Editorial: Don’t despoil public lands with wind and solar power

Nevada Democratic U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen recently announced she is co-sponsoring a piece of legislation titled the Public Land Renewable Energy Development Act of 2019, which is touted as bipartisan legislation to promote the development of renewable energy on public lands — which is the vast majority of the land in Nevada.

“Nevada’s public lands are a source of pride and natural beauty in our state, but they also represent a potential home for clean, renewable power that will benefit Nevada and our country,” the senator is quoted in a press release put out by her office. “At a time when we’re facing the real, dangerous effects of climate change, we must find policy solutions to embrace clean energy alternatives to curb harmful carbon emissions. This bipartisan legislation would help to identify and advance additional renewable energy projects in wind, solar, and geothermal on federal lands, which make up nearly 80 percent of our state. I will continue to support forward-thinking policies that put us on a pathway towards a clean energy future.”

The bill would create another federal bureaucracy called the Renewable Energy Coordination Office, which would be tasked with streamlining the permitting of renewable energy development. The bill would set aside a small portion of the leasing revenue for state and local governments.

The trouble with renewable energy generating facilities — especially wind and solar — is that they are not cheap, are not really all that clean and constitute an incredible eyesore on the pristine landscape — witness the massive wind farm near Ely, the photovoltaic solar panels near Boulder City and the thermal solar mirror installations near Ivanpah and Tonopah.

“Not withstanding the romantic view of wind and solar power held by many, they are not cost-competitive, they are very far from clean, and they would do remarkably little to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and anthropogenic climate change, the ‘crisis view of which is unsupported by the evidence,” writes Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute in an October edition of the National Review. “Several available analyses show that a major expansion of wind and solar power would increase the emissions of such conventional pollutants as carbon monoxide.”

Zycher cites Institute for Energy Research estimates that wind power is about twice as expensive as conventional gas-fired power and that solar power is almost three times as expensive. Those costs are passed on to the residential and business power customers or the taxpayers via subsidies. “The ubiquitous claims that wind and solar power now are cost-competitive ignore substantial costs for backup power and much longer transmission lines, and the effects of massive subsidies and guaranteed market shares,” Zycher explains.

And they gobble land. Zycher says that to achieve the renewable energy goals of the Green New Deal would require a land mass 15 percent larger than the entire state of California.

As for preventing global warming, the author says the renewable energy goals of the Green New Deal, even under highly favorable assumptions, would reduce temperatures by the year 2100 by about 0.173 degrees Celsius. He also notes that research suggests that of the 1.5 degree Celsius increase in temperatures since 1850 that mankind is responsible for only about half a degree.

Never mind the number of migratory birds killed every year by wind and solar power plants.

Meanwhile, Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writing in The Wall Street Journal, points out that one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic, while solar power requires even more cement, steel, glass and other metals, which require massive earth moving by fossil-fuel powered heavy equipment.

Is this really what we should be doing with our public lands?

A version of this editorial appeared this week in some of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel,  Sparks Tribune and the Lincoln County Record.

(Reuters pix via National Review)

Newspaper column: Trump appeals court nominee looks right for the job

This past Friday President Trump nominated former Nevada Solicitor General Lawrence VanDyke to a seat on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles cases for nine Western states and territories in the Pacific.

As solicitor general, VanDyke served in the office of then-Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt. He also served as solicitor general in Montana and Texas. 

VanDyke earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Montana State University-Bozeman and graduated magna cum laude in 2005 from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of both the Harvard Law Review and Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and currently is a deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Department of Justice.

Nevada’s Democratic U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen immediately issued a statement sharply critical of the nomination.

Lawrence VanDyke

“We’re frustrated the White House is choosing to ignore the bipartisan work undertaken by our offices in concert with Nevada’s legal community to identify and recommend qualified Nevadans for the Ninth Circuit,” said their statement. “The Administration’s decision to put forward this nominee ignores the broad, consensus-based opinion of Nevadans. Instead, the White House has chosen to move forward on their extreme judicial agenda. While we will review the full record of this nominee, we are disappointed that the White House has chosen to nominate a candidate with a concerning record of ideological legal work.”

Only two days before the two senators had announced the formation of what they called “bipartisan judicial commissions to make recommendations for Nevada’s judicial vacancies,” and said, “We are establishing the commissions to encourage this and future administrations to nominate candidates that reflect the diversity and values of the Silver State.”

