April 18, 2023 • 43 mins
An area near the entrance to Death Valley National Park has the capacity to produce enough energy to power the entire planet if covered in solar panels. Yet for Nye County, Nevada residents, the question of what must be sacrificed – including the environmental and economic future of the area – and by whom, looms large. Hillary Angelo is the author of the Harper’s Magazine article, “Boomtown,” which explores the complexity of the solar land rush in the West. Angelo is an urban and environmental sociologist and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Dustin Mulvaney, who was featured in the article, is a solar expert and Professor at San José State University. Alec speaks with Angelo and Mulvaney about the objections of residents, what spaces might be used instead, and how to rethink the future of energy.
You can find the article, “Boomtown,” here:
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/01/boomtown-beatty-nevada-solar-farms-death-valley/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. After decades of debate, it is
now common knowledge that the world is in the midst
of an ever increasing energy crisis, and that the long
era of burning fossil fuels for power is contributing to
(00:23):
our own demise. And yet the transition to alternative energy
is proving to be more complex than you might think.
The Harper's Magazine article Boomtown examines the solar land rush
currently happening in the American West, specifically in the town
of Beatty in Nai County, Nevada. The Ni County area
(00:46):
has the capacity to produce enough energy through its prospective
solar farms to power the entire planet, Yes, the entire planet.
Close to the entrance of Death Valley National Park, It's
an area rife with flat land and almost endless sunlight,
but residents are pushing back on proposals to use its
(01:10):
land for this purpose. After a series of exploitative boom
bust cycles like the Gold Rush. Residents are opposing the
plan on ecological and economic grounds. They argue that covering
Nevada in solar panels will affect wildlife, recreational spaces, and
(01:30):
the town's future. The article asks the difficult questions of
who should sacrifice for our collective future and at what cost.
My guests today are deep into this inquiry. Dustin mulvaney
is a solar expert and professor of environmental studies at
San Jose State University, and he collaborated on the Harper's article.
(01:55):
But first the author of Boomtown, Hilary Angelo, is an
urban environmental sociologist and associate professor of sociology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also a current
member of the Institute for Advanced Study, where she is
working with other scholars on the issue of climate crisis politics.
(02:18):
I wanted to know how her work in urban sociology
was related to sustainability and the growing issue of water scarcity.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I do a lot of work on urban sustainability and
sustainability planning in general, and so a lot of questions
about how human settlement relates to the external environment. So
one of my interests in this topic and in these
questions about energy is are we making the same decisions
again as we now confront this new environmental crisis? Because
much like we've done with water. We sort of created
(02:49):
these very large scale infrastructure systems in the twentieth century
that made huge quantities of water available to you know,
people who lived in cities in Los Angeles and elsewhere,
and we're now confronting the unsustainabilities of those decisions, especially
as the West gets dryer. And so yeah, I think
there's a kind of similar dynamic that's happening now. Obviously
we're not going to run out of sun, but we
(03:10):
will run out of land, or you know, we can
be making different choices about how to use these resources.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
You know, when I was out there, it was like,
you know, people desperate, a lot of handwringing, a lot
of pronouncements, and then it would abate and it would
go away again for a while. But when I read
your article, I mean, now we pivot from that to Nevada.
Baity is the city, NI County is the general area.
And I don't want to use the word nimby, because
(03:38):
that to me bespeaks rich, privileged people who don't want
things in their vista that are necessary and they want
to impose among other people. I don't view those people
as nimby. How do you describe those residents there.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, I mean, it's nice of you not to use
the term. When I initially heard that there were people
in the desert protest solar development, I also sort of
thought or assumed that they were Nimbi's. You know, that
is the framework that we're used to thinking about these issues,
which is a question of sort of you know, private
property or private interests versus questions of public good. When
I met these people, I mean, I think what I
(04:15):
found so interesting about them and what made me write
the article, is that I felt they were actually trying
to make this very important critique that has more to
do with what you were just talking about about, for example,
the choices we made about water and other natural resources
in the twentieth century. Basically, they were saying, this is
a question of how we do social change, and we're
(04:36):
claiming that climate change is this moment of large scale
social transformation. But actually from our perspective, from their perspective,
we're making the same decisions about land use, about infrastructure development,
and so on. So I thought that kind of critique
that was being made doesn't fit into how we understand
Nimbi's Public land in the United States is a commons
or could be described as a commons, which isn't a
(04:57):
vocabulary that we use in the US very much, but
people talk ab got it. There's sort of similar fights
about renewable energy development in Latin America and Africa, and
people use the term energy grabbing like so they sort
of talk about this common land being taken by energy
companies and the implications that has for rural livelihoods, And
so I think that is actually much more similar to
what's going on in the American West.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Now, you know, here in New York, where as everybody knows,
you know, Robert Moses condemns and through eminent domain takes
whole neighborhoods in the Bronx so we can build a highway.
In New York City in cooperation with the state, sees
through eminent domain valleys of land that they evicted everybody
from and flooded them to make the reservoir system for
(05:40):
the city's drinking water. But in the area of Nevada
you were in, do they view it purely as another
rush companies coming in private companies to alter the landscape.
Do they see it as a critical element potentially in
something that we all have to make some sacrifices for
(06:02):
in some contribution, which is to address climate change.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Right, Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I
think some of them do and some of them probably don't.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
For some people, there is a very personal emotional reaction
that any of us would have, right if the government
was coming and seizing land or you know, building flooding
a valley and putting a reservoir in your backyard. Of
that kind of thing, they just got themselves as fighting
for their lives. So that I think often in that
framework it doesn't sort of rise to the level of
the public good questions. But you know, one thing I
(06:33):
would say is that even within that, like even when
we start thinking in those terms about you know, what
is in the national interest or the public interest here,
and how should these public lands be used, Like, there's
a real question about what the highest and best use is.
So for example, in the West, there was a period
of time when valleys were being flooded for reservoirs.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So, I mean there have been shifts in the kind
of American public consciousness and sentiment about these issues over
time in terms of saying to themselves, well, you know,
the thing that's really in the public interest is to
have this reservoir here versus the thing that's in the
public interest is to save this you know, beautiful valley
so that we can have that as part of our
heart fish stocks exactly. And so yeah, I think what
(07:17):
I find complicated about this question is is that that's
an open question. Right. There's a climate crisis and we
have to be carbonized, but there's also an extinction crisis
and a biodiversity crisis, and so one can argue that
preserving desert habitat is you know, is also an important
part of responding to claims.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Just so if you have where you you mentioned in
the article, the eighty five percent of the land mass
in the state of Nevada is federal land. Yeah, and
is all of that controlled by.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
BLM basically yes. So yeah, So for.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
People who are listening, is Beaty and n County is
that on federal land that they're allowed to occupy or
are they in private land?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
It's federal land. So Beaty is a small is a
town that they describe as sort of landlocked. So it's
a little island of you know, people have owned parcels
of land and then it's surrounded by public land and
for people who are listening. So public lands managed mostly
by the Bureau of Land Management, which is a department
of the Interior, sometimes the Forest Service and other things,
and they're managed under what's called the multiple Use Mandate,
(08:16):
which means these lands, unlike national parks, are open for
extractive activities or energy development as well as recreation. And
it's actually one in ten acres of land in the
United States, which I found amazing just to learn. So, yeah,
so it's a little island of a regular town where
people own properties surrounded by this public land.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
When did the people of NY County get introduced to
this rush?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Basically now it's happening now. So there was a sort
of initial solar rush or you know, phase one of
the solar rush, which is about ten years ago. And
Dustin Melvini, who you'll be speaking to later today, has
been studying that so can talk about this over a
longer timescale. But much of that took place in California.
And so the people I mentioned in the article, Kevin
and Laura, who run a nonprofit called Basin and Range Watch.
(09:02):
They have been part of a group of sort of
western desert advocates and desert protectors, who include people trained
in conservation biology and that kind of thing, but also
many tribes and indigenous groups and activists and artists and
kind of other people who care about the desert for
various reasons. And so they started arguing, you know, ten
years ago that renewable energy development of this sort sort
(09:26):
of large scale on what is called undisturbed lands was
going to threaten deserts and was a problem. It's just
come to beaty kind of now. And it's come because
there's a new transmission line that's going to be built
around the state of Nevada. So it's a big triangle
and that's going to help carry renewable energy but also
fossil fuel based energy probably and export that to other states.
