California Crews Begin Mowing Down Region’s Iconic Joshua Trees for Solar Farm
We are going to spend decades recovering from the environmental damage caused by climate cult pseudoscience.
Back in 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom offered a bill giving the state’s iconic Western Joshua Trees “protected” status.
The Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act was prompted by the California Fish and Game Commission’s inability to act on a petition filed more than three years ago seeking to list the living symbols of the California desert as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act.
“Compromise is always painful,” said Brendan Cummings, conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity and an author of the petition. “But at the end of the day, I’ll be happy if this bill passes.”
The Newsom Administration’s intervention reflects a volatile reality: Opponents of the petition warn that listing the western Joshua tree could derail private property improvements and renewable energy projects designed to help meet California’s climate change goals of shifting the state’s electricity system entirely off fossil fuels by 2045.
However, in 2020, Avantus (the developer behind the project) received an exemption from Newsom’s Fish and Game Commission to clear the trees. Arguably, the 2023 measure is a cover for the realities that are now being played out in the state.
As I noted in an earlier post, climate cultists insisted that they needed to chop down the Joshua Trees to save them from the carbon dioxide plants actually need for life. In the senseless quest for renewable energy utopia, a solar energy firm was given permits to proceed with the Aratina Solar Center, over the deep concerns and objections of area residents.
Despite comments and concerns from residence in Boron and Desert Lake, the Kern County Board of Supervisors approved a solar farm project which will include five different sites in the East Kern County area; the board voted on the approval at their October 12th meeting in Bakersfield.
It appears a massive green energy project cannot begin without a substantial outcry from the nearby residents, whose communities are being deeply impacted with few real gains in sustainable or reliable energy.
This week, work began on felling 3,500 of the 4,700 Joshua Trees that are on the site of the solar farm.
A 2020 survey counted 4,700 trees on the project site. Since then, however, the size of the project has been reduced.
Hundreds of Joshua trees appeared to have been destroyed in the last week, but on some portions of the site the trees still stand, residents said. Neither the company nor government agencies would say how many trees have been cut down. Avantus, the developer, said fewer trees will be destroyed than the government approved.
Heavy equipment has not yet started leveling the land where the trees were felled to prepare for the solar panel installation.
Residents fear the earth-moving work will increase the threat of valley fever — a fungal respiratory infection that is transmitted in dust. A local group found the fungus that causes valley fever in samples of topsoil from the five parcels surrounding the towns where the solar panels will be built.
Residents are continuing to fight, launching a petition to halt further destruction of the Joshua trees.
A petition against the project was launched earlier this summer and currently has over 52,000 signatures.
“Ancient Joshua Trees are going extinct, and we must save them. The Aratina Solar Project in Boron, California, is approved to destroy nearly 4,000 ancient Joshua Trees in this forest…These iconic trees have stood for centuries, providing habitat for numerous species and contributing to the unique biodiversity of our region,” the petition read.
Sign the petition to save 4,000 Joshua trees by Boron. https://t.co/qw0z6GwoQl
— Wendy Reed MPA (@WendyReedTweet) August 17, 2024
If California politicos were seriously interested in reliable and affordable energy and protecting Joshua trees, they would be making plans to erect Generation IV nuclear reactors.
Instead, we are going to spend decades recovering from the environmental damage caused by climate cult pseudoscience.
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Comments
I wouldn’t be surprised if, somehow, beached whales started showing up on the site. It seems totally impossible … but somehow lefties are able to make things like that happen – like when they made it snow in Bombay(?) for the first time in 100 years just by having a “Global Warming” conference there. And the lefties’ reaction to the whales beached in the desert will just be to use the natural whale oil to burn them on the site – though they will have to add some more fuel to finish off the carcass burning, which they will happily do.
Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act prohibits un-permitted destruction of these trees. But since these solar farm ghouls with their butt ugly environment destroyers have a permit to hack down thousands of trees… it’s all good.
Permit. Translation: the right agency was paid a handsome fee.
