Tag Archive for: Bureau of Land Management

‘Dead Without Water’: Massive Desert Solar Projects Are Sucking Up Groundwater, Angering Locals

Massive solar development projects in Southern California have strained local water availability, threatening desert ecosystems and angering residents who have been impacted by the strain on the water supply, according to an Inside Climate News report.

The small communities around Desert Center, California, depend on naturally-occurring underground water reserves, known as groundwater aquifers, but the water-intensive development process for large solar projects has caused groundwater levels to fall, according to Inside Climate News. Crucial local water wells have dried up and land beneath homes has sagged as a result of development activity, while desert ecosystems have been damaged as well, according to Inside Climate News.

Locals complain that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the corporations driving the developments in California’s Colorado Desert have not allowed them to provide sufficient input in the decision-making process for the developments, according to Inside Climate News. Despite the BLM’s assurances that “renewable energy development on BLM-managed public lands will continue to help communities across the country be part of the climate solution, while creating jobs and boosting local economies,” residents say that they have not reaped much benefit from the solar projects while the strain on their groundwater supply has intensified, according to Inside Climate News.

“No one took into consideration a community lived out here,” said Teresa Pierce, a resident of a nearby community who has helped to organize other locals to respond to the resource scarcity and solar developments, according to Inside Climate News.

Developers rely on the groundwater aquifer because there is no other feasible water supply in the area, rendering transport of water from other locations to the development sites prohibitively expensive, according to Inside Climate News. The development has depleted the water reserves for local communities like one trailer park which a property manager said would be “dead without water” if the local scarcity continues to worsen, according to Inside Climate News.

Another local who has two palm trees and no house on his property saw his electricity bill go from $15 to $1,800 in just one month, as his electric irrigation pump that keeps the trees alive worked much harder to reach underground water reserves that have fallen due to the development’s extensive use of the groundwater supply, according to Inside Climate News. Drilling new, deeper water wells can cost up to $100,000, according to Inside Climate News.

The BLM was aware that its approved solar projects on public lands may have been using too much water from the area’s underground water reserves by its own standards, but the agency has advanced the projects nonetheless, according to former BLM employees cited by Inside Climate News.

Beyond the problems posed by the strain on the groundwater aquifer for humans, solar developments have overtaken many small bodies of water across the desert which formerly provided critical habitat space to the animals inhabiting the desert region, according to Inside Climate News.

The BLM has approved seven utility-scale developments in the region spanning about 19,000 acres already, with more projects under consideration, according to Inside Climate News. Another 120,000 acres are available for development in the region surrounding Desert Center, according to Inside Climate News.

The Biden administration has publicly touted its spending and regulatory efforts designed to protect 30% of America’s lands and waters from development by 2030. The administration also heavily promotes solar panels as part of its larger “green” energy agenda.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Cracks Down On Chinese Solar Panels, Undermining The Green Agenda

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While Americans Can’t Afford Gas, Biden Slashes Drilling

It’s not Putin’s price hike, it’s Biden’s. And he insists on reminding us of that every few days.

The Biden administration on Monday reversed a Trump administration plan that would have allowed the government to lease more than two-thirds of the country’s largest swath of public land to oil and gas drilling.

The Bureau of Land Management’s decision will shrink the amount of land available for lease in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska…

The decision returns to an Obama administration plan that allows fossil fuel extraction in up to 52% of the reserve, compared to the Trump administration’s effort to open up 82% of the land to drilling.

Nationally gas prices continue to rise, despite increased production, hitting an average of $4.13. Of course, where I live, people would wait on line for an hour to get $4.13 gas and consider $5.13 a mouthwatering bargain.

But that’s what happens when you put enviros in charge of a city, a state, or a country.

While Biden and his lackeys advise Americans to buy $55,000 electric cars, they fly jet planes everywhere and then keep blocking efforts to make America energy independent.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Robert Spencer’s Qur’an: A new annotated Qur’an that belongs in every sensible citizen’s library’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski tries to get Interior Department official fired for opposing jihad mass murder

So it turns out that the acting director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, has denied the Left’s “climate change” mythology, and opposes jihad violence and illegal immigration. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski is out for blood, trying to get Pendley for heresy, that is, for his dissent from Leftist orthodoxy.

My first reaction to this was, So what? The guy is in the Bureau of Land Management. What does that have to do with “global warming,” unless Kaczynski thinks that the sea levels are going to rise and swallow whole cities, including Obama’s new beachfront estate, and we’re all going to be dead in 12 years? What do jihad violence and illegal immigration have to do with land management? Kaczynski here shows that he would have been a terrific Gestapo official: why no, sir, you cannot have a position as a grocery clerk, because you have shown insufficient ardor for the Führer.

And indeed, the Left is increasingly open about its totalitarianism.

Those with dissenting views will not be allowed to hold jobs, even if those jobs have nothing to do with the subject of their dissent. A few years ago I was invited to address an education conference in California that had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam; the hate-filled fascist Georgetown University thug Nathan Lean got the cowardly Catholic bishop Jaime Soto, under whose auspices the conference was being held, to cancel my appearance. (I spoke at the conference as scheduled, in a venue outside the bishop’s purview.) And also a few years ago, the Washington Post discovered that the Qur’an-burning pastor Terry Jones was driving for Uber; they duly got him fired. I don’t approve of book-burning, but it is not illegal in the United States, and the idea that a man must be hounded forever and prevented from making a living for views that dissent from the Left’s reveals what Leftists really are.