(09:49):
So the solar developers are kind of following where these
transmission lines are likely to be.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Now, knowing as we do that similar to the water crisis,
there's a clock ticking here in terms of climate change
and global warming, and I'm wondering what you think what
it's going to take for us to have I never
used the word Manhattan Project because that bespeaks war. I
tend to use the word Apollo Project, where we're going
(10:16):
to really, really the government's going to get serious about
spending money on these projects, not waiting for private developers
to do it. What do you think it's going to take.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
What an excellent question. I think we're all we're all
asking that question right now.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
And to be clear, just since you were talking about
some of like sort of where nationally we're going to
be putting renewable energy development, right, I am not. I mean,
most energy experts agree that we're going to need some
you know, large scale utility scale solar and wand and renewables.
So this is not a this is not an argument
against large scale solar per se. It's a question about
(10:48):
where we put it and how we're building it out.
Human settlements are all kind of unsustainable in their own ways, right,
So some cities need water brought to them, some cities
need food brought into them, like New York. So it's
not again, it's not also to say that, you know,
we've made a terrible mistake creating cities in the Southwest.
I mean, I think there's a few things that are
missing right now. So one is we don't really have
(11:09):
good frameworks for large scale planning in the United States.
And I sort of mentioned this, I think in the
article in passing, probably in one sentence. But there isn't
other than the Bureau of Land Management, which isn't really
staffed or funded for playing this kind of role. There
is not a federal agency that can make really big,
coordinated decisions about land use. Seems very important. So there
are you know, there are planned energy corridors like so
(11:30):
there's a they know where these transmission lines are likely
to go. There was some federal planning around that, but
there's absolutely no coordination between different types of activities related
to renewables, So lithium, geothermal, solar farms, all that can
kind of happen in the same place. All those permits
are assessed separately. The planning of transmission lines and location
(11:51):
of substations takes place separately from questions about where to
put actual solar farms. So all of these things are
happening in this really piecemeal way that makes it hard
to make good decisions. And I think also the role
that the federal government is playing is one of kind
of lowering barriers to private development. Right They've tried to
make it easier for many good reasons for private developers
(12:12):
to build out solar, to build out renewables, to reduce
the financial risks that those companies are taking on to
do it. Which is good in terms of facilitating you know,
solar happening quickly, it is not as good in terms
of helping guide projects to the best locations or having
these kinds of big picture questions in mind. Right, So
(12:33):
the federal government could be making decisions like should this
land in central Nevada be part of our twenty five
y twenty five initiative, which is the goal to build
out twenty five gigatts of solar by twenty twenty five
on public lands, or.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
The thirty ontograt for that.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
They're trying to be Yeah, but there's also at the
same time a thirty by thirty initiative, which is to
conserve thirty percent of the land mass in the United
States as you know and whatever they call it, you know,
intact habitat. And so this land in Nevada be part
of the energy sort of portfolio or part of the
conservation portfolio. I mean, those are the kinds of questions
that I think the federal government could be stepping in
(13:09):
to help answer.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
You're an urban sociologist, describe for our listeners what that is. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
So I usually say I'm an urban and environmental sociologist,
and so a lot of my work is about ideas
about nature and the environment and how we mobilize them
when making decisions about the built environment about cities. So,
before I got my PhD, I worked for the New
York City Parks Department.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Actually, so, where are you from.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Originally I'm actually from Kentucky, but I went to college
near here. I went to Vassar i.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Vasa, Yeah, nuts valid, and then you got your PhD.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah, So I worked here in city government and then
I stayed here. I worked for a program called Partnerships
for Parks that was actually a public private partnership, but
it basically existed, exists, it still exists to get communities
involved in their city parks and to advocate for them,
and to also help the parks department work better with
the public.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I first moved here in seventy nine to go to NYU,
and then the Conservancy emerged, and there was all this brief,
as I recall, debate about what union labor no city
workers who worked there, how much were they being usurped
by this private group. Now we have this quasi private
(14:23):
public marriage of the two. I mean Central Park is
like a business.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Now it is. And you know this actually relates to
the other things we're talking about. I mean it's a
double edged sword. In the West. I mean, national parks
are much like Central Park. Right. National parks, as many
people know, are these very controlled spaces. You're shuttled from
here to there. They're super crowded, there's lots of infrastructure, bathrooms,
internet for tourists. It's for tourists. Public lands are like
(14:51):
the interstitial spaces were I mean, I will just say
so coming from California, there's a lot of state parks there.
They don't allow dogs in state parks. So it was
the middle of COVID and I got dog when I
moved to California from New York because I didn't know
what else to do with my time, and so I
discovered public lands because it was a place you could
take your dog. You can take your dog, you can
shoot guns, you can ride motorized vehicles, you can live there,
(15:12):
you can camp for fourteen days without a permit. It's
a really kind of interesting and amazing place. Again just
because as an urban nite and a coastal urban nite.
I really had no sense that this land existed in
the United States and that it still exists. And it's
not to say that it's a free for all, but
those are the kinds of questions that are coming up
now about about these landscapes. I think in a similar way,
(15:32):
and the changes in parks in New York, I think
can show us how public relationships to these spaces changes
so dramatically. Right, Central Park went from being a dangerous
place that was not particularly valued or was seen as
like a liability.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
We don't go in the park. Right, the park was
dangerous as a very dangerous space.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, everybody, it's like the mall.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
It is.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Central Park.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
No, No, No. Urban and environmental sociologist Hillary Angelo. If
you are interested in conversations about energy sources and our future,
be sure to check out my episode with journalist Nicholas Narkos,
(16:18):
who investigated the cobalt rush in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Just like chatting with his kid ZICKI. He was working
in mind since he was three, basically, and then there
was this moment where I showed him my phone. I said,
the new iPhone is going for a two hundred dollars
and everybody there knows that it's going into batteries something
like fifty percent of the cobalt. Mind there it goes
into letting my own batteries. How do you feel about this?
And he was just like, I feel terrible, And I
(16:44):
think he sort of thought, you know, how can people
sort of sanction such violence against people like me?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Hear more of my conversation with Nicholas Narkos that Here's
the Thing dot org After the break, Hillary Angelo proposes
new ways of thinking for the solar model. I'm ATLEC.
(17:14):
Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. For
her article on the solar boom in the West, Hillary
Angelo dug deep into the history of the area and
the exploitation of its land. I wanted to know if
places like Ni County were deemed off limits for development,
what spaces might be used instead.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, it's a great question. People talk about locating large
scale solar on disturbed lands, that's what they call these.
So this is sort of industrial I think in terms
of things like brown Field. So yeah, where there was
a factory and it's polluted. They talk about areas where
there was strip mining, and Appalachia so often prison top, yeah, mountaintop.
So often prisons come to those regions now because they're
(17:57):
sort of, you know, undesirable land uses. People don't want
prisons near their houses. But it's also not the best
thing for a community in Appalachia, right, Maybe you'd prefer
to have a solar farm in a prison. There's also farmland.
This is in California, so exhausted farmland that can't be
used for farming anymore, or that they don't have water
to farm on anymore, Like that's another good place for it.
So yeah, I think those are all possible.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Now, the energy that could be accessed by the residents
of Ni County doesn't have to be part of a
solar farm that they're constructing. You could literally in the
bargaining say you're going to build us our own solar farm.
In other words, we're going to have free energy for
everybody that lives here, free for the rest of our lives.
And that's the gift you're going to give us, an
(18:42):
exchange for us not getting in the way of your project.
When you say this energy goes elsewhere, that's the reality.
It goes elsewhere. They don't get it they don't get
to wet their beak. As we say in the mafia.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
It's tricky to answer that question. It does. Like the
very simple way that it could be stated is, yeah,
it goes elsewhere. This is like large scale renewable energy
being generated to send and be purchased by companies. Yeah, exactly.
But you know, as I've heard the Bureau of Land
Management and other people say, like once you get the
(19:18):
electrons in the transmission line, that you can't really parse
it out in those ways. So there is a you know,
obviously there is local energy being generated and used in Baby,
So I assume they get some of it, but.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
It feels like maybe they should get more of it.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Maybe they should get more of it. Yeah, I don't
I don't think. I don't know. I mean, I think,
you know, again, the bigger question for them is what
is the economy of this town, And for them, this
kind of tourism model seems to have a better long
term future for them, and it makes them less reliant
on a company that may be kind of here today,
gone tomorrow. Renewable energy not just solar, but also things
(19:55):
like lithium and geothermal, Like there's a lot of speculation.
