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I interview Kevin Emmerich, co-founder of Basin & Range Watch, a non-profit environmental organization based in southern Nevada that educates people about threats to public land from industrial development and energy extraction in the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin. These regions have been ground zero for "green energy" due to their plentiful sunlight, strong winds and lithium deposits.
Kevin enjoyed a career in the National Park Service for 20 years in seven different National Parks and Monuments, including Death Valley National Park since 1991 (now retired). He has also worked as a field biologist for research on desert species such as the Panamint Alligator Lizard, Desert Tortoise, and Mojave Fringe-toed Lizard.
I've been following Basin & Range Watch's work for over a decade, since I saw Kevin quoted in an LA Times article about a "green energy" project in California. I've interviewed both Kevin and the organization's co-founder Laura Cunningham a number of times for print and podcast. I appreciate not only their knowledge and experience, but also the love they both so clearly have for the Southwest, a love that I share. So when I had questions how the incoming Presidential election might affect "green energy" projects in this area, my first email was to Basin & Watch.
We don't go to Trump right away. First I asked Kevin to talk about the negative environmental effects of "green energy" development in the desert, and we mostly talked solar. Having laid the groundwork for why it's important to stop such projects, Kevin speculated on whether Trump will be worse, the same or better than Biden was and Harris was likely to be. "Better" meaning less development. If you want to skip right to this section, go to timecode 35:01.
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CREDIT: Intro & outro narration: Sarah Beth Reiss
TRANSCRIPT:
Kollibri: All right, today's guest on Speaking For The Trees, No Matter Where They're From, is Kevin Emmerich of Basin and Range Watch. Kevin, would like to tell us a little bit about yourself and also about Basin and Range Watch?
Kevin: Yeah, I'm Kevin. I'm actually a former park ranger and biologist and ended up buying a place with my partner, Laura, in the middle of a nature conservancy preserve in the Mojave Desert, Nevada. And the reason I'm bringing that up is we started to get surrounded by proposals for a really big solar project and some mining. But as an organization, we formed primarily to address the impacts and the threats of large scale renewable energy on the desert. And as you can see from the news, it certainly hasn't gone away. It's grown and it's gotten bigger. But Basin and Range Watch is a nonprofit and we primarily follow renewable projects, but not only that, we're essentially a watchdog group for environmental issues in the Mojave Desert.
Kollibri: Right, and then up into northern Nevada too, as well, which is kind of outside of the Mojave.
Kevin: True, I mean, we do cover the Great Basin. And all in all, the Basin and Range is huge, extended to Arizona. So we don't really have a limited range except that we try to do what's practical and we tend to do a lot of this stuff closer to us. But yes, I should say we are following a few of the Great Basin Desert issues, which I can talk about.
Kollibri: Sure, sure. So you have kind of a generalized opposition to industrial development in the desert areas there of the Great Basin and the Mojave. But as it turns out, that isn't really a lot of fossil fuel production in that area, is it?
Kevin: No, geologically speaking, it's not really the best place for oil reserves due to it broken topography. When you think about where they're getting oil and they're doing a lot of the oil and gas leasing in Colorado Plateau, it's a fairly uniform geology. But here in the Basin and Range, everything's been broken up and uplifted and sunk down or extended. And so oil deposits are pretty hard to find and hard to get. They exist out here, but it's nothing economically viable enough to make a large industry. So extraction here is more mining and renewables related.
Kollibri: As you well know, when most people hear about green energy projects, they consider this to be a positive thing to be an environmentally positive thing. But what's really missing from the conversation most of the time are all the various environmental effects of these different kinds of projects. So I was hoping if you could speak to that just a little bit, it's sort of the big picture and more general perspective on what kinds of environmental problems are caused by wind, solar, lithium mining, etcetera.
Kevin: Well, okay, I mean, I'll start with solar. And I know that some folks, they think that we have to do this right now because we need to stop fossil fuel emissions from happening. I don't disagree with stopping fossil fuel emissions, but I think many of the impacts that I'm about to talk about are getting either overlooked or justified by what they would call like a green energy transition.