Republican President Trump paid no heed whatsoever.

Critics of VanDyke quickly jumped on his record in Montana of advancing friend of the court briefs defending bans on same-sex marriage and abortion, as well as challenges to gun rights. 

The voters of both Montana and Nevada had amended their state constitutions to prohibit same-sex marriage, and in 2014 Montana filed a legal brief defending those amendments before the 9th Circuit. Cortez Masto, then Nevada attorney general, refused to defend the state’s amendment. The 9th Circuit eventually ruled both state’s amendments were unconstitutional.

VanDyke was quoted by a Montana newspaper, while running unsuccessfully for a seat on that state’s Supreme Court, “My job was to represent the interests of the people of Montana and defend our state’s laws. So simply because I worked on a specific case or made a specific recommendation obviously can’t be taken as representative of my personal views. In fact, as Montana’s solicitor general, I worked on cases and took positions that were sometimes at odds with my personal or political views.”

While working under Laxalt, VanDyke was said to be a key figure in securing an injunction staying the Environmental Protection Agencies’s 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule, which unduly expanded federal power over every stream, ditch, seasonal puddle and muddy hoof print as being covered by the restrictions of the Clean Water Act of 1972. 

The conservative National Review also notes that VanDyke’s challenge of the Bureau of Land Management’s over-broad greater sage grouse land plan caused the agency to back off. The plan would have withdrawn more than 10 million acres of federal public land from use for such things as grazing and mineral exploration. He also challenged the Obama-era EPA’s Clean Power Plan that threatened to raise power bills.

“VanDyke also litigated in defense of the Second Amendment and religious freedom,” the National Review article continues. “He filed the multi-state amicus briefs at both the circuit and Supreme Court level in the Trinity Lutheran case. He was also part of the successful multi-state challenge to the Obama administration’s DAPA program, which attempted to legalize and grant numerous benefits to over 4 million illegal aliens without statutory authority. As the lead lawyer for a 22-state coalition, he successfully challenged the Obama administration’s Overtime Rule.”

Sounds like the kind of person who could help change the future rulings of the once uber-liberal 9th Circuit.

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Newspaper column: National Popular Vote would make Nevada voters irrelevant

The Nevada Assembly voted 23-17 this past week to cut the impact of your presidential vote by at least a third.

Assembly Bill 186 would have Nevada join something called the “Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote.” Instead of awarding Nevada’s six electoral votes — one for each representative and senator in Congress — according to how Nevadans vote, those six electoral votes would be awarded to the president and vice president team that wins the popular vote nationally.

One could say this cuts the value of Nevada’s votes from six to four, since the votes nationwide would be proportional to population. Or one could say it negates our votes entirely since it matters not how we vote.

Not a single Assembly Republican voted for the bill and five Democrats had the good sense to reject this attempt to emasculate the federalist system on which this country was founded.

If only three state Senate Democrats have the temerity to buck their party leadership and reject AB186 it would fail.

An email to Gov. Steve Sisolak’s office asking whether he would sign or veto the bill should it pass did not garner a response.

Backers say the compact would become a reality if it is adopted by states possessing a combined 270 electoral votes, or a majority of the 538 electoral votes. A similar bill passed in Colorado earlier this year, giving the proposal 181 electoral votes, just 89 votes short of becoming binding.

A similar measure passed the Nevada Assembly in 2009 on a party-line vote but failed to come up for a vote in the state Senate.

The instigation for the current push is the fact that in 2016 Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote by 304 to 227, though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million.

If the National Popular Vote had been in force in 2000 Nevada’s then four electoral votes would have been enough to flip the election to Al Gore, even though George W. Bush won the popular vote in Nevada by 49.5 percent to 46 percent, winning every county except Clark. Bush won the electoral vote 271 to 266, but lost the popular vote by 540,000.

Janine Hansen, state president of the Nevada Families for Freedom, mentioned just such a scenario in testimony opposing AB186.

“There are three dangers I’d like to mention with the National Popular Vote,” Hansen testified. “One is the National Popular Vote will potentially betray the voters of our own state. If our state voted for candidate A and the National Popular Vote winner was candidate B, our votes would be stolen from our desire and given to the National Popular Vote winner, betraying the voters in this state. I think there would be a lot of angry voters if they found out that that’s what happened.”