You know, it's a new in just and so there
are many companies that are trying to get their hands
in it. And some of them are good and stable
and some of them are not. And so they yeah,
they I think they worry about, you know, becoming a
new company town basically, and then the company folds.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
And then do you like writing? I do like writing? Yeah, yeah,
Because I'm not saying this to be kind. What really
hooked me was that this is such so well written,
this piece you did you mean you're writing? It is fantastic.
And I'm an old Harper's junkie. Louis Lappham is an
old old friend of mine, and I don't mean old chronologically,
which he's old chronologically too, but he's a dear friend
of mine. So I'm a big Harper's reader. What are
(20:35):
you working on now.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I'm working at a book. So I'm working at a
book on public lands and the energy transition, so basically
looking at the future of public lands in some ways
that we've just talked about, like basically, climate change is
this moment of large scale transformation. Old infrastructure systems are crumbling,
old ways of doing life on Earth are crumbling, and
we're building a bunch of new systems. So I'm curious about,
(20:58):
you know, how that's happening and whether we are actually
able to kind of change the way we do things,
change the political economy, change the relationship to the environment
in fundamental ways. I just want to say one thing.
I'm going to invite myself to say one thing before
we sign off, which is, you know, as an urban sociologist,
a lot of what my work was about was looking
at kind of the decisions we made in the name
(21:20):
of nature that were not sound decisions environmentally, Right Like,
we often oppose housing construction because we want to preserve
open space, but in not building housing, we push people out,
out and out and out, We increase commuting, we increase emissions, right,
we fragment habitats, you know, and that kind of thing.
So I think this is a similar thing, right Like,
we need to decarbonize, we need to do it fast.
(21:41):
We're in the middle of climate crisis, but there are
multiple there are you know, competing issues here, including habitat
and biodiversity crisis, and in using this land for scholar,
I think we are sort of failing to think about
the big picture of all of the environmental challenges that
we're currently facing, different ways to solve them. Well, thank
(22:02):
you very much, Thanks so much, thank you. That's a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Institute for Advanced Study scholar Hillary Angelo my next guest.
San Jose State University Professor Dustin mulvaney is the author
of Solar Power, Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice, and he
is also a source for the article Boomtown. I was
curious to learn what the people of NY County know
(22:30):
and understand about our climate crisis timeline and the sacrifice
that is being asked of them.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
I do think that these communities have a long history
with extractive industries, and I think that that's the lens
through which they're interpreting a lot of the land us
change that might be coming their way and is already
coming their way for solar development. These folks who live
(22:58):
out there tend to be very tuned into the natural world,
so to speak, the desert ecosystem, and they know things
are changing. I have a sense that they they're familiar
with the climate change overarching challenge that we're all facing.
I think that they just have had these experiences where
(23:20):
when let's say, you know, a major city like Las
Vegas or Los Angeles needs a dump, they go to
the desert. When they need lithium, like they need today,
where do they go? They go to the desert. Where
do they need in this case, lots of sunshine. You know,
they feel like their resources are being somewhat squandered in
the sense that they also look around and see areas
(23:43):
that are disturbed, meaning they're not just living in these
rural areas that are rich ecosystems. They're living in a
rich ecosystem that also has pockets of extractivism all over it.
There's mining all over the California Desert. There has been
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
What are they mining were now?
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Primarily there's gold mining, there's silver mining in Nevada. The
there's new mining projects that are being proposed in and
around the area where the solar development's happening as well.
Lithium mining. We have somewhere on the order of last
I checked, it was something like seventeen thousand plaster claims
for lithium in the state of Nevada, which is you know, lithium.
(24:21):
That's another major challenge, right we don't right now have
the supplies of lithium to get to the electrification of
vehicles that we are hoping to see in the future.
So I guess the way I think some of these
communities are seeing what they're being asked to sacrifice here,
they see it as somewhat of a false choice because
(24:43):
if you zoom out of the Mohave Desert and the
areas of the Colorado Desert, which is southern California, if
you zoom out, there's a lot of agriculture there. You know,
if you look at blythe a major city on the
Colorado River, they're growing lots of alfalfa for export for horses. Now,
those are opportunities to cite solar farms in these agricultural
(25:07):
areas the Imperial Valley.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So in an area where there's a lot of agriculture,
the solar is built adjacent to that. It's land that
they're not farmingland. It was one of the conditions there
that makes it less problematic for them.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Well, the key thing is the habitat. So you know,
when we're talking about the controversies in this particular region
of California and Nevada, the controversies are usually around the
public lands, and these public lands have been in conservation
by default because they have never been developed. So that
means that they're very good habitat for desert tortoise, which
(25:43):
we've lost almost ninety percent of that population of that animal,
that species that's been in that area since there were
sabertoothed cats, right, that species has been there for a
long time, and now we're we're damaging its habitat. So
when a solar farm is cited in agricultural areas, it's
usually a decision made by that farmer to convert either
out of agriculture or maybe you know, in some cases,
(26:05):
Blithe and the Imperial Value are going to be asked
to retire land because we're over extracting water from the
Colorado River as well. So there's this opportunity to kind
of put that puzzle together. As agricultural lands are retired,
maybe those are the opportunities to put the solar farms
because you don't damage the habitat.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
And when you say damage the habitat, when you have
these installations in these places and quote unquote habitat is disturbed,
are they talking about one or the other of boat
or both of habitat for wildlife? You talk about the
tortoises and so forth are not necessarily baby in Nevada,
(26:48):
but are different areas worried about. They want things left
absolutely pristine and you know natural or is it They
want to be able to tear it up with an
ATV and have a dirt bike track. And there's cultural
imperatives and there's preferences they have that are not necessarily
in harmony with nature. Is it a combination of both.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
It is a combination of multiple factors, partly because the
public lands system, which is managed by the Bureau of
Land Management in the Department of Interior, is the one
federal agency without a mission, meaning the National Park Service
has a mission to provide park services and get people
(27:33):
to see nature. The Forest Service has a mission to
manage sustainable yield of forests in some places and manage
wildernesses and others. But the Bureau of Land Management has
multiple priorities. Conservation is one of them, but energy development
is another, mining is another, Recreational ATV use is another.
(27:54):
So in some ways this controversy embodies the challe faced
by this federal agency since it was developed. You know,
the history of that agency is the General Land Office
was a federal agency that gave away land for development
the Homestead Act. As the West was settled, the General
(28:14):
Land Office offered out these lands for if you were
going to develop these lands and work them, farm them,
you could have it. And the desert areas were not farmable,
so the General Land Office could never give away these lands.
In fact, in the nineteen twenties, the Bureau Land Management
tried to give away lands back to the states and
that didn't happen. So the General Land Office gets merged
(28:36):
with a grazing agency, and that's the land that the
Bureau Land Management manages today. It's the nation's largest landlord.
It manages two hundred and fifty million acres across the West,
and it manages for all these different activities. Take the
desert tortoise again for an example. The desert tortoise. We
spend more money conserving that species than grizzly bear, bald eagle,
(28:59):
and gray wolf combined. So that species we make a
lot of federal investments in it. And on the flip side,
we've now permitted somewhere on the order of ten gigawatts
of solar on public lands. That's more than any other
state has, So that means that there's this kind of
inevitable clash of conservation because those lands were never developed.
(29:21):
And the Energy Policy Act of two thousand and five
was actually the biggest energy law that we had until
this most recent inflation Reduction Act. So the Energy Policy
Act of two thousand and five mandated that the Bureau
of Land Management develop for solar and the idea there
was partly, hey, we've been given out public lands for coal,
(29:42):
oil and gas for all these years. Now it's the
solar and other renewables industries turned to have the public lands.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Professor Dustin mulvaney, if you're enjoying this conversation, don't keep
it to yourself, Tell a friend and follow here's the
thing on the heart radio app, Spotify or wherever you
get your podcasts. When we come back, Dustin Mulveny shares
a potential way to move forward for the communities that
(30:12):
will be affected by solar expansion. I'm Alec Baldwin and
this is here's the thing. Dustin Mulveny's research focuses on
the production of emerging technologies and their environmental impact, and
(30:36):
specifically solar energy commodity chains. I wanted Mulveny to share
what if any dangerous byproducts we might have to worry
about from the expansion of the solar industry.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
So solar doesn't seem to have the same level of
challenges that batteries do up the supply chain. The key
ingredient for solar panel is quartz. Most of the solar
panels made out of glass, so by weight, quartz goes
into that glass, but there's a semiconductor grade quartz that's
mined and that's turned into a very very pure type
(31:11):
of silicon that eventually becomes the wafers that you see
in a solar cell. The key metal that is interesting
that the solar industry uses is silver. So on a
given year, the solar industry uses somewhere around fifteen percent
of the global silver supply, which is quite incredible. Now.
