What Clean Energy?

Forget about developing massive solar projects in one of the sunniest places on earth.

Senator Dianne Feinstein has put the kibosh on such development on a million acres of the Mojave Desert, freezing numerous planned projects in their tracks and making it tougher for her home state to meet its goals of getting more of its electricity from renewable power.

Now why would a good liberal—a likely supporter of legislation to cut greenhouse gases—want to do a thing like that? Of course, it’s not like that’s anything new; the now-canonized liberal lion of the Senate, Edward Kennedy, helped block the development of a wind farm off his beloved Cape Cod for years. So liberals are every bit as NIMBY inclined as anyone else it seems, even when it comes to saving the earth.

But to be fair, Feinstein’s opposition to solar plants in the desert isn’t just knee-jerk opposition to unsightly industrial-scale development. It comes down to a promise made when the federal government got its hands on that land a decade ago. The feds said they would preserve the desert.

And a bunch of mirrors disturbing the vista and disrupting the delicate desert ecosystem doesn’t exactly amount to preservation.

So California companies will have to look elsewhere for their utility-scale solar plants.

But the case of the California solar plants brings up an interesting question as the United States and other countries move to lower their carbon emissions in an attempt to mitigate the worst affects of global warming caused by greenhouse gas. Is there really such a thing as clean energy, at least when it comes to energy produced on the massive scale needed to make a dent in use by a modern economy like that of the United States?

Feinstein is right, for instance, that solar farms and solar thermal plants capable of generating the gigawatts of power California needs to replace the power it gets now from fossil fuel could damage or destroy some of the most scenic and ecologically delicate land in the West. And that goes not just for the Mojave, but for solar plants planned for the deserts throughout the Southwest.

You’re talking giant construction projects that will alter the landscape forever when you talk about solar plants capable of producing big wattage numbers.

And that’s not the only clean energy that comes with drawbacks. Hydropower was long touted as clean energy, and the massive Three Gorges dam in China is one of the ways that nation is planning to generate emission-free electricity.

But the dams necessary for large-scale hydropower projects have come in for criticism in recent years for damaging streams and rivers and hurting fisheries. There has even been movement in the United States to remove dams from some rivers.

Or then there are the massive wind power projects envisioned by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens among others. The United States’ Great Plains are one of the great wind corridors on earth. But, as with solar, you’re talking about massive construction projects, and wind power has been blamed for damaging both bird and bat populations over the years.

OK, then go nuclear. Not a favorite of most environmentalists, and an option still feared by those of us old enough to remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. But the plants have gotten a lot better over the years, we’re told. And they don’t produce greenhouse-gas emissions. France, for instance, relies heavily on nuclear for so-called clean energy.

But then what do we do with the waste? That’s a question we still haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily.

OK, so don’t go emission free. We have huge deposits of natural gas locked in shale deposits in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and other states. Natural gas at least burns a lot cleaner than coal. Not emission free, but still, an improvement over the current mix, which has the U.S. getting around 60 percent of its electricity by burning coal.

Exxon Mobil, at least, is betting $31 billion on increased natural-gas use, with its planned purchase of XTO.

Oh, but there’s a problem there too. It’s not known exactly to what extent, but there’s evidence out there that the process used to break the shale and free the natural gas pollutes surrounding groundwater.

Now remember, we have a president who pledged to cut emissions when he campaigned for office, and who has since brokered an incomplete climate deal on the international stage in Copenhagen. We have a House of Representatives that has passed legislation capping carbon emissions and a Senate considering similar caps. Our Environmental Protection Agency has determined that it can issue regulations limiting greenhouse-gas emissions.

And all of that may be a good and necessary thing, and it may help lead the world away from the precipice of disastrous climate change. But let’s not pretend the energy we get in any large amounts is “clean.”

About the best we can hope for is “cleaner.”

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com