And so starting with solar energy, it's low density energy, meaning that you need quite a lot of space in order to produce the same output at a fossil fuel plant or even a nuclear plant could actually produce. You would just need a lot of space to do so. And so that means we just have to put those panels just about everywhere. We're a little luckier here in the US than say some of those ecosystems. And well, if you've seen photos of China, they've actually covered whole mountains with solar panel of them. It's almost shocking to see that. But the point being that wherever they put this, it needs a lot of space.
And so they also want to have good solar insolation. That's where there's a lot of radiant solar energy coming down. And so they like the desert. They want relatively flat areas, although some of them do want to build on a sloping area as well that are south-facing. And they want to be near transmission and structure. And so we're all of the special areas and ecosystems are located. I mean, they didn't necessarily choose to be in the transmission area either. We're dealing with situations where solar projects need to either scrape up or drive over thousands of acres of habitat. That's how we see it. And they see it as open land. We see it more as habitat up in the Great Basin, for example.
I mean, we want to talk about that area. The Basin and Range is characterized by a mountain range and in 40 to 60 to 80 miles, there's another mountain range. But those basins are flat in the bottom. And once we can get some transmission built out there, at least that's how the companies are looking at it, we can fill a lot of those basins with solar panels. And so we have a lot of proposals in the area for really big transmission lines that are going to connect the solar panels up in the Great Basin. And they're going to have to build it among those sage brush ecosystem. And there's a lot of applications now. I would say roughly about maybe 75,000 to 85,000 acres of solar applications and then Nevada Great Basin alone.
And they're big. Some of them are like we're looking at 10,000 acre, 15,000 acre proposals. And one of them was even like 25,000 acres. And so these guys just try to claim all of the land out there. But what they're going to need to do is they're going to have to remove a lot of that sage brush. And that of course is habitat for sage and grass, pygmy rabbit and a host of other species that actually use that habitat. And it's a tragedy to think that if they finally do build this power line called Green Lake North from the Reno area to the Robinson substation outside of Ely, that that many thousand acres of that habitat could be developed for solar.
Solar has a lot of impacts. They need to scrape the ground and in the Mojave desert here we have a then sometimes thicker surface called desert pavement, which is essentially a flat layer of stones or rocks that's been cleaned out by years and years of wind erosion and settlement. And desert pavement is really important for holding soils together and even hold the moisture in the ground and some of the desert plants really benefit off of it.
Well, a lot of that will get scraped up and that area below it that can get run over so many times and it becomes a fine dust and it becomes airborne. And some of the dust is caliche, a carbon-based, broken down limestone. Caliche in a fine enough dust when it becomes airborne, become the greenhouse gas. And so we have that element. Another really big element of the solar project is that when they build them and they do all of that scraping and that driving and running over a habitat, they need water to mitigate the dust.
And so we have a cluster of solar projects down in the Mojave desert here south of Pahrump, Nevada. And there's roughly 29,000 to 30,000 acres of either developed products or proposals that collectively would need about 5,000 acres of feed from water in order to construct them.
And so they're proposing wells near the solar projects, but those would also be near springs, or areas that have groundwater close to the surface that support a lot of mesquite and other phreatophyte plants. And so there's quite a bit of pressure to develop a lot of that. There's also birds, problem with wind turbines as well. We're not following as many wind proposals here in Nevada, but the one project that we do have so far has managed to kill eight golden eagles since its operation. And a number of other birds and raptors, including saw wet owls, but the turbines tips will move at approximately 180 miles per hour. And the birds don't see those. And they do create a problem.
In solar energy, we have the power towers that were built. Those are the big thermal plants that are radiated by mirrors that they create a solar flux that actually burn birds in mid-air. Fortunately, there are no proposals to build any more of those that I know of just because they're really expensive and pretty inefficient. It's pretty bad for the environment. But birds can also see solar panels as a lake as they're looking on the ground. And the lake effect is theorized to draw some birds to some of these large sprawling photovoltaic projects. And they do find a lot of birds in some of these projects. And Southern California, a lot of birds that have collided with solar panels. So there is a pretty big town of dead birds. The solar industry says there's really not enough evidence to prove all of that. But we talk to some biologists that tell us they find buckets of dead birds from some of these projects.