That is also interestingly hasn't led to an increase in
(31:35):
silver mining, partly because of the photo industry going away.
Silver was widely used in developing photographs, and that supply
basically now has kind of slid over to the solar industry,
not the direct supply, but has basically substituted that demand
(31:55):
over time. So a solar panels a somewhat simple technology
which poses some challenges for recycling. So that means that
like the solar panels not very valuable inside problematic elements
that are in a solar panel might be lead at
the end of its life, there's a little bit of
lead in the sod or it's not like a television
set that has a real lot of lead in it.
(32:16):
But that's probably the exposure of concern. For example, if
you're recycling solar panels, they've recycled ninety five percent of
their solar panels in Europe.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
By the way, cadmium as an element in solar panels,
what role does that play.
Speaker 4 (32:31):
So there are two major types of solar panels. Most
of them ninety five percent of them are crystalline silicon,
so they rely on that quartz and that very very
refined silicon. There's a different technology, a technology actually people
thought would be more widespread today, which is called thin film.
(32:52):
The silicon ones are exceptionally thin, but these thin films
are actually like one hundred times thinner. They're on the
order of one hundred nanem of thickness, and those are
the semiconductor layers that generate the electricity. So there's one
major manufacture of cadmium telluride solar panels, and that is
a thin film technology that is based on cadmium compounds,
(33:16):
so there's no quurts in that technology at all. It's
literally a totally different solar technology. The materials are totally different.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Now in France where recently they ruled that you have
to have a solar on every new parking structure that
is built, and we have a little bit of that
in this country. Without getting too political, Where in the
triptich of what I understand in terms of the menu
of renewable energy, where does geothermal fit in and does
(33:48):
it really work? Is geothermal something to your understanding, something
that only works site specific meaning your home. You drill
a geothermal well to provide certain resource is heating and cooling,
but it only works on a house by house basis.
Or are there is there the potential for geothermal to
work in the utility sense?
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Yeah, so you're describing kind of the two different types
of geothermal. There is a household level heating cooling geothermal
where there's no electricity generation involved unless there's a heat
pump associated with that, which could be the case. Geothermal
at the utility scale is very location specific because it's
taking very hot steam or hot water and bringing it
(34:35):
up to the surface to turn a turbine. So there
are some advances that people are talking about enhanced geothermal
where they essentially go deeper and they may even fracture
some rock, some of that heat source rock that's down low,
to increase its surface area to get a little more
steam out of it. But that is certainly another area
(34:57):
that's growing right now. Geothermal power is growing and it
also has the potential to provide some other resources as well,
So not just generating electricity from these power plants, but
district heating, so you could potentially so geothermal tends to
have a lot of waste water cooling water associated with it,
so you could potentially deliver just like we have our
(35:20):
water systems in our under our streets, you could have
a geothermal hot water system linked under the seats. In fact,
New York City has the largest i think district steam
system in yes, so you could do that.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
What are some of the byproducts as well? It seems
like every time we address a problem, renewable energy as
an attempt to address a problem, and every time we
do that, not that we have an equivalent number of
problems we create, but we create some. What are some
of the problems as far as you're concerned that the
move to solar, that the build out of the solar future,
(35:56):
what are some of the problems that result from that.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
Well, there are man issues, as I mentioned at the
end of life, I think that are important. There are
chemical stewardship questions around some of the very easy to
deal with chemicals. The industry actually doesn't use extremely toxic materials.
It uses materials that could be relatively easily treated even
(36:20):
in regular municipal wastewater treatment facilities in some cases, so
I'm not overly worried about that, I'll be honest, I
think the big issue is the land issue. We really
are moving from subterranean energy resources where you just poke,
you build a pad and poke a hole in the
ground and get tremendous quantities of dense energy to a
(36:41):
very diffuse resource that does require a lot of space.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
But as far as I'm concerned, if I may, when
you make that point, the first thing that comes to
mind for me is you poke a hole in the
ground and you have presumably less damage to the crust
if you will to the exterior, But once that stuff
comes out of the ground, it more than makes up
for it and the toxicity and the damage it creates. Absolutely,
(37:06):
we punch a few holes in the ground, we inject
water into rock formations and force gas out with God
knows what the byproduct of that is. Who really knows
what the long term consequences of fracking are nobody, But
the resultant energy is far more what we want. Do
you see it that way?
Speaker 4 (37:27):
I agree with that. Where I try to take a
little different approach to that is to not think of
it as training off one bad energy for another bad energy.
Meaning it's absolutely the case that even if the worst
case land use, solar is still better than what we're
doing right now in terms of the level of fossil
(37:48):
fuel extraction. That's not the question, But the question is
how to do it better because we have so many
other alternatives. That's the one beauty of this solar technology
is that it's the only technologlogy we can live under
that generates electricity. It's the only technology that we can
integrate into the built environment. It's the only technology that
we could easily integrate into agricultural areas. So to some extent,
(38:13):
I think the challenge is exactly what how you framed
it at first, which is that we tend to silo
these issues. We're only thinking about solar development from the
narrow lens of carbon. We're just like in the past,
we'd clean up water. You know, when I lived in
New Jersey, I was a site engineer cleaning up MTBE
(38:34):
spills MTBs an additive and gasoline. And the way we
cleaned up the groundwater pollution based on the rules that
we're supposed to follow, was to put it in the
air in New York, So we just shift problems from
water problem to air problem. Air problem the water problem,
like we have acid rain from coal, right that we
somewhat solve that problem by taking the acid rain potential
(38:58):
out of the air. But now we have solid weight
problems and fly ash problems at all these coal fire
power plants because the scrubbers have collected all that toxic
stuff and now it's sitting at the coal plant. So
with the case of solar, we need to be thinking
more than just about like the trade offs on the
carbon question. We need to be thinking about how could
we build this in an integrative way where we're thinking
(39:20):
about water we're thinking about land, we're thinking about air
pollution at the same time, instead of trying to just
solve the carbon problem and then we'll figure out what
we'll do with the land problem later.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Typically, for what you'd see on its solar farm, how
long do solar panels last? If you're wondering if a
material that the urns generates energy is nonetheless banking in
the one hundred and twenty degree sun, a wind turbine
is out there in the ocean in salt water, and
how long do those last. Let's just stick with solar.
(39:52):
Solar panels typically last.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
How long a typical solar panel is warranteed to last
twenty to twenty five years, So that's unlike any other
products that we really see. And the way the warranties
work is that they put out a certain amount of
power of their initial amount. So if you have one
hundred watts solar panel, it will put out eighty watts
by the end of its life twenty twenty five years.
Because impurities in those very hostile environments on your roof
(40:18):
in the desert, impurities creep into those solar cells and
that's what takes away their ability to generate power over time. However,
we've seen solar panels that are operating now fifty years,
so we certainly are seeing solar panels that are made
very very well. They go through all sorts of advanced
(40:38):
degradation tests, hail tests, corrosion tests, all sorts of tests
to make sure that they last a long time. In fact,
they have to do those in order to get to
ensure the warranties for the solar panels that they're selling.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
What do you think is one step that we can
take that you think is triage? We need to do
this now. Now what do we need to do now?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
I'll say two things. One, I think community ownership of
some of these assets is really critical. So it might
not be resolvable in its current situation, but we know that,
for example, when ranchers get together and they own the
wind farm, no one fights it. They all welcome it
because they're definitely they're going to receive direct benefit from that.
