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The endangered desert tortoise needs land. Paving it over for solar panels is not the solution. Just because city-dwellers see these areas as “empty” doesn’t me

The endangered desert tortoise needs land. Paving it over for solar panels is not the solution. Just because city-dwellers see these areas as “empty” doesn’t mean they don’t have sensitive ecosystems that are already becoming rarer and rarer.

viknesh 3y ago
I suppose the flip side is that we choose not to build solar, wind, or invest in nuclear and all tortoises die.
- solardev 3y ago
  What if there were solar sites with no endangered animals? Acres of rangeland, abandoned malls, warehouse rooftops, aqueducts, lakes... I dunno if it's really an either or. Endangered species are often endangered because of extreme habitat loss, which means by definition there's not a lot of land left for them to live on, which means most projects won't intersect them. Of course the connection isn't that basic (desert is good for both tortoises and solar farms) but it does suggest one has more flexibility than the other. What percentage of utility scale renewables projects are blocked by endangered species? One recent study suggests environmental impacts are a source of opposition in half of the studied projects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001471#fig3 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... That's a lot, but doesn't necessarily mean it was the only (or primary) source of opposition. A lot of these bigger projects have to undergo environmental review via federal (NEPA) and state (CEQA) processes, which are expensive and slow (by design, to ensure their validity) and many projects stall when developers move on to locales with laxer rules and neighbors -- essentially giving up before the environmental impacts could be fully analyzed. My underlying point is that these things are rarely black and white, and there may be valid reasons to consider each project on a case by case basis. However, there might also be a valid reason to overhaul these laws to allow weighting climate priorities against individual protected species. If so, though, that should be very carefully and rarely done... once we lose those, they're never coming back. We can always find alternate energy sources/sites if we're willing to pay more. No amount of money will bring back extinct species (yet).
- wernercd 3y ago
  Or, the world continues on even if it is a little bit warmer. No proof that "all tortoises die" this side of a meteorite or nuclear war. Dooms Day Prophecies have a wierd way of being bullshit just like the religions that surround them. IE: 100+ years of climate change and the 4 horses of Global Warming, Global Cooling, Acid Rain, 12 years left. The real problem with 'green' solutions is the mountains of unrecyclable waste created after raping the earth to make the 'green' batteries, wind blades and solar panels that end up in land fills. Not real green but at least people are getting power and making money on the 'investments'.
- roughly 3y ago
  I get your meaning, but I'm not sure that the desert tortoise specifically stands to lose by either global warming or the collapse of human civilization.
  - l33t7332273 3y ago
    Not to be too aloof, but why should we care too much about if the desert tortoise stands to win or lose if we’re doing what’s necessary to save our civilization?
    - roughly 3y ago
      Well, because we’ve discovered time and again that when we fuck up ecosystems, it’s bad for us, too. Should we care specifically about the desert tortoise above other species? Probably not. Should we be cautious about taking actions that have long ranging future consequences, such as obliterating at least one species? Probably yes. It’s not so much that the desert tortoise is of particular concern, it’s more that we’re so bad at tending to the one and only livable planet realistically available to us that we keep rendering it uninhabitable for species that have the same basic vital needs as us that should be cause for reflection. I’ll note as an aside that as we expand our bioengineering capabilities, the stock of genetic resources we’re drawing on as our toolkit is exactly the biodiversity we’re rapidly depleting, so even beyond the warm fuzzies of not rendering entire species extinct and the basic awareness of how finite and bounded our little bubble of cosmic survivability is, it seems like a waste to keep throwing away the library of useful genetics that took a couple billion years to furnish the first time.
danans 3y ago
> The endangered desert tortoise needs land. Paving it over for solar panels is not the solution. You don't pave over land to install ground based solar. Not only is that unnecessary, but would also make the solar way more expensive.
- wernercd 3y ago
  I assume "pave over" is an alliteration to the fact that even if there isn't square miles of pavement you are in fact destroying ecosystems. Who honestly thinks that solar panel farms involve actual square miles of pavement?
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    Erthos is planning to literally pave the ground with panels. It's an interesting idea: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/utility-scale-solar-has-stagnated-so-erthos-mounts-pv-panels-right-on-the-ground https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/utility-scale-sol...
    - porkbeer 3y ago
      How does one summon EEvlog
      - p1mrx 3y ago
        I assume you're referencing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds Erthos' panels are not solar freakin roadways, because they're fenced off, and only maintenance robots drive on them.
  - danans 3y ago
    > I assume "pave over" is an alliteration to the fact "pave over" has a pretty distinct meaning even in its figurative uses, referring to the encapsulation of the ground surface with asphalt or concrete, as happens in cities or with major highways. Solar panels aren't really the same, when you consider that they are now being used to shelter crops via agrivoltaics [1], increasing yields and decreasing water use while also providing supplemental income to farmers via electricity sales. > even if there isn't square miles of pavement you are in fact destroying ecosystems More likely modifying ecosystems, not destroying them altogether. Remember that the actual "paving over" of ecosystems - via roads, etc - and the fossil fuel extraction industry have and continue to do far more damage to ecosystems than any renewable generation has. The Kern River oil field near Bakersfield CA isn't exactly the picture of prime wildlife habitat anymore: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/KernRiverFromBluff.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/KernRive... Even the scientist at the forefront of research into the concern about desert ecosystems says [2]: ""It's certainly going to damage some of the ecology. I think that's a tradeoff we have to accept. It's part of becoming less reliant on oil, and more reliant on solar and wind power." 1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivoltaics-us-solar-industry-farmers-and-communities https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivol... 2. https://phys.org/news/2009-03-dark-side-solar-power.html https://phys.org/news/2009-03-dark-side-solar-power.html
hinkley 3y ago
The most 'empty' land is farmland at this point. Especially if you can find a swath that's quite a ways away from everything else (ie it's inconvenient to drive to). Like Nebraska, or Iowa.
hotpotamus 3y ago
I live in South Texas which seems to be transitioning into desert currently (co-worker's well just ran dry and everything). Maybe the tortoises can live here.
whats_a_quasar 3y ago
To conserve the environment, the power system needs to decarbonize, and that means solar needs to be built somewhere. No matter where it's built, solar will take up land, so we ought to build it in the places where the sun makes it most effective. People supporting development of clean energy don't necessarily believe these areas are empty: they think that the best way to preserve the environment is to use that land to generate power and eliminate some portion of fossil fuel emissions. There is a crapload of desert in the U.S. West. The tortoises need to live somewhere, but it is hard to me to imagine the harm to the tortoises of solar development is worse than the detriment to all ecosystems from CO2 emissions.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >There is a crapload of desert in the U.S. West There's also a crapload of space on top of buildings, in the cities where people want to consume the power generated by solar arrays. Why isn't there more of a push to install solar arrays on rooftops? Or over parking lots?
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Well first of all there is. California now requires new houses to have solar. But residential solar is much more expensive because you need roofers to install it. Massive solar farms are much faster to install and much cheaper.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      There's also commercial buildings. You could put a gigantic solar array on top of a Walmart Supercenter, and then an even bigger solar array over its parking lot.