Hansen also noted there is no national authority for determining the accuracy of the National Popular Vote.

In his testimony, Jim DeGraffenreid, vice chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, pointed out Nevada is currently a battleground state, getting significant attention from national candidates. He said the state’s first-in-the-West caucuses provide opportunities for all Nevadans to participate.

“The Electoral College exists because the Framers of the Constitution believed that each state should matter in selecting the president,” DeGraffenreid testified. “It is designed to protect the smaller states like Nevada. To suggest that a state should disregard its own voters and instead follow the will of voters in some other state is the exact opposite of what the Framers intended.”

He said the bill could make Nevada voters irrelevant.

The Founders created the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate to assure the smaller populated states were not relegated to powerlessness in a one person-one vote system. The states were meant to be sovereign and to hold the powers not specifically delegated to the federal government.

The National Review pointed out in a recent article that using 2016’s turnout stats a candidate could have won 54 percent of the vote in 48 states, losing only California, New York and D.C., but if an opponent won 75 percent of the vote in just those three locales, a 451 to 87 electoral vote landslide would have turned into a popular-vote defeat to 50.7 percent to 49.3 percent — even though the voters in 48 states rejected that candidate.

Should Nevada surrender its presidential votes to California and New York?

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Newspaper column: How to make use of those Yucca Mountain tunnels

Obama and Reid tour Nellis AFB solar panel site. (R-J pix)

Sometimes things just naturally come full circle.

For decades Nevada’s former U.S. Sen. Harry Reid constantly pounded on two themes: Blocking nuclear waste from being stored in Yucca Mountain in Nye County and pressing for more and more solar panels to be thrown up on thousands of acres of public land and on rooftops across the state.

When Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the nation’s sole nuclear waste dump in 1987, Reid said two things, no and hell no. As he rose in seniority in the Democratic Party to become Senate majority leader, he finally found the power to make those words stick and steadily turned down the funding spigot for the project until President Obama shut it down entirely.

As he neared retirement, Reid declared Yucca Mountain dead, though President Trump and his Energy Secretary Rick Perry have been trying to breathe life back into it.

Meanwhile, Reid campaigned vigorously for green energy, bragging about his role in the state investing $6 billion in green energy and creating 20,000 jobs. The projects include sites such as the 3,000-acre Copper Mountain Solar project outside Boulder City and the 15-megawatt solar panel installation on Nellis Air Force Base.

Almost every year at his long-running green energy conference in Las Vegas, Reid would drag out some dignitary from the base to repeat the boast that the project was saving taxpayers $1 million a year in power costs — without ever bothering to mention the panels cost $100 million in 2007 and would reach obsolescence in 25 years and need to be disposed of.

Which brings us to the closing of the circle.

An alert reader recently brought to our attention a report from a Berkeley-based group called Environmental Progress. It seems that when you do the math, solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy output than nuclear power plants.

This prompted our alert reader to suggest it is time to contemplate the Yucca Mountain Solar Panel Repository.

“We talk a lot about the dangers of nuclear waste, but that waste is carefully monitored, regulated, and disposed of,” Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, an advocate for nuclear energy, told the National Review. “But we had no idea there would be so many panels — an enormous amount — that could cause this much ecological damage.”

The Environmental Progress report states, “If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).”

Those innocent looking solar panels contain elements such as lead, chromium and cadmium — known carcinogens. The panels are difficult and expensive to recycle. The process is labor intensive and the price of the resulting scrap material is low, according to the National Review. (Never mind the toxic waste created during the manufacturing process.)

But, since they are already imbedded in glass and plastic and would not necessarily have to be protected by water shields like nuclear waste canisters if they were buried in those miles of tunnels at Yucca Mountain, it seems like a solution to the problem of what do with that $15 billion project sitting idle in the desert. The main problem is that it may not be big enough.

The United States has more than a million solar energy installations, many of which are nearing the end of that 25-year life expectancy, and more are being built, though currently solar produces only about 1.3 percent of the world’s electricity, compared to 10 percent for nuclear power.

As for the nuclear waste, we never thought it a good idea to dump it in a hole in the ground, when it can be recycled, as many countries currently do. It would be rather easy to haul the stuff to the desert at or near Yucca Mountain and store it above ground in dry casks until it can be recycled, possibly on site, which would create a number of high tech jobs.

Don’t you love it when mislaid plans come together?

