The endangered desert tortoise needs land. Paving it over for solar panels is not the solution. Just because city-dwellers see these areas as “empty” doesn’t mean they don’t have sensitive ecosystems that are already becoming rarer and rarer.
People supporting development of clean energy don't necessarily believe these areas are empty: they think that the best way to preserve the environment is to use that land to generate power and eliminate some portion of fossil fuel emissions.
There is a crapload of desert in the U.S. West. The tortoises need to live somewhere, but it is hard to me to imagine the harm to the tortoises of solar development is worse than the detriment to all ecosystems from CO2 emissions.
There's also a crapload of space on top of buildings, in the cities where people want to consume the power generated by solar arrays. Why isn't there more of a push to install solar arrays on rooftops? Or over parking lots?
You don't pave over land to install ground based solar. Not only is that unnecessary, but would also make the solar way more expensive.
Who honestly thinks that solar panel farms involve actual square miles of pavement?
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/utility-scale-sol...
Erthos' panels are not solar freakin roadways, because they're fenced off, and only maintenance robots drive on them.
"pave over" has a pretty distinct meaning even in its figurative uses, referring to the encapsulation of the ground surface with asphalt or concrete, as happens in cities or with major highways. Solar panels aren't really the same, when you consider that they are now being used to shelter crops via agrivoltaics [1], increasing yields and decreasing water use while also providing supplemental income to farmers via electricity sales.
> even if there isn't square miles of pavement you are in fact destroying ecosystems
More likely modifying ecosystems, not destroying them altogether. Remember that the actual "paving over" of ecosystems - via roads, etc - and the fossil fuel extraction industry have and continue to do far more damage to ecosystems than any renewable generation has. The Kern River oil field near Bakersfield CA isn't exactly the picture of prime wildlife habitat anymore:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/KernRive...
Even the scientist at the forefront of research into the concern about desert ecosystems says [2]:
""It's certainly going to damage some of the ecology. I think that's a tradeoff we have to accept. It's part of becoming less reliant on oil, and more reliant on solar and wind power."
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivol...
I dunno if it's really an either or. Endangered species are often endangered because of extreme habitat loss, which means by definition there's not a lot of land left for them to live on, which means most projects won't intersect them. Of course the connection isn't that basic (desert is good for both tortoises and solar farms) but it does suggest one has more flexibility than the other.
What percentage of utility scale renewables projects are blocked by endangered species? One recent study suggests environmental impacts are a source of opposition in half of the studied projects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...
That's a lot, but doesn't necessarily mean it was the only (or primary) source of opposition.
A lot of these bigger projects have to undergo environmental review via federal (NEPA) and state (CEQA) processes, which are expensive and slow (by design, to ensure their validity) and many projects stall when developers move on to locales with laxer rules and neighbors -- essentially giving up before the environmental impacts could be fully analyzed.
My underlying point is that these things are rarely black and white, and there may be valid reasons to consider each project on a case by case basis. However, there might also be a valid reason to overhaul these laws to allow weighting climate priorities against individual protected species. If so, though, that should be very carefully and rarely done... once we lose those, they're never coming back. We can always find alternate energy sources/sites if we're willing to pay more. No amount of money will bring back extinct species (yet).
Dooms Day Prophecies have a wierd way of being bullshit just like the religions that surround them. IE: 100+ years of climate change and the 4 horses of Global Warming, Global Cooling, Acid Rain, 12 years left.
The real problem with 'green' solutions is the mountains of unrecyclable waste created after raping the earth to make the 'green' batteries, wind blades and solar panels that end up in land fills.
Not real green but at least people are getting power and making money on the 'investments'.
I’ll note as an aside that as we expand our bioengineering capabilities, the stock of genetic resources we’re drawing on as our toolkit is exactly the biodiversity we’re rapidly depleting, so even beyond the warm fuzzies of not rendering entire species extinct and the basic awareness of how finite and bounded our little bubble of cosmic survivability is, it seems like a waste to keep throwing away the library of useful genetics that took a couple billion years to furnish the first time.