viknesh 3y ago

I suppose the flip side is that we choose not to build solar, wind, or invest in nuclear and all tortoises die.

solardev 3y ago
What if there were solar sites with no endangered animals? Acres of rangeland, abandoned malls, warehouse rooftops, aqueducts, lakes... I dunno if it's really an either or. Endangered species are often endangered because of extreme habitat loss, which means by definition there's not a lot of land left for them to live on, which means most projects won't intersect them. Of course the connection isn't that basic (desert is good for both tortoises and solar farms) but it does suggest one has more flexibility than the other. What percentage of utility scale renewables projects are blocked by endangered species? One recent study suggests environmental impacts are a source of opposition in half of the studied projects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001471#fig3 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... That's a lot, but doesn't necessarily mean it was the only (or primary) source of opposition. A lot of these bigger projects have to undergo environmental review via federal (NEPA) and state (CEQA) processes, which are expensive and slow (by design, to ensure their validity) and many projects stall when developers move on to locales with laxer rules and neighbors -- essentially giving up before the environmental impacts could be fully analyzed. My underlying point is that these things are rarely black and white, and there may be valid reasons to consider each project on a case by case basis. However, there might also be a valid reason to overhaul these laws to allow weighting climate priorities against individual protected species. If so, though, that should be very carefully and rarely done... once we lose those, they're never coming back. We can always find alternate energy sources/sites if we're willing to pay more. No amount of money will bring back extinct species (yet).
wernercd 3y ago
Or, the world continues on even if it is a little bit warmer. No proof that "all tortoises die" this side of a meteorite or nuclear war. Dooms Day Prophecies have a wierd way of being bullshit just like the religions that surround them. IE: 100+ years of climate change and the 4 horses of Global Warming, Global Cooling, Acid Rain, 12 years left. The real problem with 'green' solutions is the mountains of unrecyclable waste created after raping the earth to make the 'green' batteries, wind blades and solar panels that end up in land fills. Not real green but at least people are getting power and making money on the 'investments'.
roughly 3y ago
I get your meaning, but I'm not sure that the desert tortoise specifically stands to lose by either global warming or the collapse of human civilization.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  Not to be too aloof, but why should we care too much about if the desert tortoise stands to win or lose if we’re doing what’s necessary to save our civilization?
  - roughly 3y ago
    Well, because we’ve discovered time and again that when we fuck up ecosystems, it’s bad for us, too. Should we care specifically about the desert tortoise above other species? Probably not. Should we be cautious about taking actions that have long ranging future consequences, such as obliterating at least one species? Probably yes. It’s not so much that the desert tortoise is of particular concern, it’s more that we’re so bad at tending to the one and only livable planet realistically available to us that we keep rendering it uninhabitable for species that have the same basic vital needs as us that should be cause for reflection. I’ll note as an aside that as we expand our bioengineering capabilities, the stock of genetic resources we’re drawing on as our toolkit is exactly the biodiversity we’re rapidly depleting, so even beyond the warm fuzzies of not rendering entire species extinct and the basic awareness of how finite and bounded our little bubble of cosmic survivability is, it seems like a waste to keep throwing away the library of useful genetics that took a couple billion years to furnish the first time.

