It’s hard to know where to start unpacking John Schaefer’s snide and misleading June 30 editorial in the Times-Standard, in which he charges so-called “eco-NIMBY friends” with sacking viable plans for wind energy, particularly Terra-Gen’s demonstrably destructive proposal for a wind farm on Monument and Bear River Ridge.
Our organization, Siskiyou Land Conservancy, opposed the Terra-Gen project for excellent reasons. The proposed wind farm was anything but “clean.” To start, one reason taxpayers shelled out $480 million for Headwaters Forest was to protect essential habitat for the endangered marbled murrelet. The primary flyway from the ocean to Headwaters Forest is across Bear River and Monument Ridge. The Terra-Gen turbines — which would constitute the first and only wind farm erected in murrelet habitat south of Washington — could have destroyed this critical population entirely.
It was no surprise, then, that Stantec, Terra-Gen’s environmental consulting firm, invented its own highly flawed protocols for protecting marbled murrelets, rather than follow the more viable protocols established for wind energy projects by the Pacific Seabird Group. The PSG notes, “The potential for wind energy developments to negatively affect bird and bat populations resulting from direct collisions with both the rotor blades and turbine towers is well documented. … (T)hreats … include, among others, potential collision with and habitat loss from onshore and offshore wind energy projects.”
Among other threats to the murrelets’ survival, Terra-Gen’s environmental team proposed conducting murrelet studies over a single year, rather than the standard two years (apparently to allow Terra-Gen to take advantage of tax credits that were set to expire after a year); the protocols were adapted from those used in timber sales, not for onshore wind facilities; the study provided no population estimates for the murrelet cohort that flies over Bear-Monument Ridge; and there was no consideration of ongoing impacts to murrelets from other sources including climate change, degraded ocean conditions, and ongoing logging.
There were a dozen or more compelling reasons to nix the terrible Terra-Gen wind farm proposal — the industrialization of one of Humboldt’s most iconic and beautiful ridge systems, huge new grid distribution lines through tinder-dry forestlands, potential health impacts on residents of Scotia and Rio Dell — but the promised decimation of marbled murrelets was enough reason to deny approval of the project. If humanity can’t do what’s necessary to save from extinction a rare and elusive seabird that nests only in old-growth trees, when we’ve already paid half a billion dollars to protect the murrelets, then clearly we are the ones who have failed as a species.
Through his essay, Schaefer downplays the efficacy of widespread distributed solar power (WDS) in Humboldt County — here in the land that pioneered the technology! Yet it’s impossible to argue against the obvious benefits of covering every roof and parking lot with solar panels and connecting them to the grid — and, more effectively, to microgrids such as those at the airport and Blue Lake Casino. Yes, solar power generation does diminish in winter, but it still produces and supplements dirty power. In other seasons solar can (and does) entirely power individual homes, and electric vehicles, which are now widely recognized as excellent sources of emergency battery storage. Solar is even more effective if homes are simultaneously retooled for efficiency.
Why people like Schaefer, and agencies like RCEA, don’t emphasize WDS as a first line of local defense against carbon emissions is a mystery — unless perhaps we take into consideration what seems to be an auto-response fealty by local officials to large, centralized power production, and therefore to centralized profits. Widespread distributed solar puts the power and savings into the hands of the people, where it has always belonged, and spares our fragile marine and terrestrial ecosystems from the massive impacts of large industrial energy plants.
Greg King is executive director of Siskiyou Land Conservancy in Arcata.
This post was originally published on 3rd party site mentioned in the title of this site