(41:24):
But I think it's really important to also note that
when we're talking about building out solar, the US will
need somewhere on the order between five thousand and fifteen
thousand square miles of solar to power its portion of
the great according to some modelers, so five to fifteen
square miles. We have three hundred thousand square miles of
(41:48):
brown fields, degraded lands, salt contaminated agricultural lands. All to
say that I've often I feel like this conservation versus
solar energy development is a false choice, because I think
there is a path forward where we could keep many
of the lands that we value for their conservation benefits,
(42:10):
for their cultural resources, and find the places where the
disturbed lands could be utilized because we have so much
of that already and we know that those projects don't
face any opposition.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Well, I want to say thank you so much. You
are so authoritative about this. It's been my great pleasure, truly,
thank you so much. My thanks to Dustin mulvaney and
Hilary Angelo. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in
New York City, where produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice,
(42:48):
and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social
media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the
thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. After decades of debate, it is
now common knowledge that the world is in the midst
of an ever increasing energy crisis, and that the long
era of burning fossil fuels for power is contributing to
(00:23):
our own demise. And yet the transition to alternative energy
is proving to be more complex than you might think.
The Harper's Magazine article Boomtown examines the solar land rush
currently happening in the American West, specifically in the town
of Beatty in Nai County, Nevada. The Ni County area
(00:46):
has the capacity to produce enough energy through its prospective
solar farms to power the entire planet, Yes, the entire planet.
Close to the entrance of Death Valley National Park, It's
an area rife with flat land and almost endless sunlight,
but residents are pushing back on proposals to use its
(01:10):
land for this purpose. After a series of exploitative boom
bust cycles like the Gold Rush. Residents are opposing the
plan on ecological and economic grounds. They argue that covering
Nevada in solar panels will affect wildlife, recreational spaces, and
(01:30):
the town's future. The article asks the difficult questions of
who should sacrifice for our collective future and at what cost.
My guests today are deep into this inquiry. Dustin mulvaney
is a solar expert and professor of environmental studies at
San Jose State University, and he collaborated on the Harper's article.
(01:55):
But first the author of Boomtown, Hilary Angelo, is an
urban environmental sociologist and associate professor of sociology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also a current
member of the Institute for Advanced Study, where she is
working with other scholars on the issue of climate crisis politics.
(02:18):
I wanted to know how her work in urban sociology
was related to sustainability and the growing issue of water scarcity.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I do a lot of work on urban sustainability and
sustainability planning in general, and so a lot of questions
about how human settlement relates to the external environment. So
one of my interests in this topic and in these
questions about energy is are we making the same decisions
again as we now confront this new environmental crisis? Because
much like we've done with water. We sort of created
(02:49):
these very large scale infrastructure systems in the twentieth century
that made huge quantities of water available to you know,
people who lived in cities in Los Angeles and elsewhere,
and we're now confronting the unsustainabilities of those decisions, especially
as the West gets dryer. And so yeah, I think
there's a kind of similar dynamic that's happening now. Obviously
we're not going to run out of sun, but we
(03:10):
will run out of land, or you know, we can
be making different choices about how to use these resources.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
You know, when I was out there, it was like,
you know, people desperate, a lot of handwringing, a lot
of pronouncements, and then it would abate and it would
go away again for a while. But when I read
your article, I mean, now we pivot from that to Nevada.
Baity is the city, NI County is the general area.
And I don't want to use the word nimby, because
(03:38):
that to me bespeaks rich, privileged people who don't want
things in their vista that are necessary and they want
to impose among other people. I don't view those people
as nimby. How do you describe those residents there.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, I mean, it's nice of you not to use
the term. When I initially heard that there were people
in the desert protest solar development, I also sort of
thought or assumed that they were Nimbi's. You know, that
is the framework that we're used to thinking about these issues,
which is a question of sort of you know, private
property or private interests versus questions of public good. When
I met these people, I mean, I think what I
(04:15):
found so interesting about them and what made me write
the article, is that I felt they were actually trying
to make this very important critique that has more to
do with what you were just talking about about, for example,
the choices we made about water and other natural resources
in the twentieth century. Basically, they were saying, this is
a question of how we do social change, and we're
(04:36):
claiming that climate change is this moment of large scale
social transformation. But actually from our perspective, from their perspective,
we're making the same decisions about land use, about infrastructure development,
and so on. So I thought that kind of critique
that was being made doesn't fit into how we understand
Nimbi's Public land in the United States is a commons
or could be described as a commons, which isn't a
(04:57):
vocabulary that we use in the US very much, but
people talk ab got it. There's sort of similar fights
about renewable energy development in Latin America and Africa, and
people use the term energy grabbing like so they sort
of talk about this common land being taken by energy
companies and the implications that has for rural livelihoods, And
so I think that is actually much more similar to
what's going on in the American West.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Now, you know, here in New York, where as everybody knows,
you know, Robert Moses condemns and through eminent domain takes
whole neighborhoods in the Bronx so we can build a highway.
In New York City in cooperation with the state, sees
through eminent domain valleys of land that they evicted everybody
from and flooded them to make the reservoir system for
(05:40):
the city's drinking water. But in the area of Nevada
you were in, do they view it purely as another
rush companies coming in private companies to alter the landscape.
Do they see it as a critical element potentially in
something that we all have to make some sacrifices for
(06:02):
in some contribution, which is to address climate change.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Right, Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I
think some of them do and some of them probably don't.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
For some people, there is a very personal emotional reaction
that any of us would have, right if the government
was coming and seizing land or you know, building flooding
a valley and putting a reservoir in your backyard. Of
that kind of thing, they just got themselves as fighting
for their lives. So that I think often in that
framework it doesn't sort of rise to the level of
the public good questions. But you know, one thing I
(06:33):
would say is that even within that, like even when
we start thinking in those terms about you know, what
is in the national interest or the public interest here,
and how should these public lands be used, Like, there's
a real question about what the highest and best use is.
So for example, in the West, there was a period
of time when valleys were being flooded for reservoirs.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So, I mean there have been shifts in the kind
of American public consciousness and sentiment about these issues over
time in terms of saying to themselves, well, you know,
the thing that's really in the public interest is to
have this reservoir here versus the thing that's in the
public interest is to save this you know, beautiful valley
so that we can have that as part of our
heart fish stocks exactly. And so yeah, I think what
(07:17):
I find complicated about this question is is that that's
an open question. Right. There's a climate crisis and we
have to be carbonized, but there's also an extinction crisis
and a biodiversity crisis, and so one can argue that
preserving desert habitat is you know, is also an important
part of responding to claims.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Just so if you have where you you mentioned in
the article, the eighty five percent of the land mass
in the state of Nevada is federal land. Yeah, and
is all of that controlled by.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
BLM basically yes. So yeah, So for.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
People who are listening, is Beaty and n County is
that on federal land that they're allowed to occupy or
are they in private land?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
It's federal land. So Beaty is a small is a
town that they describe as sort of landlocked. So it's
a little island of you know, people have owned parcels
of land and then it's surrounded by public land and
for people who are listening. So public lands managed mostly
by the Bureau of Land Management, which is a department
of the Interior, sometimes the Forest Service and other things,
and they're managed under what's called the multiple Use Mandate,
(08:16):
which means these lands, unlike national parks, are open for
extractive activities or energy development as well as recreation. And
it's actually one in ten acres of land in the
United States, which I found amazing just to learn. So, yeah,
so it's a little island of a regular town where
people own properties surrounded by this public land.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
When did the people of NY County get introduced to
this rush?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Basically now it's happening now. So there was a sort
of initial solar rush or you know, phase one of
the solar rush, which is about ten years ago. And
Dustin Melvini, who you'll be speaking to later today, has
been studying that so can talk about this over a
longer timescale. But much of that took place in California.
And so the people I mentioned in the article, Kevin
and Laura, who run a nonprofit called Basin and Range Watch.
(09:02):
They have been part of a group of sort of
western desert advocates and desert protectors, who include people trained
in conservation biology and that kind of thing, but also
many tribes and indigenous groups and activists and artists and
kind of other people who care about the desert for
various reasons. And so they started arguing, you know, ten
years ago that renewable energy development of this sort sort
(09:26):
of large scale on what is called undisturbed lands was
going to threaten deserts and was a problem. It's just
come to beaty kind of now. And it's come because
there's a new transmission line that's going to be built
around the state of Nevada. So it's a big triangle
and that's going to help carry renewable energy but also
fossil fuel based energy probably and export that to other states.
(09:49):
So the solar developers are kind of following where these
transmission lines are likely to be.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Now, knowing as we do that similar to the water crisis,
there's a clock ticking here in terms of climate change
and global warming, and I'm wondering what you think what
it's going to take for us to have I never
used the word Manhattan Project because that bespeaks war. I
tend to use the word Apollo Project, where we're going
(10:16):
to really, really the government's going to get serious about
spending money on these projects, not waiting for private developers
to do it. What do you think it's going to take.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
What an excellent question. I think we're all we're all
asking that question right now.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
And to be clear, just since you were talking about
some of like sort of where nationally we're going to
be putting renewable energy development, right, I am not. I mean,
most energy experts agree that we're going to need some
you know, large scale utility scale solar and wand and renewables.