There's also the people factor. A lot of them need to be built next to small communities. And we work with a lot of them. And it is kind of heartbreaking. I mean, we have some projects that want to build, you know, like less than a quarter mile, just a few hundred feet from people's homes. And it just becomes a really big deal. And they get worried about the water, too. They get worried about their local habitat. And it surprises me how many people in these little towns come out in defense of the desert ecosystem. You may have heard of the project outside of Boron, California, that they're chainsawing
down about 4,200 Joshua trees. That's another huge impact: removal of native plants. So we have a number of impacts I could keep talking about but I think I'll leave it at that for now.
Kollibri: In general, I think that people don't understand that the desert ecosystems of the Mojave, the Great Basin of Snow, and that these are places that are really full of life and that they are important to habitat. You use the phrase “open land versus habitat” as, you know, how people look at this. And certainly the energy companies just look at it as open land. But unfortunately, it seems like a lot of the general public also does: Just look at the deserts as being open land, not as habitat. And I think this is in part because those kinds of areas aren't good for agriculture. And we're very agriculturally focused society. I mean, even people who live in cities, we are entirely dependent on agriculture. So that's kind of one way that we look at land as being valuable, you know?
Or we'll look at it as being valuable because there's some kind of spectacle like, oh, there's a lush forest or etc. And so the beauty of the desert is more subtle. And it's also, you know, perhaps, and it's also just more unfamiliar, you know, to people. And so they do consider it to be a place that is okay to just sacrifice because they're not even seeing it as being a sacrifice.
Kevin: One thing I will say is that large scale solar energy is getting more and more unpopular. And it's made a lot of news recently and all over the West. You might have heard of the Western Solar Plan.
Kollibri: I had that in my notes to bring that up next.
Kevin: Is this a good time for the it?
Kollibri: Yeah, go for it.
Kevin: Okay. To me, this is an interesting one because it really started to get people interested in this issue like never before. At least I hadn't seen it. This plan was essentially a revision of a plan that the Obama administration approved in 2012. It was really a “smart planning” type of architectural plan for solar energy on public lands in the West. And so they created these different categories for solar energy and the land that would host the solar energy. Well, first of all, there were solar energy zones and those would be areas where they would direct all the development. And then there would be solar exclusion areas where they didn't allow the solar. There would be a void in areas where they would allow some solar with a little bit of modification.
And they opened up about six Western states, about a little over 300,000 acres to these solar energy zones. None of the solar companies liked it because they couldn't really get around a lot of the mitigation costs and the lease fees. So they had a third category in that plan that they approved called variant plans and they opened 22 million acres of solar development business as usual, only they would review it with a variant process, which is just kind of a really a bullshit review that didn't really make much of a difference.
It was supposed to be that people could get involved and before they went into an actual National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] review and say, hey, we don't want this out there, but it turned out that the solar company dominated the scene and every variance review winds up in a eventual approval of a pool plans review for a solar project. And that's all it was.
So in 2020, and 2024, they revived this plan and they came up with five alternatives. And alternative five would have been the most reasonable one for an environmentalist because it really concentrated the energy on some of the more disturbed land, closer to the highway and the transmission lines. And it freed up the least amount of land. But the solar industry and a couple environmental organizations really fought that and they asked for things like, “well, we don't want all occupied habitat for endangered species excluded from this plan.” And that was one of the better things about alternative five.
But unfortunately, you know, the industry dominated and the Biden administration is very pro solar on public lands. And so they're going to put the industry's priorities over the environmental conservation priorities. And so in a lot of the states, they opened up close to 31 million acres. They added five extra western states. They opened up 31 million acres for solar energy development. And not all of that would be developed, but that's how much land these companies would be allowed to, you know, put their applications in for.
In Nevada, it was really large. There were some really big swath areas like in the Amargosa Valley up in Esmeralda County, just west of Tonopah. A lot in the Great Basin was actually opened up for solar development. And it just pissed a lot of the local counties off. It pissed off a lot of the environmental groups. And it shocked a lot of the people in the news media. In fact, I saw some of the local news channels talk about this and they painted it in a really negative light, and I've never seen solar energy so unpopular because of the way it was done, and the way it was kind of forced upon little communities. There weren't any real good community setbacks. They didn't really listen to a lot of people who are excluding different areas. So we have environmental groups, we have off-road groups, we have mining groups. Everybody was really mad at this plan. And I don't know how that's going to translate to the new administration.
