Reid just sent me a link to this LAT story about energy "corridors" being proposed in the West. It is nothing less than appalling.
It begins:
"Under orders from Congress to move quickly, the Department of Energy and Bureau of Land Management will approve thousands of miles of new power line and pipeline corridors on federal lands across the West in the next 14 months. The energy easements are likely to cross national parks, forests and military bases as well as other public land.
"Environmentalists and land managers worry about the risk of pipeline explosions and permanent scarring of habitat and scenery from pylons and trenches. Military officials have expressed concern that the installations could interfere with training.
"But industry lobbyists and congressional policymakers said expedited approvals for new corridors were vital to ensuring that adequate power from coal beds, oil fields and wind farms in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho reached the booming population centers of the Southwest."
(Snip)
"ExxonMobil, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas and Electric and others have proposed corridors in the state across Death Valley, Joshua Tree and Lassen Volcanic national parks as well as the Mojave National Preserve, several military bases, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and seven national forests.
"Elsewhere, routes near Moab, Utah, the Cascades and Rocky Mountains have been proposed, some up to five miles wide and 2,000 miles long.
(Snip)
""We don't want to confuse the public," said David Meyer of the department's Office of Electricity Deliverability and Energy Reliability."
Yeah, the public, those idiots...
"Acting at the behest of the nation's largest utilities, Congress in its 2005 Energy Policy Act gave federal agencies until August 2007 to review and adopt major energy corridors across 11 states.
(Snip)
"The legislation was designed to fast-track construction by requiring a single, overarching environmental review of the effect of dozens of energy corridors across federal land. The aim is to avoid time-consuming project-by-project reviews. Federal energy regulators were also given authority to designate power lines in the "national interest," which would allow them to overrule federal agencies or states or counties that withheld approval for segments of projects.
" "They've taken away our sovereignty," said John Geesman, who sits on the California Energy Commission. "We're looking down the barrel of a gun." "
There is much more, and worse. RTWT!
Is there anyone left to vote for? These idiots have managed to offend both environmentalists and the military! With Republicans doing things like this, and Democrats virtually all hopeless on such things as defense, who is left?
2 comments:
Do you think it's time we get off the grid? It just seems to me like we're too dependent on electricity, which should have been a wonderful and freeing technology but it's doing damage!
Heidi hits the nail on the head, but that sucker just won't sink. Congess is acting badly (of course!) but so long as the demand for power continues to grow (esp. in untennably large population centers...like most of the Southwest) we will have no end of this landscape-scale facilitation.
They are removing the tops of mountains in Kentucky to give us more juice! If our purple mountains' majesty aren't sacred enough to save, what hope should big stretches of desert expect?
Being "off the grid" is not possible for everyone. But everyone can use less and need less power if they choose to. But it takes a force of will; there is no use waiting for sensible incentives from governement to use less power. There's money to be made!
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