So this is not a this is not an argument
against large scale solar per se. It's a question about
(10:48):
where we put it and how we're building it out.
Human settlements are all kind of unsustainable in their own ways, right,
So some cities need water brought to them, some cities
need food brought into them, like New York. So it's
not again, it's not also to say that, you know,
we've made a terrible mistake creating cities in the Southwest.
I mean, I think there's a few things that are
missing right now. So one is we don't really have
(11:09):
good frameworks for large scale planning in the United States.
And I sort of mentioned this, I think in the
article in passing, probably in one sentence. But there isn't
other than the Bureau of Land Management, which isn't really
staffed or funded for playing this kind of role. There
is not a federal agency that can make really big,
coordinated decisions about land use. Seems very important. So there
are you know, there are planned energy corridors like so
(11:30):
there's a they know where these transmission lines are likely
to go. There was some federal planning around that, but
there's absolutely no coordination between different types of activities related
to renewables, So lithium, geothermal, solar farms, all that can
kind of happen in the same place. All those permits
are assessed separately. The planning of transmission lines and location
(11:51):
of substations takes place separately from questions about where to
put actual solar farms. So all of these things are
happening in this really piecemeal way that makes it hard
to make good decisions. And I think also the role
that the federal government is playing is one of kind
of lowering barriers to private development. Right They've tried to
make it easier for many good reasons for private developers
(12:12):
to build out solar, to build out renewables, to reduce
the financial risks that those companies are taking on to
do it. Which is good in terms of facilitating you know,
solar happening quickly, it is not as good in terms
of helping guide projects to the best locations or having
these kinds of big picture questions in mind. Right, So
(12:33):
the federal government could be making decisions like should this
land in central Nevada be part of our twenty five
y twenty five initiative, which is the goal to build
out twenty five gigatts of solar by twenty twenty five
on public lands, or.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
The thirty ontograt for that.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
They're trying to be Yeah, but there's also at the
same time a thirty by thirty initiative, which is to
conserve thirty percent of the land mass in the United
States as you know and whatever they call it, you know,
intact habitat. And so this land in Nevada be part
of the energy sort of portfolio or part of the
conservation portfolio. I mean, those are the kinds of questions
that I think the federal government could be stepping in
(13:09):
to help answer.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
You're an urban sociologist, describe for our listeners what that is. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
So I usually say I'm an urban and environmental sociologist,
and so a lot of my work is about ideas
about nature and the environment and how we mobilize them
when making decisions about the built environment about cities. So,
before I got my PhD, I worked for the New
York City Parks Department.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Actually, so, where are you from.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Originally I'm actually from Kentucky, but I went to college
near here. I went to Vassar i.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Vasa, Yeah, nuts valid, and then you got your PhD.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah, So I worked here in city government and then
I stayed here. I worked for a program called Partnerships
for Parks that was actually a public private partnership, but
it basically existed, exists, it still exists to get communities
involved in their city parks and to advocate for them,
and to also help the parks department work better with
the public.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I first moved here in seventy nine to go to NYU,
and then the Conservancy emerged, and there was all this brief,
as I recall, debate about what union labor no city
workers who worked there, how much were they being usurped
by this private group. Now we have this quasi private
(14:23):
public marriage of the two. I mean Central Park is
like a business.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Now it is. And you know this actually relates to
the other things we're talking about. I mean it's a
double edged sword. In the West. I mean, national parks
are much like Central Park. Right. National parks, as many
people know, are these very controlled spaces. You're shuttled from
here to there. They're super crowded, there's lots of infrastructure, bathrooms,
internet for tourists. It's for tourists. Public lands are like
(14:51):
the interstitial spaces were I mean, I will just say
so coming from California, there's a lot of state parks there.
They don't allow dogs in state parks. So it was
the middle of COVID and I got dog when I
moved to California from New York because I didn't know
what else to do with my time, and so I
discovered public lands because it was a place you could
take your dog. You can take your dog, you can
shoot guns, you can ride motorized vehicles, you can live there,
(15:12):
you can camp for fourteen days without a permit. It's
a really kind of interesting and amazing place. Again just
because as an urban nite and a coastal urban nite.
I really had no sense that this land existed in
the United States and that it still exists. And it's
not to say that it's a free for all, but
those are the kinds of questions that are coming up
now about about these landscapes. I think in a similar way,
(15:32):
and the changes in parks in New York, I think
can show us how public relationships to these spaces changes
so dramatically. Right, Central Park went from being a dangerous
place that was not particularly valued or was seen as
like a liability.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
We don't go in the park. Right, the park was
dangerous as a very dangerous space.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, everybody, it's like the mall.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
It is.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Central Park.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
No, No, No. Urban and environmental sociologist Hillary Angelo. If
you are interested in conversations about energy sources and our future,
be sure to check out my episode with journalist Nicholas Narkos,
(16:18):
who investigated the cobalt rush in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Just like chatting with his kid ZICKI. He was working
in mind since he was three, basically, and then there
was this moment where I showed him my phone. I said,
the new iPhone is going for a two hundred dollars
and everybody there knows that it's going into batteries something
like fifty percent of the cobalt. Mind there it goes
into letting my own batteries. How do you feel about this?
And he was just like, I feel terrible, And I
(16:44):
think he sort of thought, you know, how can people
sort of sanction such violence against people like me?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Hear more of my conversation with Nicholas Narkos that Here's
the Thing dot org After the break, Hillary Angelo proposes
new ways of thinking for the solar model. I'm ATLEC.
(17:14):
Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. For
her article on the solar boom in the West, Hillary
Angelo dug deep into the history of the area and
the exploitation of its land. I wanted to know if
places like Ni County were deemed off limits for development,
what spaces might be used instead.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, it's a great question. People talk about locating large
scale solar on disturbed lands, that's what they call these.
So this is sort of industrial I think in terms
of things like brown Field. So yeah, where there was
a factory and it's polluted. They talk about areas where
there was strip mining, and Appalachia so often prison top, yeah, mountaintop.
So often prisons come to those regions now because they're
(17:57):
sort of, you know, undesirable land uses. People don't want
prisons near their houses. But it's also not the best
thing for a community in Appalachia, right, Maybe you'd prefer
to have a solar farm in a prison. There's also farmland.
This is in California, so exhausted farmland that can't be
used for farming anymore, or that they don't have water
to farm on anymore, Like that's another good place for it.
So yeah, I think those are all possible.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Now, the energy that could be accessed by the residents
of Ni County doesn't have to be part of a
solar farm that they're constructing. You could literally in the
bargaining say you're going to build us our own solar farm.
In other words, we're going to have free energy for
everybody that lives here, free for the rest of our lives.
And that's the gift you're going to give us, an
(18:42):
exchange for us not getting in the way of your project.
When you say this energy goes elsewhere, that's the reality.
It goes elsewhere. They don't get it they don't get
to wet their beak. As we say in the mafia.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
It's tricky to answer that question. It does. Like the
very simple way that it could be stated is, yeah,
it goes elsewhere. This is like large scale renewable energy
being generated to send and be purchased by companies. Yeah, exactly.
But you know, as I've heard the Bureau of Land
Management and other people say, like once you get the
(19:18):
electrons in the transmission line, that you can't really parse
it out in those ways. So there is a you know,
obviously there is local energy being generated and used in Baby,
So I assume they get some of it, but.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
It feels like maybe they should get more of it.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Maybe they should get more of it. Yeah, I don't
I don't think. I don't know. I mean, I think,
you know, again, the bigger question for them is what
is the economy of this town, And for them, this
kind of tourism model seems to have a better long
term future for them, and it makes them less reliant
on a company that may be kind of here today,
gone tomorrow. Renewable energy not just solar, but also things
(19:55):
like lithium and geothermal, Like there's a lot of speculation.
You know, it's a new in just and so there
are many companies that are trying to get their hands
in it. And some of them are good and stable
and some of them are not. And so they yeah,
they I think they worry about, you know, becoming a
new company town basically, and then the company folds.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
And then do you like writing? I do like writing? Yeah, yeah,
Because I'm not saying this to be kind. What really
hooked me was that this is such so well written,
this piece you did you mean you're writing? It is fantastic.
