Coyote Crossing

On “exploding saltpeter”: a correction

In October I posted a complaint about really bad science reporting that was based on a newspaper’s coverage of some egregiously wrong claims about molten salt thermal storage.

Those claims were made by the couple behind “FriedCranes.org,” and

A note for future historians if Obama loses in 2012

[Update: What does the Desert Tortoise Website actually cost?]

If, in November 2012, the incumbent in the Presidential election loses the State of California by one vote, and the course of the nation is thereby altered, I would like to take this

Hundreds of tortoises dead at Ivanpah?

David Danelski reports in the Riverside Press-Enterprise:

More than 3,000 desert tortoises would be disturbed by a solar project in northeast San Bernardino County and as many as 700 young ones would be killed during three years of building, says

The fleeting idea of permanence

I wrote an essay about a dozen years ago that is now obsolete, a hopeful piece about eternity in a marriage that has since ended. There is a line in it:

The year that Becky and I were married, we drove south to an un-named valley near Blythe, a

Larry Hogue’s Ivanpah Video

Larry’s put together a really lovely video-slideshow on YouTube to show what we’re losing at Ivanpah. Spread it around!

And don’t forget to sign the … (continues)

What once was desert, from the air

Erin Whitefield photo, Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station construction site.

There are more photos, and some description of each, at Basin and Range Watch, whose proprietors have stronger stomachs than … (continues)

Climate, Biodiversity, and Colonizing the Desert (Three Maps)

I went to a conference today, and I learned some good things about which I will be writing shortly, but before I do that I wanted to share with you a couple of maps I saw at the conference, and a third I decided to put together myself to see what

The Solar Energy Industries Association visits Coyote Crossing

“Front-paged” from a comment on the previous post, a disappointingly content-free piece of flackery from the Solar Energy Industries Association.

This comment is in reference to your post, “Desert Solar is Not Renewable Energy”:

Which is why I

Soullessness

Doctor Science kindly reposted one of my articles over at Daily Kos, and there are more sympathetic and interested commenters there than I would have guessed, or hoped. It seems the campaign to inspire people to preserve desert wildlands has made

A Call for a Standard: Zero Net Loss of Desert Wildlands

This is a nice little video in support of the California Desert Protection Act of 2010. Watch it. I have a question I’ll ask afterward.

Who Needs a Desert? Solar Power in the Mojave from Peter Rhalter on Vimeo.

It’s a nifty little debunking of

A trip to the Yuha Desert

My brief account of business conducted in the Imperial Valley this weekend is up at … (continues)

Morongo Bill Visits Ivanpah

Coyote Crossingian* Morongo Bill left his Backporch for a couple days and went out to what old desert hands still call the “East Mojave” — The Mojave National Preserve and my adopted home, Ivanpah Valley.  He took a hike on the site of the proposed

Solar strip mining

If you wondered whether I might have been indulging in hyperbole of late in describing the solar energy barons’ plans with phrases like “paving the desert with mirrors,”  I wouldn’t exactly blame you. Certainly it’s not the whole desert, you might

Destroying the Joshua trees in order to save them

The soil here is tawny, pale with a reddish cast, alluvium washed down out of the Black and Date Creek mountain ranges, and the Grayback and Weaver mountains behind them. Wind and flash flood have rendered the rock, pulverized it. Soft lava and old

Solar Colonialism

The introductory chapter of historian Gray Brechin’s must-read Imperial San Francisco is entitled The Urban Maelstrom. The chapter begins with a reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s A Descent Into The Maelstrom, a tale of the now-eponymous sea storm with

Desert solar updates

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

Route 66 national monument?

Some of the best news I’ve heard in a very long time, from the Riverside Press-Enterprise:

Preservationists worried about military expansion and renewable energy development in the California desert are pitching a plan to create a vast national

Solar Rush

Via Larry Hogue, an article on the National Parks Conservation Association website:

The Mojave Desert is on fire. Private land worth $500 an acre five years ago is now selling for as much as 20 times that amount, with Fortune 500 companies

Could green kill the desert?

Biologist Bruce M. Pavlik, author of The California Deserts: An Ecological Rediscovery, which I’m working my way through this week, has a great piece in the Los Angeles Times on Big Solar vs. the deserts.

The costs of industrializing the

Ivanpah Valley: Worth more than megawatts

… (continues)