But to me, it was kind of a tipping point in the popularity of solar. And it became a situation where just about every solar project proposed here in Nevada had far more opposition and almost zero support, just from the public. And that's what I'll say about that: that they brought it into the spotlight, and it became so unpopular to a lot of people that solar energy—I don't think right now locally or even statewide—is looked at as a positive thing. And we hadn't seen that before. But it seems to be evolving into that.
One other thing about that, too, is that the solar plan hasn't passed. It had a final environmental impact statement and just about every environmental organization, except a few of the more questionable ones, protested the final [recommendation]. You can do that. We did it as well.
But if it doesn't pass, the unfortunate thing about this is that all of these solar companies have already staked their claims on the public land they want, and all of those applications are grandfathered into the plan. And so even if we got the most conservation-oriented alternative for the Western Solar Plan, all of these big projects that we're following right now don’t even count [that is, are unaffected].
And so to me, it's more of a show. The plan is more of a sort of a decoy to get people’s mind off what's really happening. But it backfired on this particular administration with a really big media backlash.
Kollibri: I wanted to emphasize a point here that we haven't said explicitly, but probably has been obvious so far. But just when we're talking about these large projects, public land is always where this is happening. It's not like a solar company goes out and buys 20,000 acres somewhere to do this project. This is public land. Because it's on public land, it's subject to NEPA, which is looking at environmental impacts. And so there's a process that needs to be followed there. So could you talk just a little bit about NEPA, what that stands for, what it's about, and how has NEPA been affected by these different efforts by the industry to develop out there?
Kevin: NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act, and it was signed into law in 70s… It really is a law that allows, theoretically, everyone to get involved and it requires a pretty vigorous review on a lot of these plans. And so a lot of us use the National Environmental Policy Act in our comments, and the groups that actually litigate use it heavily.
So the National Environmental Policy Act is essential really in actually getting your opinion heard on one of these projects. But the problem is that it doesn’t really work. I mean, it's complicated.
In the 2018s or so back in that day when we had the Donald Trump presidency, he really attacked the National Environmental Policy Act, or his administration did, and they really attempted to weaken it. And what was ironic about it, is that this got praise from the renewable industry. The American Wind Energy Association said it was really a smart thing to do, and they thanked him for that.
We have the Biden administration that restored a lot of those, you know, setbacks that were attempted, which was good, but at the same time, they're just allowing everything to go through. In my opinion, they're undermining the law: by just always approving these projects and always finding a way to either mitigate it or justify it in some part of “the greater good.”
We're following probably, I would say, seven of these projects in NEPA right now. And it's really difficult. And it's frustrating because we know that a lot of what we're going to be writing there is not going to be listened to. We do it because we get it on the record, we get standing. Then when someone decides to use litigation on one of these projects, they have a lot of what we said on the record to use. And so it's useful in that regard.
But the NEPA process, in my view, has been compromised by this industry and a lot of industry, really. I mean, it's not just the solar and wind and geothermal industry that's doing it... Unfortunately, it hasn't really worked to be engaged in this process to try to influence the agencies. I think they're really afraid of getting sued by a lot of these big companies [which] have the big attorneys and they end up always kind of siding with them. Allowing them, you know, to build where they are. If there's a big giant public outcry about some projects, sometimes you can be successful. But for the most part, NEPA is just a tool that we use to, you know, potentially get involved in a litigation on a project.
Kollibri: Right. And has there, there have been any instances where NEPA has been watered down specifically for green energy projects?
Kevin: I have to say, yeah, definitely. When they use a lot of the guidelines for the BLM, they try to get around them a lot. Like they have to fully evaluate how a project will be affected visually. And sometimes they'll not require the proper surveys at the proper time for the different biological resources. And so we'll get some pretty weak reports in that regard.