And I'm an old Harper's junkie. Louis Lappham is an
old old friend of mine, and I don't mean old chronologically,
which he's old chronologically too, but he's a dear friend
of mine. So I'm a big Harper's reader. What are
(20:35):
you working on now.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I'm working at a book. So I'm working at a
book on public lands and the energy transition, so basically
looking at the future of public lands in some ways
that we've just talked about, like basically, climate change is
this moment of large scale transformation. Old infrastructure systems are crumbling,
old ways of doing life on Earth are crumbling, and
we're building a bunch of new systems. So I'm curious about,
(20:58):
you know, how that's happening and whether we are actually
able to kind of change the way we do things,
change the political economy, change the relationship to the environment
in fundamental ways. I just want to say one thing.
I'm going to invite myself to say one thing before
we sign off, which is, you know, as an urban sociologist,
a lot of what my work was about was looking
at kind of the decisions we made in the name
(21:20):
of nature that were not sound decisions environmentally, Right Like,
we often oppose housing construction because we want to preserve
open space, but in not building housing, we push people out,
out and out and out, We increase commuting, we increase emissions, right,
we fragment habitats, you know, and that kind of thing.
So I think this is a similar thing, right Like,
we need to decarbonize, we need to do it fast.
(21:41):
We're in the middle of climate crisis, but there are
multiple there are you know, competing issues here, including habitat
and biodiversity crisis, and in using this land for scholar,
I think we are sort of failing to think about
the big picture of all of the environmental challenges that
we're currently facing, different ways to solve them. Well, thank
(22:02):
you very much, Thanks so much, thank you. That's a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Institute for Advanced Study scholar Hillary Angelo my next guest.
San Jose State University Professor Dustin mulvaney is the author
of Solar Power, Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice, and he
is also a source for the article Boomtown. I was
curious to learn what the people of NY County know
(22:30):
and understand about our climate crisis timeline and the sacrifice
that is being asked of them.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
I do think that these communities have a long history
with extractive industries, and I think that that's the lens
through which they're interpreting a lot of the land us
change that might be coming their way and is already
coming their way for solar development. These folks who live
(22:58):
out there tend to be very tuned into the natural world,
so to speak, the desert ecosystem, and they know things
are changing. I have a sense that they they're familiar
with the climate change overarching challenge that we're all facing.
I think that they just have had these experiences where
(23:20):
when let's say, you know, a major city like Las
Vegas or Los Angeles needs a dump, they go to
the desert. When they need lithium, like they need today,
where do they go? They go to the desert. Where
do they need in this case, lots of sunshine. You know,
they feel like their resources are being somewhat squandered in
the sense that they also look around and see areas
(23:43):
that are disturbed, meaning they're not just living in these
rural areas that are rich ecosystems. They're living in a
rich ecosystem that also has pockets of extractivism all over it.
There's mining all over the California Desert. There has been
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
What are they mining were now?
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Primarily there's gold mining, there's silver mining in Nevada. The
there's new mining projects that are being proposed in and
around the area where the solar development's happening as well.
Lithium mining. We have somewhere on the order of last
I checked, it was something like seventeen thousand plaster claims
for lithium in the state of Nevada, which is you know, lithium.
(24:21):
That's another major challenge, right we don't right now have
the supplies of lithium to get to the electrification of
vehicles that we are hoping to see in the future.
So I guess the way I think some of these
communities are seeing what they're being asked to sacrifice here,
they see it as somewhat of a false choice because
(24:43):
if you zoom out of the Mohave Desert and the
areas of the Colorado Desert, which is southern California, if
you zoom out, there's a lot of agriculture there. You know,
if you look at blythe a major city on the
Colorado River, they're growing lots of alfalfa for export for horses. Now,
those are opportunities to cite solar farms in these agricultural
(25:07):
areas the Imperial Valley.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So in an area where there's a lot of agriculture,
the solar is built adjacent to that. It's land that
they're not farmingland. It was one of the conditions there
that makes it less problematic for them.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Well, the key thing is the habitat. So you know,
when we're talking about the controversies in this particular region
of California and Nevada, the controversies are usually around the
public lands, and these public lands have been in conservation
by default because they have never been developed. So that
means that they're very good habitat for desert tortoise, which
(25:43):
we've lost almost ninety percent of that population of that animal,
that species that's been in that area since there were
sabertoothed cats, right, that species has been there for a
long time, and now we're we're damaging its habitat. So
when a solar farm is cited in agricultural areas, it's
usually a decision made by that farmer to convert either
out of agriculture or maybe you know, in some cases,
(26:05):
Blithe and the Imperial Value are going to be asked
to retire land because we're over extracting water from the
Colorado River as well. So there's this opportunity to kind
of put that puzzle together. As agricultural lands are retired,
maybe those are the opportunities to put the solar farms
because you don't damage the habitat.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
And when you say damage the habitat, when you have
these installations in these places and quote unquote habitat is disturbed,
are they talking about one or the other of boat
or both of habitat for wildlife? You talk about the
tortoises and so forth are not necessarily baby in Nevada,
(26:48):
but are different areas worried about. They want things left
absolutely pristine and you know natural or is it They
want to be able to tear it up with an
ATV and have a dirt bike track. And there's cultural
imperatives and there's preferences they have that are not necessarily
in harmony with nature. Is it a combination of both.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
It is a combination of multiple factors, partly because the
public lands system, which is managed by the Bureau of
Land Management in the Department of Interior, is the one
federal agency without a mission, meaning the National Park Service
has a mission to provide park services and get people
(27:33):
to see nature. The Forest Service has a mission to
manage sustainable yield of forests in some places and manage
wildernesses and others. But the Bureau of Land Management has
multiple priorities. Conservation is one of them, but energy development
is another, mining is another, Recreational ATV use is another.
(27:54):
So in some ways this controversy embodies the challe faced
by this federal agency since it was developed. You know,
the history of that agency is the General Land Office
was a federal agency that gave away land for development
the Homestead Act. As the West was settled, the General
(28:14):
Land Office offered out these lands for if you were
going to develop these lands and work them, farm them,
you could have it. And the desert areas were not farmable,
so the General Land Office could never give away these lands.
In fact, in the nineteen twenties, the Bureau Land Management
tried to give away lands back to the states and
that didn't happen. So the General Land Office gets merged
(28:36):
with a grazing agency, and that's the land that the
Bureau Land Management manages today. It's the nation's largest landlord.
It manages two hundred and fifty million acres across the West,
and it manages for all these different activities. Take the
desert tortoise again for an example. The desert tortoise. We
spend more money conserving that species than grizzly bear, bald eagle,
(28:59):
and gray wolf combined. So that species we make a
lot of federal investments in it. And on the flip side,
we've now permitted somewhere on the order of ten gigawatts
of solar on public lands. That's more than any other
state has, So that means that there's this kind of
inevitable clash of conservation because those lands were never developed.
(29:21):
And the Energy Policy Act of two thousand and five
was actually the biggest energy law that we had until
this most recent inflation Reduction Act. So the Energy Policy
Act of two thousand and five mandated that the Bureau
of Land Management develop for solar and the idea there
was partly, hey, we've been given out public lands for coal,
(29:42):
oil and gas for all these years. Now it's the
solar and other renewables industries turned to have the public lands.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Professor Dustin mulvaney, if you're enjoying this conversation, don't keep
it to yourself, Tell a friend and follow here's the
thing on the heart radio app, Spotify or wherever you
get your podcasts. When we come back, Dustin Mulveny shares
a potential way to move forward for the communities that
(30:12):
will be affected by solar expansion. I'm Alec Baldwin and
this is here's the thing. Dustin Mulveny's research focuses on
the production of emerging technologies and their environmental impact, and
(30:36):
specifically solar energy commodity chains. I wanted Mulveny to share
what if any dangerous byproducts we might have to worry
about from the expansion of the solar industry.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
So solar doesn't seem to have the same level of
challenges that batteries do up the supply chain. The key
ingredient for solar panel is quartz. Most of the solar
panels made out of glass, so by weight, quartz goes
into that glass, but there's a semiconductor grade quartz that's
mined and that's turned into a very very pure type
(31:11):
of silicon that eventually becomes the wafers that you see
in a solar cell. The key metal that is interesting
that the solar industry uses is silver. So on a
given year, the solar industry uses somewhere around fifteen percent
of the global silver supply, which is quite incredible. Now.
