Coyote Crossing

Our pal Bev over at Magickcanoe describes a heretofore undiscussed hazard of ATVs.

1 comment on "“Dumb-ass-teroids”"

Arduous day of job huntage here, but I wanted to share a couple things of a non-April Fool nature.

A couple weeks back climate activist Joseph Romm posted a screed on his blog Climate Progress against those shortsighted people who would blithely defend the desert against massive, slightly green-tinged industrial developments. Romm’s done some exemplary work pointing out the likely effects of climate change, and his book The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact And Fiction In The Race To Save The Climate is one of the most important texts written in English on the topic of energy and climate change, ever. Romm has no trouble seeing through the PR pushed by hydrogen boosters, but seems to have trouble being as dispassionate about concentrating solar on wild lands. Among the passages that got me especially riled in his post:

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) appears to like deserts so much that she wants them to stretch from Oklahoma to California and cover one third the planet.

The AP reported Friday, “Feinstein seeks [to] block solar power from desert land“:

“Nineteen companies have submitted applications to build solar or wind facilities on a parcel of 500,000 [Mojave] desert acres, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Friday such development would violate the spirit of what conservationists had intended when they donated much of the land to the public.

“Feinstein said Friday she intends to push legislation that would turn the land into a national monument, which would allow for existing uses to continue while preventing future development.”

I am sympathetic to “conservationists,” but mostly to those who are trying to conserve what matters most, a livable climate.

And:

Deserts are certainly fragile, inhospitable eco-systems — a key reason that nobody should want them spreading over one third the planet or the entire U.S. Southwest for 1,000 years.

Some people may see progressive sentiment there. I see a guy sitting in a comfortable chair in Washington DC making pronouncements about how the desert has to sacrifice so that some grand plans can be carried out. Scratch a DC “serious environmental policy player,” get Floyd Dominy.

Larry Hogue let me know about the post so I could post a comment that made his look reasonable, and he then held forth a bit at Desert Blog. Have a read.

In that post Larry talks about a Google Map to which he gave me editing access, and I highlighted a few areas in the Mojave that might theoretically actually be amenable to concentrating solar development. These are areas that have already had the desert flora and most of the fauna removed, have been graded and deprived of any ecological value, areas in which a massive industrial solar development might actually constitute an environmental improvement.

They are alfalfa farms. The Mojave Desert is a leading US producer of alfalfa. Alfalfa is a low-value crop — grossing maybe a couple thou an acre in a good year — that needs abundant water. Mojave Desert alfalfa farmers irrigate either with water from the California Aqueduct, which could be used more efficiently elsewhere or left in the rivers for struggling salmon, or they pump groundwater, which is fast being depleted. Either irrigation method adds to the carbon burden because of pumping.

Here’s a spot The Raven and I drove past last weekend:

View Larger Map

That’s just east of the Palmdale Airport. Each of those big circles is an alfalfa field, watered via center-pivot irrigation, each occupying much of a quarter-section — a quarter square mile, or 160 acres. Larry points out that eSolar offers a concentrating solar technology that could be deployed on a site that size, with output in the 46 megawatt peak load range.

I see 23 quarter-sections of almost completely disturbed land there, all adjacent. 23 times 46 megawatts is a little over a terawatt of generating capacity.  That would power 2/3 of the homes in San Bernardino County at their 2007 electricity consumption rates, more if conservation measures were instituted. The land is close to a city with good housing, meaning that workers wouldn’t offset most of the carbon savings of the plant by commuting several hundred miles to work each week, and that less of the power would be lost in transmission to end users.

The Mojave ranks second only to Wisconsin in US alfalfa production, an artifact of unnaturally cheap energy and water. An ecologically sane society would stop desert alfalfa farming altogether as a waste of both water and energy on a crop that can be grown without irrigation in the humid east. Repurposing those environmentally destructive desert alfalfa farms to produce solar electric power.

You might tool around the desert with Google Maps and see how many of those center-pivot irrigation fields you can find. Helendale, CA has one, and 46 megawatts generated there would generate three times the power consumption of the whole town. Talk about a source of municipal income.

And if you have Google Earth installed on your machine, you can download a dataset from NRDC that shows protected areas in the desert, from National Parks and Preserves to BLM wildernesses: places that deserve better than to be paved with mirrors because policy analysts in DC decide getting people to spend forty bucks on an LED light bulb is too big a sacrifice.