I'm trying to think of some examples off the top of my head… One of the projects in Pahrump Valley relied on some pretty outdated Desert Tortoise surveys to approve the permitting of this project. They grossly undercounted the Desert Tortoise. The surveys were conducted in like 1990 and ‘91 in a pretty dry year, and so they underestimated the density of the population. And then when they developed the project, they ended up getting about three times as many as they predicted. And it turned out to be a pretty big disaster, and had NEPA fully evaluated something like that. it could have ended up differently. Maybe that could have resulted in avoiding the area. You never know.
Kollibri: Right. Yeah, you mentioned the Desert Tortoise. I think maybe let's give the Desert Tortoise a minute or two here because I think it's such an amazing species. Hasn't the desert tortoise been around for several million years, maybe as long as 15 million years, since the area was much wetter, even jungle like.
Kevin: Yeah, I don't really have that number memorized, but yeah, the desert tortoise had a very long history in that particular area, probably as a bigger, more gigantic animal at the time. But it's at a point now[where it's sad because its numbers have crashed. In the last maybe two decades by almost 40%, maybe 50% in a lot of areas. And a lot of those most hard-hit areas are located in the western part of its range, the west Mojave desert, which is, you know, closest to some of the bigger urban areas, so there's a lot of land use going on out there, whether it's urban sprawl or heavy vehicle use or livestock grazing, and raven population increases associated with urbanization. [K: Ravens prey on baby Desert Tortoises.] For the most part, the tortoise is not doing too well.
And there are a few places where the tortoise is actually doing very well, and one of those is the Pahrump Valley, that’s another [area where] they're developing a lot [of solar]. In the Pahrump Valley tortoise density is like 13 per square kilometer or six per square kilometer, and that would have been considered low 30 to 40 years ago because 30 to 40 years ago, Desert Tortoise densities in some of the big population areas were like 150 or so per square kilometer. But we're down to areas like the Pahrump Valley now [which] are viable breeding populations. So it really doesn't make sense to start grabbing them and moving them out. They're not going to put these tortoises back on the solar project. They're going to move them south to an area called Tecopa Road.
And Tecopa Road is the area that's called the Stump Springs Translocation Area. It’s sort of a dumping ground for tortoises when you move them out of the way for construction. So we're effectively adding to a population decline of Desert Tortoises by allowing a solar project to be built there.
And I wanted to also say, when he talked about the NEPA violation, we have actually tried to get the Bureau of Land Management to consider an alternative to this project and the Pahrump Valley and in another area called the Indian Springs in Mercury Valley, to consider an area to be an “area of critical environmental concern” [ACEC] alternative.
What we did is we wrote up a couple proposals in these two areas for the BLM to actually protect the entire areas, and we used the Desert Tortoise as one of our main elements of this ACEC proposal because of its decline and because of the population's ability in the areas we're talking about. We also used other environmental elements like mesquite areas, neotropical migrants, archaeological areas like the Salt Song trail (which is sacred trail for the Paiute), the Spanish National Historic trail, paleontological resources and fossils. We asked them to consider the alternatives to the solar projects in their NEPA review, and they refused every time. They said that doesn't fit the scope of what the project is about.
But we feel under NEPA, this is a violation, because under that act, the BLM is required to consider “reasonable alternatives” in an environmental situation, and protecting the environment is considered “reasonable” under the National Environmental Protection Act. So in that regard, we believe the BLM has violated NEPA. I think that's probably one of the best examples.
Kollibri: As you'll recall, I sent you an email requesting, uh, to talk to you about the incoming administration before the election because I knew that, no matter what the outcome of the election was, it was going to have an effect on these kinds of projects, from the perspective of being opposed to, you know, habitat destruction and all the other environmental problems that are happening in the Mojave and the Great Basin from green energy. From that perspective, what do you think that the Trump administration is going to bring?
Kevin: So this is a real interesting question. We're speculating here. It could go different ways. I'll just put out some of the alternatives that I think, you know, could actually happen here.
