"Bullying us to step up the pace won't help," said Greg Miller, head of a new team created to speed up the bureau's permitting of renewable energy projects. "We're going to do this right; this land belongs to the American people."
Well, well, well. It’s Green vs. Green as energy companies hoping to become flush with porkulus bucks are lining up to install solar farms in the desert lands of Imperial County east of San Diego but are being held up by bureaucratic red tape and … lawsuits by environmental groups on behalf of lizards, tortoises, big horn sheep and anything else crawling around out there.
Years ago, we were working for a mom’n’pop tug outfit down in the south bay. Via arcane salvage rights laws, the owner of this company owned many of the derelict vessels that used to set in the south end of San Diego Bay. One day, while going through the mail, we opened a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was basically an order to remove all the derelicts as the Corps was going to dredge that portion of the Bay.
The owner started making all the necessary arrangements to clear out the derelicts but before he could, we received a letter from the federal EPA that was a cease and desist order as they had ruled that these abandoned vessels were a water fowl habitat and not to be disturbed.
The owner took the letters from the Corps and the EPA and faxed them respectively to one another. He then kicked his feet up on the desk and said, “Well, I think my work here is done for the day”. For the remainder of our employment (6 months), we did not hear anything further from the two groups.
The Corps must’ve ultimately won out because the derelict vessels were removed several years ago.
P.S. Yes, we know - the windmill isn't a solar panel nor is it a big horn sheep. It was just a cool picture we pulled from the not-ready-for-prime-time alternative energies archive
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The failed project in Animal Farm was a windmill.
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