Correction: The right politician was given a generous contribution.
“We have to kill the trees to save them.” Need any more proof the greens are insane?
Lord knows, there is so little desert around the Southwest, that only this area will work.
And “solar farms” is such a misnomer; nothing will grow there, except mold and mushrooms.
A former radical tree hugger has a lecture on YouTube… there is only the choice between climate or environment… can’t have both. This is a prime example of that…. sacrificing the “environment” for the “climate”. Amazing what scruples are abandoned for the Religion of Climate by the Religion of the Environment. He suggested nuclear to attempt to get both.
RIDGECREST, Calif. – Today, the Bureau of Land Management issued a Notice to Proceed authorizing Avangrid to begin construction of the Camino Solar Project, a 44-megawatt solar photovoltaic facility that will be located on 233 acres of public lands and 150 acres of adjoining private land in Kern County. – total of 383 acres with the average capacity factor of 30%
cordova electric power plant in granbury texas produces 260 Mw on approx 200 acres
Basically a gas electric generation plant produces 18-25 more electricity per acre of land.
Wind is even worse 1/30th to 1/50 of a gas electric generation plant per acre
How many solar farms will be needed to replace the dams with hydro that are being torn down?
And the gas electric plant works at night, when all those EVs that Commufornica is mandating.
A perfect storm of stupidity, ignorance and hubris.
I recall reading a year or so ago that the German government (and, I think the U.K. is doing something similar) is destroying a huge swathe of old-growth forest, to make way for wind turbines or solar panel farms, or, other such nonsense.
The vile and evil leftists and Dhimmi-crats will destroy the environment, in order to “save” it. Totalitarian and callous apparatchiks have always acted thusly.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/german_government_begins_razing_the_forest_that_acted_as_a_backdrop_for_many_a_grimms_fairy_tale_to_make_way_for_wind_turbines.html
https://americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/germany_to_raze_a_1000yearold_forest_in_the_name_of_going_green.html
“Over the past 35 years, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has removed tens of thousands of acres of the piñon pines and juniper trees, notably for sagebrush preservation and range fire management.”
“During the last century, federal agencies undertook a campaign to destroy huge tracts of piñon pine-juniper trees in the rural reaches of the American West. These hardy native trees collectively cover 100 million acres across the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau.”
The Sierra Club literally blamed Trump for 40 years of federal agency mismanagement “conservationists had hoped the practice would pause with the end of the Trump administration.”
Ecohydrology of Pinyon and Juniper Woodlands.
These idiots think pinon pine and juniper trees are hogging rainfall groundwater to the detriment of sagebrush and other unnamed “understory” brush. Then, the same groups claim they must remove Pinon to mitigate [understory] brush fires.
Sagebrush
Pretty worthless
BLM
Very worthless
Like economies, nature is best left alone, away from the tender ministrations of bloated government.
We had to destroy the earth in order to save it.
I live out where a Joshua tree would be happy, and actually asked a local nursery about getting one, because I just loved their wizened stateliness. They discouraged me because apparently they are major termite magnets, and we are constantly battling termites as it is.
The group of offended victims begins to cannibalize itself. There will be blood.
The conservationist land grab scam continues apace.
Fed, state and so-called local activist groups (funded by state and fed agencies and venture capitalists) buy – after years of lawfare harassment -adjoining scrub and desert land parcels, unify those patchwork parcels, then act as paid “doyen” for a dozen years. Time marches on, and after those dozen years things blow over.
The fake conservationists, out of the seeming blue, offer to sell the protected land to venture capitalist groups posing as green energy environmentalists. Search “Catellus Ranch.”
These groups just pulled the same stunt (2023) on an interior central coast ranching property.
And it’s not confined to one political party.
Re Mojave:
[…] California utilities to achieve a goal, set by the state, of obtaining a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020; projects in the Mojave monument area could have supplied a substantial portion of that power.
