The other day, I was talking to a recently graduated biologist who had been hired by the utility company and was working with the government, BLM, and local landowners on mitigating some of the concerns which will be documented into an environmental impact report for an alternative energy project transmission line which will then go up and over a chain of mountains, and into those 460 square miles of concrete that people call Southern California and Los Angeles.
Okay so let's talk about this for second shall we? One thing I thought was quite fascinating is we were told by our political leaders that we were going to usher in a new age of alternative energy.
We were told that the fossil fuel industry had failed us by causing too much pollution, and was not providing us the energy we needed.
We also realized that we needed to upgrade our grid and our transmission lines.
One of the biggest problems has been the EPA or Environmental Protection Agency, along with all the rules and regulations and all of the Environmental Impact Report lawsuits which seem to stop almost every energy project.
Now then, I live out in the California desert in a resort town area, and not too far from here they're going to put in a giant solar farm.
Whereas it is true that the parent company went bankrupt and it will not be able to pay back its guaranteed federal loans, the project is still on slate, and someone's going to figure out a way to pick up the pieces and make it work, so not everything will go to waste.
Still, the big hold up now happens to be the endangered species known as the; Desert Turtle.
And there aren't very many of them left, but they live out there in the desert where the path of these massive transmission power lines must be placed so they can link up with the giant solar farm if it ever gets built.
In many regards, I guess this is job security for all the folks who graduated from college with environmental degrees, they are out doing fieldwork to save this little animal, even though many of them have never seen one in the wild, only in captivity.
Nevertheless they are out there somewhere, and these fieldworkers are looking for clues, perhaps footprints of the infamous desert turtle which is not only stopped many energy projects in the past, but is now preventing that elusive alternative energy future we were promised.
Please consider all this and think on it.