He has, in his debates and in public speeches, singled out solar energy. He doesn't necessarily get things right. He said, rabbits get caught in the fence of the solar projects and he was really referring to wildlife. I mean, it does happen sometimes that snakes and road runners have actually been caught in fences surrounding solar products. And he heard that. And in the debate, he said, do you need the whole desert? You know, he said, these [projects] are really environmentally bad and it was interesting to hear him say that. We've heard his team say that they're going to go for “Drill, baby, drill” and they're going to sign a lot of orders that get rid of the Inflation Reduction Act and take away a lot of the incentives for solar energy. So it'll be interesting to see.
What happened in 2017 [was that] the administration put a moratorium on the BLM accepting any new solar applications for an entire year. And so, the question is, will he do that again? We're not really sure about that because... he's got Elon Musk advising him, and Elon is very big on lithium mining. I mean, that’s his industry right there. And I've never really seen Elon Musk say too many negative things about solar energy. I've seen him say that we should cover a corner of Nevada with solar panels to power the country. So that indicates to me that he's kind of behind a lot of those things.
So, you know, what’s Trump going to do? Not 100% sure. We do know he's going to probably cut the National Environmental Policy Act again. He's going to remove a lot of the regulatory hurdles and many of those, of course, will be environmental. And when he does that, you know, that's going to benefit a lot of industry. Like I said, the Wind Energy Association came out and supported what he did [in 2017].
What I'm thinking is some of the bigger companies that want to build solar projects might survive Donald Trump simply because they're lobbyists, like Next Era Energy. They built the Alpine project. They have some really big other proposals. There's EDF Renewables. They're the largest utility in France and they build nuclear plants mostly, but they have a U.S. solar company over here and they've got a lot of proposals as well. They're really well-funded. And a lot of them can build these projects without a lot of the, you know, incentives and the goodies.
One thing I wonder though is, will Trump put more tariffs on solar panels? Because we do know it's still cheapest to import these from China. The Biden administration put the tariffs on there because of the way the workers were being treated. We don't think Trump would really care too much about that. But he's kind of a “buy American” person and that might be a way he would foil the solar industry. That would hurt them economically.
So my question is, how much would Elon Musk influence him into permitting more renewable energy? One interesting thing about the Trump administration is they came up with the executive order to expedite the development of critical minerals. I mean, the term “critical minerals” came up under
Trump and that includes lithium, a lot of different things, you know, copper. There's a lot of critical minerals out there. And the Biden administration never rolled that back. They just held on to it. They turned critical mineral mining into a justifiable renewable energy industry. And let's face it, renewable energy does need the minerals. And so, Trump's certainly not going to roll back “critical minerals.” He's going to fight any reforms to the mining laws of 1872. So, green energy mining will probably survive maybe under the guise of something else. Those are the some speculations.
The outgoing Biden administration is putting on a big brush to to approve some of these projects before the new administration takes over in January. So we have both these competing administrations working on their plans for public lands. I'm hoping that we do get them roll back from solar projects from the Trump administration. I'm not happy at all that we're going to get for more years of these people but I'm hoping there are at least some benefits that occur from it. Time will tell.
Kollibri: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we can we can all agree that overall, environmentally, the Trump administration is likely to be just terrible, horrific, across the board. But that within that context, there is a possible silver lining that, yes, maybe some of these large solar projects would get canceled or put off for now. Even if they're they're just put off, that's a few more years that, you know, the creatures who call that land habitat get to be there. And that's that much longer to to see if we can if we can save it permanently.
You know, the lithium mining, we didn't talk much about that, but that's that's another thing that you all are keeping your eye on that's that's been developed a lot in Nevada and up into Oregon as well. And the lithium, of course, is needed for the batteries for the electric cars, you know. I saw a speech that Trump had given shortly before the election and he was speaking in front of some auto workers, and he was delivering a line that he delivered many times before that he’s against electric vehicles. This has been a theme of his now for years of just opposing electric vehicles. But then he stopped halfway through the point he was making, and said well, actually, you know, I've been spending more time with Elon Musk lately, and he's been talking to me about this. And and so actually, you know, I do think there's a place for them. I just really laughed because that was definitely a theme this year of his campaign—that he would get a big donation from some billionaire or spend some time with some billionaire, and then he would just completely flip flop on on something that he'd said before it. And here it was.
