The environmental champions in the Biden regime want to destroy 55 million acres of public lands by blanketing them with ugly and ineffective solar panels. That would be a landmass larger than 36 states and would completely destroy some of the most beautiful natural environments in the United States. But at least it will save the weather from getting one degree warmer sometime in the next century!
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is spearheading the plan to build massive solar farms on public lands in 11 states. The same government agencies that prohibit oil companies from creating a tiny footprint to explore oil on public lands now want to wipe out the natural environment on those same public lands. Figures.
The BLM currently manages 162 million acres of public land in western states. The land is designated as “multi-use,” which means some activities like farming, ranching, hunting, fishing, hiking, and camping are allowed on it. For most Americans, the public lands provide beautiful nature views as they drive from Point A to Point B. All of that would be wrecked if this plan comes to fruition.
Instead of driving through western states and enjoying the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, Americans would be subjected to millions of acres of ugly solar panels. Where beauty and nature once reigned will now be a gross, industrial landscape of symmetrical solar panels that don’t even work. It’s hard to even visualize what it would look like with 55 million acres of American land covered by solar panels. That’s larger than the entire state of Idaho.
The Biden regime has set an impossible goal of generating 25 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from solar power and windmills by 2025. The ultimate goal is to completely eliminate cheap and effective energy from oil, natural gas, coal, and other abundant hydrocarbons by 2035.
The environmentalist wackos at the Los Angeles Times are giddy about the plan, writing, “Biden’s Western solar plan sounds scary, but it’s better than climate change.”
Is it?
We can’t understate just how much this plan will destroy the natural environment if implemented. Plants and trees will have to be clear-cut and ripped out in the areas where the solar panels are installed so they won’t burn up every time there’s a wildfire. Wildlife migratory patterns will be disrupted.
“They say we have to protect the environment, but they’re OK with destroying the environment to save it,” says Gabriella Hoffman, the host of the District of Conservation Podcast. “It makes no sense if you’re a conservationist.”
Liberal environmentalists don’t care about nature or the environment at all. They hate it. They hate everything that is good, beautiful, or true.
The pipe dream that the weird weather cult is trying to force on everyone else would ultimately require 160 million acres of land to be covered with solar panels and windmills. That’s about the size of Texas. That is what it would take to fully replace affordable and effective power delivery methods like nuclear, coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric.
Yes, the plan is even to rip out all of the clean and renewable hydroelectric plants in the country. Gavin Newsom just did that on the Klamath River in California and inadvertently caused the largest environmental disaster in America since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. You won’t see that story on the news anywhere, though, because Newsom can do no wrong in the eyes of the media.
Energy analyst Robert Bryce sums up the catastrophe that this solar panel plan will actually have on the environment in this statement: “This idea that we can save the environment by carpeting the rural landscape with oceans of solar panels and forests of wind turbines—it boggles the mind how climate activists can justify this.”