danans 3y ago

> The endangered desert tortoise needs land. Paving it over for solar panels is not the solution. You don't pave over land to install ground based solar. Not only is that unnecessary, but would also make the solar way more expensive.

wernercd 3y ago
I assume "pave over" is an alliteration to the fact that even if there isn't square miles of pavement you are in fact destroying ecosystems. Who honestly thinks that solar panel farms involve actual square miles of pavement?
- p1mrx 3y ago
  Erthos is planning to literally pave the ground with panels. It's an interesting idea: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/utility-scale-solar-has-stagnated-so-erthos-mounts-pv-panels-right-on-the-ground https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/utility-scale-sol...
  - porkbeer 3y ago
    How does one summon EEvlog
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      I assume you're referencing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds Erthos' panels are not solar freakin roadways, because they're fenced off, and only maintenance robots drive on them.
- danans 3y ago
  > I assume "pave over" is an alliteration to the fact "pave over" has a pretty distinct meaning even in its figurative uses, referring to the encapsulation of the ground surface with asphalt or concrete, as happens in cities or with major highways. Solar panels aren't really the same, when you consider that they are now being used to shelter crops via agrivoltaics [1], increasing yields and decreasing water use while also providing supplemental income to farmers via electricity sales. > even if there isn't square miles of pavement you are in fact destroying ecosystems More likely modifying ecosystems, not destroying them altogether. Remember that the actual "paving over" of ecosystems - via roads, etc - and the fossil fuel extraction industry have and continue to do far more damage to ecosystems than any renewable generation has. The Kern River oil field near Bakersfield CA isn't exactly the picture of prime wildlife habitat anymore: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/KernRiverFromBluff.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/KernRive... Even the scientist at the forefront of research into the concern about desert ecosystems says [2]: ""It's certainly going to damage some of the ecology. I think that's a tradeoff we have to accept. It's part of becoming less reliant on oil, and more reliant on solar and wind power." 1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivoltaics-us-solar-industry-farmers-and-communities https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivol... 2. https://phys.org/news/2009-03-dark-side-solar-power.html https://phys.org/news/2009-03-dark-side-solar-power.html

hinkley 3y ago

The most 'empty' land is farmland at this point. Especially if you can find a swath that's quite a ways away from everything else (ie it's inconvenient to drive to). Like Nebraska, or Iowa.

hotpotamus 3y ago

I live in South Texas which seems to be transitioning into desert currently (co-worker's well just ran dry and everything). Maybe the tortoises can live here.

whats_a_quasar 3y ago

To conserve the environment, the power system needs to decarbonize, and that means solar needs to be built somewhere. No matter where it's built, solar will take up land, so we ought to build it in the places where the sun makes it most effective. People supporting development of clean energy don't necessarily believe these areas are empty: they think that the best way to preserve the environment is to use that land to generate power and eliminate some portion of fossil fuel emissions. There is a crapload of desert in the U.S. West. The tortoises need to live somewhere, but it is hard to me to imagine the harm to the tortoises of solar development is worse than the detriment to all ecosystems from CO2 emissions.

midoridensha 3y ago
>There is a crapload of desert in the U.S. West There's also a crapload of space on top of buildings, in the cities where people want to consume the power generated by solar arrays. Why isn't there more of a push to install solar arrays on rooftops? Or over parking lots?
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Well first of all there is. California now requires new houses to have solar. But residential solar is much more expensive because you need roofers to install it. Massive solar farms are much faster to install and much cheaper.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    There's also commercial buildings. You could put a gigantic solar array on top of a Walmart Supercenter, and then an even bigger solar array over its parking lot.