So I saw that and I took that seriously. So in terms of lithium mining and whatever else needs to go with it—“critical minerals”—for the electric vehicles, probably he'll just want to make that easier because of his friend, Elon.
Kevin: Well, and also just the mining industry in general has embraced these critical minerals. And of course, lithium mining, they're a big lobby of the Trump administration. In all honesty, I don't see that getting better. And if you'll remember that the Thacker Pass mine was approved at the end of the Trump administration on public land. So, you know, and they did their part in streamlining that review of the well, and I was part of that lawsuit. So I saw them, it was really frustrating to watch it. But unfortunately, the next administration didn't do much to change what they did. So I think lithium's here to stay because of Elon and because the electric vehicle industry is not going to just go away. Lithium was also needed for large-scale solar batteries and they actually do use quite a lot of it. This is a side note: a lot of the solar plans, they don't even talk about what happens if some of this starts to burn. That's a pretty big impact that I didn't talk about earlier.
But back to Trump, I do agree with you. I think that the electric vehicle industry has gotten too big really to go away and I just don't think he's going to be able to crush it like that. But again, we'll see what happens. Maybe I'm underestimating him. I mean, what I hear is scary. I mean, mass deportations and he's going to get rid of all these federal agencies and I'm hearing some pretty strong stuff from the source. So I'm not walking into this, you know, all happy and thinking Trump's going to help us. A lot of the people in these little towns around here voted for him for that reason. And I hope he does come through but the problem also around here is that developing renewable energy is in the state constitution. Reaching the RPS, “renewable portfolio standard,” is part of the constitution. And the renewable companies are heavy donors to the governor Joe Lombardo, who is a Republican. So he's been portrayed in some media, a “clean energy giant.” He endorsed Donald Trump. There are videos of them shaking hands, you know, having a drink. I'm just saying that green energy is going to be embedded in the economy and Trump's just not going to kill it all. But I'm hoping he takes his special unreasonable Trump hate against wind turbines, solar panels, and does kill some of these projects. I’ll send him a thank you letter if he kills the one around me. [laughs]
Kollibri: It seems like at the federal level, especially with, you know, Project 2025—which we didn't mention, but I'm sure you're familiar with—it seems like at the federal level, it's hard to do much because there's some big forces that are in motion there and some big interests, you know, but even with that being the case, do you think that progress can still be made to protect places and to push back on some of these projects at the local level?
Kevin: That's a good question. I will say about some of the local people I work with, solar energy got them to admit how much they like nature and groundwater and springs and archaeology sites and that sort of thing. So on a local level, it might be all we have. State governments may be opposing, you know, some of the rollbacks. Like in Nevada the Trump administration is probably going to come out and try to sell a lot of public lands off and I don't think that's necessarily going to go over well with everybody. They're going to pick places next to a lot of little communities that people actually really love. And so there could be some local pushback against a lot of the things that he does.
Then there can also potentially be state designations for parks and that sort of thing. I don't think our governor [in Nevada] is really going to go that far though. I mean, he actually was opposed to the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, which is a pretty cool thing that the Biden administration did on the southern tip of Nevada. They made that into a really big national conservation area. And I just don't think that we have a political group in Nevada, powerful enough to want to protect things. And so I think the effect out here is going to be bad. Maybe California will be more equipped to oppose a lot of the things that they do. But I think we're going to see a lot of really weird stuff coming in the next couple years.
Kollibri: Right. Right. I guess I guess I brought the topic up to just in part to make the point that, for people who are rightfully concerned about the incoming administration and who do feel strongly that they want to protect places in this and that, that the best place for them to put their energy is on some local issue or campaigns.
Kevin: Yeah. I think that there are a lot of ways you can get involved in that. Yeah. I mean, raising a group of public citizens and lobbying for that thing with local senators and stuff. Really, I think be helpful. Maybe that's the way to do things now. I mean, I do remember in the last Trump administration, a lot of state did mobilize their own laws. You know, the ones that didn't really like him that much.
Kollibri: Right. Right. Yeah. Thanks so much, Kevin. I really appreciate it.
Kevin: Thank you for giving us the attention and spreading the word around me. Really appreciate that.
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