The Sierra Club National defends its support of paving desert wildlands with solar sprawl by saying things like “rooftop solar is great, but we can’t install it soon enough.”
Apparently they really meant that. Our pal Morongo Bill did a little research so brilliant I wish I’d thought of it:
In the screen capture above, the rooftop where the A inside the orange balloon is the building housing their national headquarters in San Francisco, California. Why are there no solar arrays atop this building housing what is alleged to be one of the greenest organizations in the country and self charged with protecting our environment, especially from global warming?
There’s more of his methodology on his Backporch.
Damn good question. The environmental “big dogs” need to get with the program. I wonder how many of Sierra Club’s members agree with this position?
=v= The SC’s membership is reliably more environmental-minded than its leadership.
Distributed generation, with lots of small solar panels on lots of rooftops, seems to me to be the most promising way to reduce our dependence on dirty fuels while also protecting as much habitat as possible. So it’s very disappointing to see the lack of leadership from environmental organizations on this issue. It’s doubly disappointing that they would trade away perfectly good habitat for energy development.
I don’t know their situation, and this doesn’t change their obligations, but there’s a good chance they don’t own the building they’re working out of.
A fair point, OTPR, and if I understand the situation correctly they lease the entire building long-term. Which would certainly make it feasible for them to negotiate a solar lease-style setup between themselves, their landlord, and a firm like Sungevity, at no financial risk to either the Club or the building owner.
What this says to me is that either they’re working on it always a possibility or they just haven’t considered it. My money’s on that second one.
Hi Chris,
Hi Chris, I’m not going to wade into this whole hog, as I don’t have all our talking points down. But I work in that building, for the Sierra Club, and in the past month I have worked with a team of Club activists in California working on distributed generation. We’re all for that. We have high hopes for that.
We’re also doing our best to fight coal plants and get off oil. We don’t want to be against everything. That marginalizes us. So we do support solar in the desert, if it is well-sited. For you, perhaps, there is no such thing. But every solar facility that goes on line can mean a coal plant that never gets built.
The sooner we get to the place were renewables are the first choice for utilities the better.
(Oh, and the Sierra Club does rent the building. I don’t know if there’s been any move to get solar on the roof, but I can tell you that we have wanted to do food composting for some time, but it wasn’t until a year or so ago, when the city launched a program for commercial buildings, that we were able to do so.)
To John Byrne Barry,
Sir, you wrote"We dont want to be against everything. That marginalizes us. So we do support solar in the desert, if it is well-sited. For you, perhaps, there is no such thing. But every solar facility that goes on line can mean a coal plant that never gets built.”
We out here in the hinterlands would sure like to know whether you as a Sierra Club employee,
support this particular project Chris is writing about here at Ivanpah, and actually speaking only
for myself, I guess I’d like to know if you even know anything about this project at all.If you did I think you probably wouldn’t have responded to the post in the fashion that you did.
I don’t want to speak for Chris or anyone else, but for me, I oppose this project with everything I have for many reasons which I have written on, ad nauseum per some people I know, at my blog. I can think of, right off the bat, 2 or 3 projects in the desert that I can support due to the fact that they are sited on poor, low quality land and not prime animal and plant species habitat, etc.
The Rice Project to be built on the site of an old WW2 air force base comes to mind, the Abengoa Solar project built on used up farmland near Barstow is another one that readily
comes to my mind. Both of which I have blogged about. Yes, there are sites that environmentalists can readily support. This is not one of them.
One other thing. Yes there is such a thing as supporting something. There is also the option
of not supporting or half heartedly supporting as well, in effect leaving something to the wolves so to speak, in the guise of the renewable energy barons in this instance. This also
is called by some as sacrificing a pawn in the chess game, unfortunately for the Sierra Club
in this instance you are playing with grandmasters who didn’t need the pawn sacrifice to have your group and the rest of us pretty close to checkmate now. All they had to do was divide and conquer, a strategy that they have used to perfection in this instance.
As far as being hoisted up on the green petard, the club did that to itself. It’s one thing to preach green and sacrifice to the rest of us, it turns out that it’s a little harder to
make the same sacrifices we’re asked to make.
We have said all along, local power, homegrown on rooftops is the way to go. And the club said it’s good but not enough. Now we know that was a hollow statement all along, as spoken
eloquently by the rooftop.
Morongobill
Before this goes any further, I just want to say that John Barry is an old friend, has been for nearly 20 years, and is an excellent backpacking partner and a good man, and commenters here will treat him civilly, period. I may not have to say that given the high caliber of commenters here, but tempers are high - mine included - and this is the Internet. So. Said it.
John, I’m pleased to hear that the Club is working on a DG initiative, and not at all surprised to hear you’re involved.
You say: “But every solar facility that goes on line can mean a coal plant that never gets built.” Solar plants, unless they have some mechanism for energy storage and most do not, cannot replace coal. Coal provides baseload power. Solar provides peaking power power generated in mid-day and afternoon when demand is highest and so what it can actually displace is natural gas or diesel, both of which are used to fuel plants that provide peak demand power. Diesel is definitely worth replacing, so no quibble with that. Natural gas is also dirty (though not as much at the power plant itself) and a source of carbon, but it’s not quite right to speak of solar as replacing natural gas because at least with solar thermal, industrial-scale plants often include a natural-gas-fired component, either to warm the turbine fluid in the morning or to supplement the power produced when the sun goes behind a cloud, which it does often enough even in the desert. So that’s not a straightforward swap. I know you may have said “coal” as a sort of synecdoche for “fossil fuels,” but I just thought I’d clarify that.
Second: “if it’s well-sited.” That’s kind of an elastic phrase: hard to disagree with. Even the most radical advocate of all distributed generation would say that desert solar projects can be well-sited if they’re on rooftops in Barstow. Bill above mentions two projects that have not been uniformly condemned by enviros. (I’m a bit concerned about how close the Abengoa site is to the Harper Lake ACEC, but still: it’s really abused land.) Some Sierra Club desert activists I know have advocated building industrial scale solar in the Mojave River Valley east of Barstow, where there’s old abandoned ag land and existing transmission lines and even the footprint of the old Solar One plant at Daggett.
Here’s the thing, though: For the last two years I’ve been going to Sierra Club California/Nevada Desert Committee meetings, at which desert activists from Sierra Club chapters throughout those two states come together four times a year to discuss a wide range of desert issues, and the Ivanpah SEGS site has come up at every single meeting I’ve attended, and I have not heard a *single* Sierra Club desert activist say they thought that project was well-sited. This is not a group of people likely to be reluctant to voice opinions.
The Sierra Club should be actively soliciting the expertise of its members, some of whom have been active in the Club for decades. It has a pool of knowledge, of intimate familiarity with the lands at issue and how those lands have changed over the last five decades or so. There are some frighteningly smart people at those meetings, the Toiyabe Chapter’s John Hiatt and Craig Deutsche who edits the Desert Report and Tom Budlong from the Angeles Chapter and my DPC colleague Terry Weiner to name only a few. A wise environmental organization, when taking positions on issues involving privatization of public lands, would actively seek the input of in-house experts such as the Desert Committee. The Club has not sought out their expertise. The Desert Committee’s funding has been cut, as has funding for the Desert Report. I recognize that funding is tough everywhere, but there are people already in the Club, already loyal to it and wanting to advance its mission and standing, who could, if they had been consulted at all, have saved the Club what will almost certainly be a disastrous misstep into the wrong side of the history books on Ivanpah. But they weren’t consulted.