and it stays there and it.

[34:13] Gets added to as long as we leave the vegetation up top alone. When we bulldoze it, we not only lose the ecological community that is building up that calcium carbonate, but we We also create conditions in which that soil can erode because it's not being held down by vegetation, that calcium carbonate can be exposed.
Once caliche is exposed, it's vulnerable to weathering, that carbon will go back into the atmosphere.

[34:39] Rainwater is slightly acidic. It's going through air that has carbon dioxide in it. It forms carbonic acid.
Acid hits calcium carbonate, which is alkaline, and it breaks up the calcium from the carbon, and the carbon gets turned into carbon dioxide and goes into the atmosphere.

[34:59] So when you're bulldozing old-growth desert to put in a solar plant, you better be damn sure that solar plant is going to generate enough electricity that it makes up for not only the carbon that is no longer going to be taken out of the atmosphere, by the living desert community there, but all of the carbon that you could conceivably be releasing back into the atmosphere in the long term over centuries. So this is a really big issue.
And in a less scientific and less colorful language, it's basically like we equip our homes with countless types of filters. It makes no sense that we think our artificially constructed homes need all that filtration, but we can't seem to understand that our planet needs that same filtration. And this is one of those natural filters that you just described, the glitche and how the water goes through and gets filtered clean when it goes down into the aquifer going through that process.
See, for a minute I thought you were talking about a different process too, which is really important, which is the desert pavement that is an inorganic surface in the desert. It's a trap for particulate matter in the air. And they figured this out when they saw over actually Sima Dome pretty much in the lava fields on the west side of the dome. They.

[36:16] Saw a desert pavement that was the same rock as the rock that was beneath all the sand.
There's like a thin layer of basaltic lava stones on top of a huge amount of silt, like 50 feet of silt and then the same age of volcanic rock underneath. And what that meant was that the top layer of rock had been trapping silt for centuries and just rising as the silt built up. The upshot of all this is that process traps particulate matter, which we would otherwise be breathing in downwind. And so this is a huge issue in places like the West Mojave where there's just rampant bulldozing for solar and there's rampant dust storms all all of a sudden, places that are never really seen dust storms before, that still holds the spores of valley fever, which is, it's a real public health issue and people can write it off as unimportant, insignificant.
05.05 Or as in the case of the wonder in mitigated impact declaration, they said dust was going to be a less than significant impact from not only the construction, but the activity on site, which less than significant impact is just not an appropriate way to talk about dust storms.
Yeah, I'm reminded of an old folk song written by the folk singer Charlie King, and this, This was written about nuclear testing in the desert and it's called Acceptable Risks.

[37:38] And the chorus is, oh, they told us it was safe and they swore that it was true.
They said the risks are all acceptable. Acceptable to who?
Okay, we've done wildlife, we've done how dare you, we've done the cultural resources and rural landscape, we've done carbon sequestration, we've done public health with air quality.
I think we could do the alternatives at this point.
The really ironic thing about all this is that there are more sensible ways to do this.
There are easier, faster, less damaging, and more democratic ways of addressing the climate crisis than relying on remote utility-scale generation. And the only reason that we aren't doing it is because the big utilities are calling the shots. They have a business plan that relies on remote generation and transmission and selling power as a monopoly to whoever's in their territory, and they don't want to give that up.

[38:41] Music.

[39:13] So I think we've probably covered the interruption of wild habitat pretty well.
One thing that is really important that we will have an episode on, hopefully this year, I would love to set that up, is active sequestration of carbon in long-lived inorganic form in desert soils by ecological processes that are interrupted if you bulldoze the desert.

[39:37] Dr. Robin Kobaly would be a great guest. She's just extremely busy, but she's so engaging.
I really want to get her on. But basically, and she can, Robin, if you're listening, I would love for you to call in and correct me if I get any of this wrong.
But basically you have mycorrhizal networks throughout the desert.
80% or more of plants that have been examined of known species of plants everywhere in the world, not just the desert, have relationships with soil fungi in which in a lot of cases, the soil fungi will grow into the roots of the plant and they exchange different things.
The plants are photosynthesizing, taking sunlight and water and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into sugar and starch. And so they give sugar and starch to the fungi.
The fungi extract nutrients from the soil more efficiently than the plant roots can do by themselves. Sometimes they fix nitrogen and feed that to the plants. And so it's this symbiotic relationship that has been in place for hundreds of millions of years.
It's obviously changed through that period.
Most of us in old relationships have seen how they've changed over the years.
But one thing that plants do, they suck carbon dioxide through the leaves and and sometimes through the stems like in Palo Verde.
Bring it into the plant.