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Yucca Mountain entrance. (ABC pix)

Some media beginning to explore the root cause of the Oregon protest

While most of the media attention is focused on a handful of protesters camped out in a vacant building on a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon and the plight of the Hammond family ranchers is dismissed as justice being served, a few accounts are beginning to explore the underlying cause of the controversy — overreach and abuse of power by federal land managers.

The situation is being compared to others across the country that indicate a pattern if not a conspiracy.

One of those comparisons is to the Hage ranch litigation that has lasted more than two decades and outlived the father and mother of the current owner of the ranch near Tonopah.

At one point a federal judge said this about the federal land managers:

After the filing of this action, the Government sent trespass notices to people who leased or sold cattle to the Hages, notwithstanding the Hages’ admitted and known control over that cattle, in order to pressure other parties not to do business with the Hages, and even to discourage or punish testimony in the present case. For this reason, the Court has held certain government officials in contempt and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In summary, government officials … entered into a literal, intentional conspiracy to deprive the Hages not only of their permits but also of their vested water rights. This behavior shocks the conscience of the Court and provides a sufficient basis for a finding of irreparable harm to support the injunction described at the end of this Order.

An article at the National Review cites this case and others as examples of the long brewing Sagebrush Rebellion.

The article also cites the case of a Wyoming rancher who refused to grant the BLM a right-of-way across his property. He lost at the Supreme Court but a dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was scathing in its assessment of the federal government. She wrote that the BLM “demanded from (rancher Harvey Frank) Robbins an easement — for which they did not propose to pay — to replace the one they carelessly lost,” due failing to file on the deed before Robbins bought the ranch. According to Ginsburg, Robbins became the target of “a seven-year campaign of relentless harassment and intimidation to force [him] to give in.”

Also National Review writer David French notes that the feds had been taking over Oregon ranches near the wildlife preserve for years and that by the 1990s, the Hammonds were among the few ranchers left. Some were forced to sell when the feds diverted water that flooded grazing land and made it unsuitable for ranching. “The protesters allege that the government then began a campaign of harassment designed to force the family to sell its land, a beginning with barricaded roads and arbitrarily revoked grazing permits and culminating in an absurd anti-terrorism prosecution based largely on two ‘arsons’ that began on private land but spread to the Refuge,” he writes.

If the Hammonds sell the ranch, the government has the first right of refusal.

A Wall Street Journal article points out the brazenness of federal land managers, citing a Texas example.

The Aderholt family had grazed cattle on a ranch near the Red River for seven decades until the BLM told them in 2013 that 650 acres of the ranch’s 900 acres belonged to the federal government because it was adjacent to the river.

“This land was bought and paid for and people struggled to acquire it, so for them to just come in and swoop in and say it’s theirs is pretty devastating,” the article quoted the rancher as saying.

The writers note that a neighbor of the Hammonds in Oregon was forced out by the feds, because the ranch’s grazing land kept getting reduced. “They just kept cutting back and cutting back on the grazing leases,” the rancher was quoted as saying. “They want to turn it all over for birds instead of cattle.”

Just a year and a half ago dozens of ranchers met in Austin, Nev., to try to figure out what to do about grazing reductions imposed by the BLM.

“I have worked hard my entire life to get along with the BLM and I have never been cited for trespass,” one rancher said. “But then one man with some sort of vendetta comes in and, with a snap of his fingers, he makes a decision that can ruin the lives of my family. It’s terrible.”

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal editorial declares:

Many in rural Oregon view this as a government vendetta. Rusty Inglis, who worked for the Forest Service for 34 years and now runs a local Oregon farm bureau, recently told a trade magazine that it’s “obvious” that “the BLM and the wildlife refuge want that ranch.” The Oregon Farm Bureau called the sentences “gross government overreach.” The ideology of “national” land has become the club to punish private landowners who are the best source of economic stability and conservation.

While many in the press mistakenly say the Hammonds set fires on public lands, they actually set fires on their own land and it accidentally spread to the 140 acres of public land near the 187,000-acre federal refuge that has grown from its original 89,000 acres in 1908.

The Hammond family

Oregon Rep. Greg Walden:

Walden: “More than half my district is under federal management, or lack thereof.”

Walden also noted that federal agents set a back fire on private land that jeopardized the private land owners who were fighting fires in the area,  but no one was ever charged with a crime.