RFK Jr. tried to muscle in on Baroness Dianne Feinstein’s patronage project. He was royally slapped down as befits a scummy, sagebrush cattle ranch property expropriating, greedy weasel.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/business/energy-environment/22solar.html
“The Statewide Support Entity (SSE) and the California Department of Conservation (DOC) are excited to share the 2023 Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program MLRP Annual Report. To date, the program has received $90 million in appropriations.”
———————————————
“At more than 587,000 acres, The Wildlands Conservancy’s Catellus acquisition is the largest nonprofit land acquisition donated to the American people in U.S. history. It included funding of more than 85,000 acres in the Mojave National Preserve, more than 20,000 acres in Joshua Tree National Park, and over 210,000 acres in 20 Bureau of Land Management wilderness areas, and hundreds of thousands of acres of important habitat.”
Biden green new deal is trillion dollar fraud. No doubt paul pelosi and related are reaping the windfall.
Yeah; that’s all that these “green” environmental schemes and “climate change” (formerly branded as “global warming”) histrionics and hysterics are all about. The biggest and most lucrative hustler/con/grift in the history of the world. fleecing billions of tax-paying citizens the world over. With the grift proceeds flowing into the pockets of leftists’/Dhimmi-crats’ most well-heeled, greedy and corrupt cronies, donors and courtiers.
Any person who can’t figure that out, and, how credulously/earnestly believes that these schemes are about allegedly “saving the environment” or “stopping climate change,” is a total fool.
All for the greater good, you know!
Another term ba$tardized by the left and their newspeak.
The natural environment and habitats must give way for …… concerns about climate change. WTF. Then the same climate cult fresh off clear cutting to emplace solar panel farms tell the rest of us to move into tiny apartments in density populated cities. It ain’t about climate its about control of folks lifestyle; less effective power generation means less available power.
Solar panels made in China?
“Thinking they were wise, they became fools…”
Paul the Apostle, Romans chapter 1
That simple.
Its all about the benjamins.
The vast amount of grift available in the climate scam is the very best opportunity ever in the history of the planet for the confluence of politicians, crony corporations and “conservation” non-profits to rake in fortunes.
And as a bonus, all the while deflecting criticism from their rapacious damage because the climate crisis propaganda has been very effective to the NPCs of the world.
I’m afraid only an epic financial collapse will end their plan.
This is sacrilegious. Very important tree to native Indians
For BS
Gram Parsons unavailable for comment.
Considering all the energy it takes to melt silicon and manufacture these photovoltaic cells, it’s highly unlikely that enough solar energy will be converted into electricity over the life of the cells to offset the energy used to make them.
They don’t want us to have electricity.
They will propose a “replacement” for our current energy source and then they will object to it soon after.
Quite independent of whether this solar farm makes sense or not.
233 + 150 acres?
Do you have any idea as to how much of California looks like this 400 minus acres?
I don’t know about Joshua trees specifically, but most desert plants transplant successfully. No problem finding homes for these Joshua trees. I would take a couple.
Bet you could sell them, given the story, for more than the land cost–pre rezoning.
Hey, we didn’t make the snail darter rules — they did. Then they rammed them down our throats, Now they want to ignore them. No amnesty.
I wouldn’t mess with Joshua, and he had some experience with solar and hailstones (not friendly to solar panels):
The Israelites faced an alliance of five Amorite kings from Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon. At Gibeon, Joshua asked the LORD to cause the Sun and Moon to stand still, so that he could finish the battle in daylight. According to the text, the Sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. This event is most notable because “There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel.”[35] The LORD also fought for the Israelites in this battle, for he hurled huge hailstones from the sky which killed more Canaanites than those which the Israelites slaughtered. From there on, Joshua was able to lead the Israelites to several victories, securing much of the land of Canaan. He presided over the Israelite gatherings at Gilgal and Shiloh which allocated land to the tribes of Israel (Joshua 14:1–5 and 18:1–10), and the Israelites rewarded him with the Ephraimite city of Timnath-heres or Timnath-serah, where he settled (Joshua 19:50).
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