[40:54] And they do that because sunlight allows them to take carbon dioxide and turn it into these longer polymers of carbon that we call sugars.
The roots don't do that.
The roots only breathe out carbon dioxide. They take in oxygen. Plants breathe in oxygen too. They respirate through their stomata, which are occasionally on their trunks, but usually on their leaves.
And some plants will get some oxygen through other means, dissolved in water or whatever, but in the roots they only take in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
So you have this thing where there's some carbon dioxide being brought into the plant up top and then it gets pumped down into the soil and breathed out.
So it's essentially a pump from the air into the soil of carbon dioxide.
Every plant does it, every time it photosynthesizes, any time there's light on a living plant, it's pumping carbon dioxide into the ground.
A lot of that comes back up out.
But for plants with relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, a lot of times those fungi will have coating on the little tendrils of the networks in the soil.
It's a coating of something called glomalin.

[42:06] It's a polysaccharide for those of you who want the chemistry.
And basically it's really long-lived. It's got a great shelf life.
It is made up largely of carbon. It's a polysaccharide, which means a sugar polymer, and it can last a very long time in soil. And so if the fungi are secreting this glomalin, carbon gets deposited in the soil.
Okay, so there's that.
The fungi and the plant roots also will sometimes mineralize carbon.
They will make little crystals of calcium carbonate.

[42:40] And this sounds far-fetched, but when you think about how living things work, you have really simple animals that mineralize calcium carbonate as if their life depended on it, because it does, because they're clams and they need shells.

[42:53] They turn free-floating carbon and available calcium into calcium carbonate in enough volume that they have this tidy, really strong shell protecting them.
And we do that. We have bones. We have bones and teeth.
Things are really good at taking things out of the air and the water and the soil and turning them into organic chemicals, but we're also really good at turning them into inorganic chemicals like calcium carbonate. And when mycorrhizal fungi do that, they create these layers of calcium carbonate in the desert soil. When it builds up enough and it gets thick enough, we tend to call it caliche. That's long-term carbon storage in the soil.
Desert soils can sequester enough carbon this way that let's say a thousand acre patch of desert soil that has intact habitat on it can sequester tons of carbon per year. And that's both in organic matter that's in the soil, the glomalin and the plant roots and things like that. Plants grow, they send down roots, they die up top and the roots will stay down there. They'll decompose a little bit, but a lot of the carbon will stay down there for a long time. But there's also this inorganic carbon, this calcium carbonate that desert ecosystem builds up and sequesters down in the soil and it stays there and it.

[44:12] Gets added to as long as we leave the vegetation up top alone. When we bulldoze it, we not only lose the ecological community that is building up that calcium carbonate, but we also create conditions in which that soil can erode because it's not being held down by vegetation, that calcium carbonate can be exposed. Once caliche is exposed, it's vulnerable to weathering, that carbon will go back into the atmosphere.

[44:38] Rainwater is slightly acidic. It's going through air that has carbon dioxide in it. It forms carbonic acid.
Acid hits calcium carbonate, which is alkaline, and it breaks up the calcium from the carbon, and the carbon gets turned into carbon dioxide and goes into the atmosphere.

[44:58] So when you're bulldozing old-growth desert to put in a solar plant, you better be damn sure that solar plant is going to generate enough electricity that it makes up for not only the carbon that is no longer going to be taken out of the atmosphere, by the living desert community there, but all of the carbon that you could conceivably be releasing back into the atmosphere in the long term over centuries.
So this is a really big issue. And in a less scientific and less colorful language, It's basically like we equip our homes with countless types of filters.
It makes no sense that we think our artificially constructed homes need all that filtration, but we can't seem to understand that our planet needs that same filtration.
And this is one of those natural filters that you just described, the glitche and how the, water goes through and gets filtered clean when it goes down into the aquifer going through that process.
See, for a minute I thought you were talking about a different process too, which is really important, which is the desert pavement. That is an inorganic surface in the desert. It's a trap for particulate matter in the air. And they figured this out when they saw over actually SEMA dome pretty much in the lava fields on the west side of the dome. They saw a desert pavement that was the same rock as the rock that was beneath all the sand.

