“What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is my own.” James Joyce penned those words while writing Ulysses, but he could have easily written them were he composing a report on the political attitudes of the pseudo-elite greenie left of the modern era.
From an article by Greg Rehner at Fox News:
California clean energy project threatens thousands of protected Joshua trees: reports
A California-based renewable energy company plans to clear thousands of protected Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert to make way for a solar project that will generate electricity for nearly 180,000 homes in coastal neighborhoods instead of the impacted communities, according to reports.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the company, Avantus, is planning to build the Aratina Solar Project on 2,300 acres near Boron and Desert Lake, California, two towns in Kern County.
And, according to Rehner, this construction project spanning “2,300 acres will mean the “destruction” of more than 3,500 “protected” Joshua trees. So, not only will the electricity generated be diverted away from the community that’s actually generating it, but the people who live there will now be left with an ugly landscape of barren desert, screaming of corporate colonialism and “green” elitism.
Here’s this, also from Rehner:
Residents of the poverty-stricken towns are angered by the project, not just because of the construction dust, but also because the land where the solar facility will be located is home to endangered desert tortoises.
The residents’ concerns reportedly were ignored by county officials, who unanimously approved the project.
(Somebody better check the county officials’ bank accounts.)
But, it gets worse. This is from the Aratina Solar Project’s website:
The project consists of a solar array with a solar generation capacity of up to 530 MWac and an up to 600 MWac battery energy storage system.
So, not only is the company coming in and destroying one of the most unique aspects of the California landscape, they’re rubbing salt in the wound... and leaving a battery storage system behind. Of course, this battery storage system will use lithium… and we all know how well lithium and California go together; from a blog I wrote on May 24th:
SD firefighters fly in fire experts to tackle lithium battery fire still blazing from last week
[A]ccording to San Diego journalist Amy Reichert, the San Diego fire department has elected to fly in fire experts to “study” the fire because they have no idea how to manage the blaze, estimating that it may take another week or week-and-a-half to get the fire back under control—meanwhile, poisonous fumes from burning lithium batteries continue to spew into the air.
Yeah, that fire started May 15th, and as of four days ago… it was still going. At this point, we’re going on three weeks.
In August of last year I wrote an essay on the “green” colonialism movement after a wind turbine disposal company exploited a “modest Texas town” and turned it into a “dumping ground” for decommissioned and expired turbine blades:
In 2017, a Washington-state company called Global Fiberglass Solutions came along, promising an exciting new way to repurpose the blades, and since then, GFS has been dumping the blades in the far-off land of Texas. According to the Texas Monthly article, the managing director himself admitted that only a fraction of the stockpile had ever been ‘recycled.’
Destroying carbon-consuming trees in favor of problematic “carbon neutral” technologies, all so the coastal denizens can feel eco-friendly and virtue signal their “sustainability,” is peak irony—and pain.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license.