Among William Perry Pendley’s heresies was that he “has repeatedly pushed hardline anti-Muslim views, including citing an article by anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer in a 2018 tweet to claim Islam was at war with America.”

Here Kaczynski employs the familiar smear of Leftist “journalists,” that opposing jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women, gays and others makes one “anti-Muslim.” That could only be true if all Muslims endorse jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women, gays and others. Does Kaczynski believe that? If so, he should accuse himself of “Islamophobia” and resign in disgrace from CNN. In reality, opposing such things doesn’t make one “anti-Muslim” any more than opposing the Nazis during World War II made one “anti-German.” I’ve only said that about ten thousand times, and have said it directly to Kaczynski in emails. He doesn’t take any note of it, because he is not a real journalist, he is a Leftist propagandist who is not interested in the truth, but only in shaping the world by imposing his narrative upon it. He may succeed for awhile, but all totalitarian thought control breaks down in the end under the weight of reality. And in this case, reality may break on in Kaczynski in a most unpleasant way, when he discovers that the Islamic jihadis he has enabled and run interference for are something less than grateful.

Kaczynski his smear of Pendley with this: “‘Who knew? Islam’s war with America started just up the road in Greeley, Colorado!,’ Pendley tweeted. In the article, Spencer floats unfounded conspiracies about ‘leftists’ allying with ‘Islamic hardliners who adhere to Sharia, a system of laws that would have many of them executed.’”

The article in question details how Leftist were banning the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which Muslim Brotherhood theorist and Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb also found objectionable. That wasn’t a conspiracy theory at all. Both the Leftist hatred for the song and Qutb’s similar hatred for it are amply documented in the article and elsewhere. What is ironic here is that Kaczynski claims that I spread “unfounded conspiracies about ‘leftists’ allying with ‘Islamic hardliners who adhere to Sharia, a system of laws that would have many of them executed.’” Yet in demonizing me for opposing jihad terror, he enables those Islamic hardliners. In claiming that the idea that Leftists would ally with Islamic hardliners is a “conspiracy theory,” the hardcore Leftist Kaczynski allies with Islamic hardliners to try to destroy those who stand against jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others. Conspiracy theory?

Kaczynski also objects to Pendley for saying that the Department of Homeland Security should focus on jihad terror rather than “right-wing extremism”; Kaczynski quotes acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan saying that “extremism from white supremacists” is “one of the most ‘potent ideologies’ driving acts violence in the US.” He note that Pendley said this in 2010, but doesn’t bother to inform his hapless readers that few people were worrying about “right-wing extremism” in 2010. Nor does he bother to inform them that the idea that “right-wing extremism” is a greater threat than jihad terrorism is based on studies with numerous flawed premises.

We have just learned regarding the jihad massacre last week in Paris that the jihad murderer Mickael Harpon “had caused alarm among his colleagues as far back as 2015, when he defended the massacre of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper by two brothers vowing allegiance to al-Qaeda. But even though a police official charged with investigating suspected radicalization among the force questioned the colleagues, none of them wanted to file an official complaint.”

Why didn’t they? The answer is obvious. None of them wanted to file an official complaint for fear of the French counterparts of Andrew Kaczynski. They were afraid if they did, articles like this one about William Perry Pendley would be in their future, and their career would be in ruins.

Yes, by stigmatizing and demonizing opposition to jihad terror, Leftist “journalists” are getting people killed. If CNN were a genuine news source, it would fire him and repudiate this article. But it isn’t, and it won’t.

“Senior Interior official denied there was an ozone hole and compared undocumented immigrants to cancer,” by Andrew Kaczynski, Paul LeBlanc, and Nathan McDermott, CNN, October 8, 2019:

(CNN) The acting director of the federal agency responsible for managing one in every 10 acres of land in the United States has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change and falsely claimed in a 1990s speech there was no credible evidence of a hole in the ozone layer.

William Perry Pendley was appointed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt as the acting director of the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in July 2019. Prior to his appointment, Pendley was a conservative activist, commentator, lawyer and served as the longtime president of the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation. …

Comments on Islam

Pendley has repeatedly pushed hardline anti-Muslim views, including citing an article by anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer in a 2018 tweet to claim Islam was at war with America.

“Who knew? Islam’s war with America started just up the road in Greeley, Colorado!,” Pendley tweeted. In the article, Spencer floats unfounded conspiracies about “leftists” allying with “Islamic hardliners who adhere to Sharia, a system of laws that would have many of them executed.”

Writing in a 2010 blog post, Pendley railed against a Department of Homeland Security report that labeled right-wing extremism as a threat, arguing instead the focus should be on “those who embrace radical Islam.”

“(New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and President Barack Obama) think — if one can call it thinking or anything more than wishful thinking—that Americans should be afraid of terrorist attacks, not from all those who embrace radical Islam, but from their countrymen who hold very strong views on important issues of the day?,” Pendley wrote.

Last month, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan released the department’s counterterrorism strategy, calling extremism from white supremacists one of the most “potent ideologies” driving acts violence in the US….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.