[46:20] Thin layer of basaltic lava stones on top of a huge amount of silt, like 50 feet of silt and then the same age of volcanic rock underneath.
And what that meant was that the top layer of rock had been trapping silt for centuries and just rising as the silt built up.
The upshot of all this is that process traps particulate matter, which we would otherwise be breathing in downwind.
And so this is a huge issue in places like the West Mojave where there's just rampant bulldozing for solar and there is rampant dust storms all of a sudden, places that are never really seen dust storms before.
That still holds the spores of valley fever, which is, it's a real public health issue and people can write it off as unimportant, insignificant.
Or as in the case of the wonder in mitigated impact declaration, they said dust was going to be a less than significant impact from not only the construction but the activity in sight, which less than significant impact is just not an appropriate way to talk about dust storms.
Yeah. I'm reminded of an old folk song written by the folk singer Charlie King, and this was written about nuclear testing in the desert, and it's called Acceptable Risks.
And the chorus is, oh, they told us it was safe and they swore that it was true.
They said the risks are all acceptable.
Acceptable to who?

[47:47] Music.

[49:24] Okay, we've done wildlife, we've done how dare you, we've done the cultural resources, and we've done carbon sequestration, we've done public health with air quality.
I think we could do the alternatives at this point.
The really ironic thing about all this is that there are more sensible ways to do this.
There are easier, faster, less damaging, and more democratic ways of addressing the climate crisis than relying on remote utility scale generation. And the only reason that we aren't doing it is because the big utilities are calling the shots. They have a business plan that relies on remote generation and transmission and selling power as a monopoly to whoever's in their territory. And they don't want to give that up. And here's this new technology that is threatening to upend our business model.
A solar panel doesn't care whether it's out in the desert, or on a rooftop, or on top of a landfill somewhere, or on the space station.
It's all photons.
It's all turning into electrons.

[50:34] You can put a million of them together all at once, or you can put four of them together all at once. They're going to work the same way.
There's no reason why you have to have giant piles of them out in the desert.
You could have a giant number of small piles of them in a neighborhood or in a city. You, get these millions of solar panels that could be going on hundreds of thousands of houses, and this is threatening to the utilities. And they are reacting with political pressure to slow or stop the growth of this industry unless they can control it. And so they are, simultaneously pushing for really easy access to large amounts of public land.
And they are pushing governments like the state of Nevada and the state of California to cut back on incentives for what we generally call rooftop solar.
We're sitting under some right now as we record this.

[51:29] It also includes things like parking lot, solar carports, and solar power on landfills, and just anywhere you can put it in the built environment, it could go.
But utilities want it all in a few extremely large arrays, somewhere far away from where it's being used so that they can then have transmission lines, which are guaranteed profit center for utilities to ship it to where it's needed rather than having it 10 feet away from where it's being used like right now.
Can we just go back to living in caves, please?
It'd be cozy. This is all so complicated. This is getting really in the weeds.
But I think people picture their lifestyle continuing in the current way and people picture.

[52:16] Being able to just have uninterrupted power, not having to think about, oh, we're working off the solar battery now and we have to not run the 3D printer until nine o'clock, whatever it is. People mostly don't want to have to challenge capitalism.
They don't want to challenge their own comfort.
Yep. But I don't think we need to challenge our comfort all that much. Look at the really energy efficient societies in places like Northern Europe, the Scandinavian countries.
Change is uncomfortable. Yeah. Change itself is uncomfortable.
People don't want to change. The utilities companies don't want to change. The average person, I am an advocate. I believe in protecting nature and defending animals, but I have a hard time moderating myself and by comfort I mean that unlimited demand that we seem to expect. Leaving the water running while we're doing dishes, while you're scraping your tongue and brushing your teeth, standing in the shower for an extra 10 minutes to relax your back. These are all things that we do that are wasteful that are... there's eight...

[53:16] Billion people out there and there's easily 500 million using water excessively that are just average human beings. The population of the United States and Europe alone are excessive. And that's the kind of comfort that I'm talking about is that we literally have to talk about going back and living in a cave, but it's like finding that middle ground, acknowledging where we've come from.
I'm going to steal a page from the usual Alicia comment book and say, I just want to give a little bit of slack to people that enjoy aspects of not living in a cave.
I myself very much enjoy not having cholera and a certain degree of modern comforts like relatively safe to drink water and not getting hypothermia in my house and things like that.
I like that. I'm not advocating that anybody go without that.
If people want to live in caves, which I often do, I go camping in the winter.
Good for your soul. But I don't think we're talking about depriving people all that much.
But I feel like that's the straw man argument that gets thrown out.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Is that, and you and I have both had this said to us in comments on social media. People.

[54:28] Don't want to go back to living in caves. And that is not what we are suggesting.
I'm more and more impatient with that argument. When people say that, it's often in response to comments like, we need to go back to 1990 levels of electrical consumption.
And they say that and my response is basically the...