3 comments on "Desert solar updates"

Because I know there are one or two people scrambling to come up with something for CotA, I’m going to publish it on Thursday rather than Wednesday. Send in your submissions! And thanks to those of you who’ve submitted already. The list is a little shorter than for the previous CotAs, but there are some damn fine posts here.

1 comment on "Pushing CotA back one day"

A jaguar whiles away its life at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. FWS Photo.

From the Arizona Daily Star:

A federal judge overruled an agency’s decision today that had stopped preparation of a recovery plan and designation of prime protected habitat for the endangered jaguar in the Southwest.
District Judge John Roll’s ruling essentially said that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to prove its case that the jaguar is primarily a foreign species and that there is no important habitat for it in Arizona and New Mexico. Roll ordered the service to return on January 8 of next year with a new decision on critical habitat and a recovery plan.
The ruling is a big victory for the Center for Biological Diversity, which had filed suit challenging service decisions on both issues, and the Defenders of Wildlife, that had sued against the recovery plan decision only.

The Center for Biological Diversity has more.

3 comments on "Some happier jaguar news"

Some upsetting news from our friends at the Center for Biological Diversity. Cut and pasted from an email alert sent out by CBD’s Kieran Suckling:

Two weeks ago the last known American jaguar died. Not in the wild. Not by mistake. He was euthanized on a stainless-steel table in Phoenix.

When the state-sanctioned vet said it was better for Macho B to die this way than in the wilderness, where he had lived for 15 years, I was taken aback. When the vet said Macho B could have lived another two months, I wondered: Why the rush to euthanize him? When the vet said Macho B’s death was “necessary” due to long-term kidney failure, I called for an independent investigation.

The story just didn’t add up.

The first of the independent investigations is complete, but state and federal wildlife agencies won’t release it. The Arizona Daily Star, however, talked to the investigators and confirmed my worst fears.

Tissue samples show no sign of kidney failure. Indeed, University of Arizona pathologist Sharon Dial stated that, “For a supposed 15-year-old cat, he had damned good-looking kidneys.”

The euthanization was rushed and unnecessary. Macho B was likely suffering from severe dehydration, probably brought on by his snaring, anesthetizing, and collaring. Rather than being killed, said Dial, Macho B should have been given intravenous fluids for 24 to 48 hours. There was just not enough information to support euthanizing him so quickly.

Macho B was injured, possibly fatally, during capture. Though the wildlife agencies publicly denied Macho B’s death was caused by “capture myopathy” (i.e. stress and injury), internal memos stated: “Department personnel suspected capture myopathy/renal failure.” Only after the Star’s investigation was it revealed that Macho B’s paw was severely swollen, and deep scratch marks were found seven feet up the tree where he was snared.

The necropsy was botched. Investigations into the cause of death have been hampered by a decision to do a “cosmetic” rather than a full necropsy so that Macho B’s pelt could be stuffed for “educational” presentations. Why and who deemed this more important than a full investigation?

The only good news to report is that the Center for Biological Diversity’s lawsuit to establish a federal recovery plan and protected critical habitat for the jaguar is going well. In a hearing last Monday, the federal judge peppered the government’s lawyer with skeptical questions, showing his discomfort with how the agency has continually changed its rationale for not protecting America’s jaguars.

Establishment of a federal recovery plan would likely have prevented the death of Macho B, and it certainly would have prevented what one pathologist called a “lack of total transparency” in how the post-capture handling has been conducted

More on the story is available here. CBD’s Jaguar Legal Defense Fund is asking for your donations.

6 comments on "Jaguar Death Was Unnecessary"

2 comments on "Saddleback Butte sunset"

Under this vault of stars I am content.
Stuck fast to this small rock I am at ease.
Minuscule, ego fading by degrees
and what remains of little consequence.
Only the wind and stars, and nighttime shades
of loves abandoned, fire going cold
as in the embers images unfold.
Crushed there, beneath the fallen palisades
of what my life had been, of all my owned
identity, the burdensome façade
torn down abrupt, as by a jealous god;
beneath my stony wrack, all limber-boned
and new, pellucid, clear, I watch the stars
my vision all the clearer for the scars.

3 comments on "Stargazing"