Against green

Someone didn’t get the memo.

While President Obama was addressing a joint session of Congress with his State of the Union speech, calling for a goal of America producing 80 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2035, environmentalists on the same day were filing suit to block the 75-turbine Spring Valley Wind generation facility planned for White Pine County near Great Basin National Park.

The lawsuit — brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Watershed Project and three local American Indian tribes — accused the Bureau of Land Management of putting the project on a “fast-track” for approval “in order to achieve the industry applicant’s goal of obtaining millions of dollars of federally available financing.”

The plaintiffs say BLM refused to conduct a full environmental analysis as required by law due to pressure from the industry and the Interior Department, of which the BLM is a subsidiary. The federal lawsuit asks the court to block any site preparation, such as bulldozing roads and putting up fences, much less erecting towers for turbines.

The lawsuit claims the project will be built on a site sacred to the Western Shoshone and will harm the “regionally significant population of Mexican (or Brazilian) free-tail bats” and “many other on-site and migratory native wildlife species.”

Rob Mrowka, an ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, said that while renewable energy is important, such projects must be properly located.

To that, George Hardie, project manager for the company planning to build Spring Valley Wind, remarked, “If the Spring Valley project is not environmentally acceptable, then no project in Nevada will ever be acceptable.”

The project “has put in place the most extensive and forward-looking mitigation and adaptive management plan ever devised for any wind energy project in the United States to minimize the impact to wildlife and the environment.”

Isn’t it odd that the biggest opponents of these green energy projects that would be funded with taxpayer money are environmentalists who want a pollution-free planet, but seem to have adopted the BANANA motto — build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.

The president said Tuesday night, “I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: By 2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources,” adding that, “Some folks want wind and solar.”

And some folks seem to prefer full employment for litigators in perpetuity.