[54:51] Opposite and far more insulting and obscene converse of OK Boomer. AMT – Man.
JS – And 1990 was fine. AMT – Sorry, you were living in a cave in 1990, bro?
JS – There were some people I knew, actually. But that was voluntary. In 1990, I had an, electric coffee grinder. AMT – Ooh.

[55:11] JS – I had coffee shipped to me, not particularly to me, but shipped to where I could get it and it was good coffee. In 1990, there was really good beer. It was electrically refrigerated. That was nice.
I didn't have to walk to school uphill both ways. I was driven in a comfortable car every day.
No snow in San Diego County.
There was once. It was around 1990. I think I was in kindergarten and it snowed in San Diego County at the lower elevations and it was a huge fucking deal. So stand yourself corrected.
Okay. Excellent.
And it snowed this past week in San Diego County.
Oh, speaking of which, in our show notes, look for Jack the dog cavorting in the snow. I will post a video.

[55:54] He's awfully cute. But basically, I mean, that kind of argument is entirely a straw man, like you said.
And the worst one, the absolute worst one, in my opinion, because it just shows that the person is absolutely not engaging with anything that we've said is when you lay out arguments like the ones we've been laying out, both for how not to do solar and how to do solar, and they respond with, you're just nimbys.
05.10.10 Yeah, I mean, it's the difference between someone who wants to say there's a problem and someone who says, I see a problem and I'd like to offer some solutions.

[56:28] Those people don't want to offer any solutions. And that's what you and I are trying to do here is just bring some solution-oriented conversation to something that is very clearly a problem to everybody who's not profiting from it.
There's something special though about that. That's a phenomenon.
People will just dismiss, people won't listen. People say, oh, she's got an agenda.
He's just being hysterical. I like how you said she isn't being hysterical.
That's very nice of you.
Yeah, I just, I rethought that part way through. But the NIMBY thing really gets to me because here I am saying we shouldn't put this stuff far away where we can't see it, we should be putting it where we live, on our houses, in our shopping malls, in our carports, in our backyards.
We should be putting this in our backyards.
You literally did put it in your backyard. And the person says, you're just a nimby.
And it is not constructive to respond with, you're just an idiot.
But really, do you think about what words mean?

[57:25] It's just really frustrating. And that's all I can really helpfully say about that.
We want this shit in our backyards. And most utilities don't want to tell you the truth because they know it's about making money at the end of the day.
Their bottom line is more important than the Earth.
It doesn't feel right. It feels depressing that we're just killing the planet so that we can consume more resources. Yep.
And we will talk in a later episode about how to contend with just how depressing this shit is.
It's not 100% depressing. There are victories.
Hoping for one on the topic that Alicia's episode last time around covered.

[58:07] Thank you all, by the way, for your support, either through stopwonderin.org or your direct comments to the county.
It was greatly appreciated by all parties involved fighting for the land out there.
Yep, and thanks for getting me off my butt to get comments in on that.
I'll also point out since we're winding to a close here that coming up later this year, 90 Miles from Needles will be having a short series, a special podcast under the 90 Miles from Needles banner on the Amargosa Basin and the wonderful natural resources to be found there, the Wild and Scenic River, Death Valley National Park, Badwater, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, 282 feet below sea level where the Amargosa River ends up, the springs and marshes and such north of Beatty, Nevada, where the Amargosa River rises and some of the many environmental issues and native rights issues that occur along this very short, very confined river that...

[59:12] Has just really won a special place in my heart. And as soon as we get Alicia up there, it'll win a special place in her heart, too.
We've already talked about pupfish in the Amargosa Basin, Shoshone pupfish, and the Devil's Hole pupfish is up there, too.
Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.
Look for that this summer.
Titled to be determined, but think of it as the Amargosa podcast.
And there will be more on that coming up. And you just never know what Alicia's going to come up with, so hold your breath. And we'll talk to you soon.

[59:41] Music.

[59:48] This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Chris Clark and Alicia, Pike. Thanks to Martine Mancha for our fine podcast artwork.
You can check out new T-shirts available on our website at 90milesfromneedles.com.
And thanks to folk singer and composer Charlie King for the use of a snippet of his song Acceptable Risks, which is always on topic.
You can hear more of Charlie's work on Apple Music. I especially like the dual album set containing the albums Vaguely Reminiscent and Somebody's Story.
I recommend the song Who's the Criminal here. We miss you Bruce Byer.
If you like what we're doing here with the podcast, you can support us financially allowing us to do more work like this by going to 90milesfromneedles.com, and clicking on the button that says Become a Desert Defender.
We'll be bringing you more desert news from Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Northern Mexico, New Mexico, and California in the weeks to come so stay tuned.

[1:00:46] Music.