When you hear of plans to multiply solar fields and windmills by a hundredfold as the pathway to nirvana, think of this:
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meet the people running the country’s energy policy
California’s Governor Noisome, who is planning to run for president next year and must expand his appeal to non-crazies, has proposed a massive program for desalination plants and reservoirs. But even he recognizes the problem:
In his news conference, Newsom also emphasized his frustration with the bureaucratic process, which often [always – Ed] slows down the implementation of climate plans like this one.
"The time to get these damn projects is ridiculous, it's absurd, it's reasonably comedic," Newsom said.
COSTA MESA, Calif., May 12 (Reuters) - California regulators on Thursday rejected a $1.4 billion desalination plant on environmental grounds, dealing a setback to Governor Gavin Newsom, who had supported the project as a partial solution for the state's sustained drought.
The California Coastal Commission voted 11-0 to reject the proposal by Poseidon Water, controlled by the infrastructure arm of Canada's Brookfield Asset Management (BAMa.TO), to build the plant on a low-lying coastal site at Huntington Beach, near the town of Costa Mesa, about 30 miles (50 km) south of Los Angeles.
The plant was designed to convert Pacific Ocean water into 50 million gallons (189.3 million liters) of drinking water a day.
[Better the poor have no water than water that might have to be subsidized by taxpayers — hooray! Fiscal conservatism arises among the followers of Mother Gaia. Solar boondoggles next?)
That is enough for 400,000 people, but the plant would use a process that staff experts at the commission said would devastate marine life and expose the plant to future risk of sea level rise while producing expensive water too costly for low-income consumers.
Environmentalists who have opposed the project for years burst into celebration after the vote in a Costa Mesa hotel conference room.
Representatives of Poseidon issued a statement expressing disappointment but made no comment on whether they would attempt to revive a project in which they have invested more than 20 years and $100 million.
Any new proposal for the site would face difficult odds or have to undergo significant redesign, so thorough was the staff report in detailing its flaws.
"It was a defining day for the for the Coastal Commission," said Susan Jordan, a plant opponent and director of the California Coastal Protection Network. "When you have a project like this that is so damaging over the next half century, you really can't allow that to move forward."
The first Governor Brown and the legislature at the time laid out a plan in the early 70s for new reservoirs and pipelines to accommodate the water needs of the state. Since then, the population has doubled, and not only have none of the proposed plans been started, and they never will, but the state legislature has bowed to the environmentalist and diverted half the water supply to non-agricultural and residential use; in other words, to preserve the snail darter and the bumpy frog.
There will be no desalination plants built, the sole nuclear power plant remaining will be shut down in 2 1/2 years (Noisome is trying to extend the 2025 deadline for its termination, but he won’t succeed), and there will certainly be no 10,000-acre solar farms or 1,000-acre windmill factories. Which won’t matter, because the transmission lines that would be required to bring the electricity generated by those unicorn fantasies will never be built, either.
High-speed train to nowhere, anyone?
And it’s not just California that will block all the new infrastructure that’s required to bring about the net-zero mirage: After it had been approved by every state and federal environmental agency review board with jurisdiction, Maine voters killed the construction of a 100-yard wide transmission corridor that would have brought Canadian hydropower to New England (a route that was in Maine only because New Hampshire blocked its construction there); prevented windmill farms from going up because they would negatively affect the '“Dark Sky Movement” ((yes, there is such a thing) and its plan to turn all of northern Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont into a “Dark Sky Preserve”. While they were at it, those same voters imposed a permanent ban on mining in the state to preclude the exploitation of a huge lithium find in the state. Lithium is essential to electric car batteries, but that’s what third-world countries are for.
Coast-to-coast, in every state, so-called environmentalists and MYMBies and sympathetic judges and Indian tribes can either permanently block infrastructure projects or, at least, delay them for decades. The problem with that is that the same groups, acting in concert with compliant legislatures, are busy shutting down our existing fossil fuel energy industry; we will have destroyed our source of energy sources long, long before there’s anything to replace them.
Which is the plan.
