I am so sick of seeing our deserts destroyed, as though it’s somehow “empty” land. There are a million square miles of parking lots and building roofs in this country that we could cover with these things, and yet we would rather destroy ecosystems that are already delicate and millions of years old, with species that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. And then call it “green” while we do it. All of this because the government can’t be bothered to deal with (read: compensate) private property owners to cover their parking lots and roofs with solar.
They can say they’ll stay away from “sensitive resources” all they want, but that’s proven to be false in the past, so why should we believe them now? They’re only putting them within ten miles of existing transmission lines - next time, it will be within ten miles of the ones they’re building now, and so on until there’s nothing left. The sad part is that this comment will be immediately taken as being against solar and renewables, when it’s actually against destroying more of our untouched land and history for profit.
There’s already tons of solar fields and wind fields in the desert. Now they’re starting to open up old gold mines and create new ones, in the Sierras as well as the desert. Look at Grass Valley and Nevada City, where not a single resident wants some giant mining company threatening their town and their rivers, but apparently they don’t get a say about their own homes. Joshua trees have been destroyed by fires caused by climate change, and none of us will see them grow back in our lifetimes. They’ve destroyed important historical sites like the petroglyphs at China Lake and display fake ones for tourists. They’ve built Las Vegas nearly up to the edge of Red Rocks and there’s ugly mansions popping up on the way to Mt Charleston. They’re building a train straight through some of the last open desert in California east of San Diego and through the agricultural region of San Joaquin valley. They’re “cleaning up” the Salton Sea, but of course you can’t just trust that they’re not going to fill the area with McMansions after that so they can expand the tourist dollars of Palm Springs. They’re turning the western terminus of the original transcontinental railroad into a fucking strip mall called The Railyards and putting a farmer’s market in the old Southern Pacific buildings. Some Silicon Valley douchebags are building a “utopia” in the middle of the wetlands east of SF, destroying the ecosystems and birds’ migratory pattens that the region has tried so hard to protect.
In the next fifty years, there will not be any open land left in the US unless it is a lucrative tourist attraction like Yosemite. There is already hardly anywhere on the SoCal coast that doesn’t cost $20 to get near it, and half of it is private property when private beaches are supposedly illegal in California. Ironically, the last piece of wild coastline in OC is owned by the military. It’s just a blatant “fuck you” to our country’s wilderness, ecosystems, and history, and especially, it seems, to the American Southwest.
Temecula is a shitshow, partly from all the recent construction. But it already has 5 lanes, and even more once you get to the 215 split. I never even see anyone on the toll roads (by comparison to the main freeway) south of Temecula, so if that’s what they’re putting in, maybe they should charge less if they actually expect people to use them.