That is also interestingly hasn't led to an increase in
(31:35):
silver mining, partly because of the photo industry going away.
Silver was widely used in developing photographs, and that supply
basically now has kind of slid over to the solar industry,
not the direct supply, but has basically substituted that demand
(31:55):
over time. So a solar panels a somewhat simple technology
which poses some challenges for recycling. So that means that
like the solar panels not very valuable inside problematic elements
that are in a solar panel might be lead at
the end of its life, there's a little bit of
lead in the sod or it's not like a television
set that has a real lot of lead in it.
(32:16):
But that's probably the exposure of concern. For example, if
you're recycling solar panels, they've recycled ninety five percent of
their solar panels in Europe.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
By the way, cadmium as an element in solar panels,
what role does that play.
Speaker 4 (32:31):
So there are two major types of solar panels. Most
of them ninety five percent of them are crystalline silicon,
so they rely on that quartz and that very very
refined silicon. There's a different technology, a technology actually people
thought would be more widespread today, which is called thin film.
(32:52):
The silicon ones are exceptionally thin, but these thin films
are actually like one hundred times thinner. They're on the
order of one hundred nanem of thickness, and those are
the semiconductor layers that generate the electricity. So there's one
major manufacture of cadmium telluride solar panels, and that is
a thin film technology that is based on cadmium compounds,
(33:16):
so there's no quurts in that technology at all. It's
literally a totally different solar technology. The materials are totally different.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Now in France where recently they ruled that you have
to have a solar on every new parking structure that
is built, and we have a little bit of that
in this country. Without getting too political, Where in the
triptich of what I understand in terms of the menu
of renewable energy, where does geothermal fit in and does
(33:48):
it really work? Is geothermal something to your understanding, something
that only works site specific meaning your home. You drill
a geothermal well to provide certain resource is heating and cooling,
but it only works on a house by house basis.
Or are there is there the potential for geothermal to
work in the utility sense?
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Yeah, so you're describing kind of the two different types
of geothermal. There is a household level heating cooling geothermal
where there's no electricity generation involved unless there's a heat
pump associated with that, which could be the case. Geothermal
at the utility scale is very location specific because it's
taking very hot steam or hot water and bringing it
(34:35):
up to the surface to turn a turbine. So there
are some advances that people are talking about enhanced geothermal
where they essentially go deeper and they may even fracture
some rock, some of that heat source rock that's down low,
to increase its surface area to get a little more
steam out of it. But that is certainly another area
(34:57):
that's growing right now. Geothermal power is growing and it
also has the potential to provide some other resources as well,
So not just generating electricity from these power plants, but
district heating, so you could potentially so geothermal tends to
have a lot of waste water cooling water associated with it,
so you could potentially deliver just like we have our
(35:20):
water systems in our under our streets, you could have
a geothermal hot water system linked under the seats. In fact,
New York City has the largest i think district steam
system in yes, so you could do that.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
What are some of the byproducts as well? It seems
like every time we address a problem, renewable energy as
an attempt to address a problem, and every time we
do that, not that we have an equivalent number of
problems we create, but we create some. What are some
of the problems as far as you're concerned that the
move to solar, that the build out of the solar future,
(35:56):
what are some of the problems that result from that.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
Well, there are man issues, as I mentioned at the
end of life, I think that are important. There are
chemical stewardship questions around some of the very easy to
deal with chemicals. The industry actually doesn't use extremely toxic materials.
It uses materials that could be relatively easily treated even
(36:20):
in regular municipal wastewater treatment facilities in some cases, so
I'm not overly worried about that, I'll be honest, I
think the big issue is the land issue. We really
are moving from subterranean energy resources where you just poke,
you build a pad and poke a hole in the
ground and get tremendous quantities of dense energy to a
(36:41):
very diffuse resource that does require a lot of space.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
But as far as I'm concerned, if I may, when
you make that point, the first thing that comes to
mind for me is you poke a hole in the
ground and you have presumably less damage to the crust
if you will to the exterior, But once that stuff
comes out of the ground, it more than makes up
for it and the toxicity and the damage it creates. Absolutely,
(37:06):
we punch a few holes in the ground, we inject
water into rock formations and force gas out with God
knows what the byproduct of that is. Who really knows
what the long term consequences of fracking are nobody, But
the resultant energy is far more what we want. Do
you see it that way?
Speaker 4 (37:27):
I agree with that. Where I try to take a
little different approach to that is to not think of
it as training off one bad energy for another bad energy.
Meaning it's absolutely the case that even if the worst
case land use, solar is still better than what we're
doing right now in terms of the level of fossil
(37:48):
fuel extraction. That's not the question, But the question is
how to do it better because we have so many
other alternatives. That's the one beauty of this solar technology
is that it's the only technologlogy we can live under
that generates electricity. It's the only technology that we can
integrate into the built environment. It's the only technology that
we could easily integrate into agricultural areas. So to some extent,
(38:13):
I think the challenge is exactly what how you framed
it at first, which is that we tend to silo
these issues. We're only thinking about solar development from the
narrow lens of carbon. We're just like in the past,
we'd clean up water. You know, when I lived in
New Jersey, I was a site engineer cleaning up MTBE
(38:34):
spills MTBs an additive and gasoline. And the way we
cleaned up the groundwater pollution based on the rules that
we're supposed to follow, was to put it in the
air in New York, So we just shift problems from
water problem to air problem. Air problem the water problem,
like we have acid rain from coal, right that we
somewhat solve that problem by taking the acid rain potential
(38:58):
out of the air. But now we have solid weight
problems and fly ash problems at all these coal fire
power plants because the scrubbers have collected all that toxic
stuff and now it's sitting at the coal plant. So
with the case of solar, we need to be thinking
more than just about like the trade offs on the
carbon question. We need to be thinking about how could
we build this in an integrative way where we're thinking
(39:20):
about water we're thinking about land, we're thinking about air
pollution at the same time, instead of trying to just
solve the carbon problem and then we'll figure out what
we'll do with the land problem later.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Typically, for what you'd see on its solar farm, how
long do solar panels last? If you're wondering if a
material that the urns generates energy is nonetheless banking in
the one hundred and twenty degree sun, a wind turbine
is out there in the ocean in salt water, and
how long do those last. Let's just stick with solar.
(39:52):
Solar panels typically last.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
How long a typical solar panel is warranteed to last
twenty to twenty five years, So that's unlike any other
products that we really see. And the way the warranties
work is that they put out a certain amount of
power of their initial amount. So if you have one
hundred watts solar panel, it will put out eighty watts
by the end of its life twenty twenty five years.
Because impurities in those very hostile environments on your roof
(40:18):
in the desert, impurities creep into those solar cells and
that's what takes away their ability to generate power over time. However,
we've seen solar panels that are operating now fifty years,
so we certainly are seeing solar panels that are made
very very well. They go through all sorts of advanced
(40:38):
degradation tests, hail tests, corrosion tests, all sorts of tests
to make sure that they last a long time. In fact,
they have to do those in order to get to
ensure the warranties for the solar panels that they're selling.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
What do you think is one step that we can
take that you think is triage? We need to do
this now. Now what do we need to do now?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
I'll say two things. One, I think community ownership of
some of these assets is really critical. So it might
not be resolvable in its current situation, but we know that,
for example, when ranchers get together and they own the
wind farm, no one fights it. They all welcome it
because they're definitely they're going to receive direct benefit from that.
(41:24):
But I think it's really important to also note that
when we're talking about building out solar, the US will
need somewhere on the order between five thousand and fifteen
thousand square miles of solar to power its portion of
the great according to some modelers, so five to fifteen
square miles. We have three hundred thousand square miles of
(41:48):
brown fields, degraded lands, salt contaminated agricultural lands. All to
say that I've often I feel like this conservation versus
solar energy development is a false choice, because I think
there is a path forward where we could keep many
of the lands that we value for their conservation benefits,
(42:10):
for their cultural resources, and find the places where the
disturbed lands could be utilized because we have so much
of that already and we know that those projects don't
face any opposition.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Well, I want to say thank you so much. You
are so authoritative about this. It's been my great pleasure, truly,
thank you so much. My thanks to Dustin mulvaney and
Hilary Angelo. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in
New York City, where produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice,
(42:48):
and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social
media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the
thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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