It’s a cold and rainy day. We even had hail earlier. So I thought what a great day to write about energy, specifically wind and solar energy. After all according to “the One” these are the two types of energy that will finally free us of our “addiction to oil”, make us energy independent and stop the flow of our money to countries that use it to undermine our way of life. Every president since Nixon has espoused the same goal and never come close to freeing us of our addiction to oil. We even created a new cabinet position, the Department of Energy, to help us become energy independent. Forty years on and all we did is create another huge bureaucracy that does a good job of keeping track of our ever increasing addiction to oil but little else.

Call me crazy but I think windmills that generate electricity should be placed where the wind blows frequently and that solar arrays should be built where the sun shines most of the time. You know the deserts of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. One would think that environmentalist and other proponents of “free” energy would think the same way. One would be wrong.

Take, for example, Senator Ted Kennedy. He was a big supporter of alternative forms of energy. Except of course, like most liberals, when it affected him directly. He successfully fought the placement of a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod because it would have ruined the view from his summer home. Tall, ugly windmills are OK near Rosamond and Mojave, California but not so much off the coast of Cape Cod.

When California Senator Diane Feinstein found out that several huge solar arrays were proposed to be built in the Mojave Desert she immediately sprang into action. Not to support the solar arrays that would have generated mega-watts of clean energy for Southern California, but to have Congress pass a law that made millions of acres of the Mojave Desert an environmentally sensitive area and therefore off limits to any solar arrays. After all what is more important, a tortoise or people? Guess we know the answer to that question.

Recently, while on vacation, I happened to run across an article in the local newspaper titled “Solar project faces hurdles”. Local environmentalists are fighting the construction of a solar array in the Panoche Valley. It’s located in the eastern part of San Benito County. I never heard of it either. According to the article the Panoche Valley is “know mostly for cattle and barbed wire, a treeless landscape…….that turns green in the spring but for much of the year looks like rural Nevada”. In other words a barren and forlorn countryside but with lots of sunshine for most of the year; a perfect place for a solar power project, right.

Wrong; at least according to the environmentalists who are of course fighting it. The fact the project would generate enough pollution free energy to power 315,000 homes is irrelevant. The blunt nosed leopard lizard might be endangered and we can’t have that, can we?

As much as we all would like to be energy independent, and I am all for that, I think that at some point we are going to have to make some important choices and probably have to make some tradeoffs. Yes turtles and lizards are important but at the cost of humans not being able to heat and cool their homes? I don’t think so. Right now it the very people who tell us that we need to use alternative sources of energy are telling us to take our wind farms and solar power plants and put them where to sun doesn’t shine!

Simon Weston- Commentary

Simon Weston is a resident of Stevenson Ranch. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.