Can Utah's Beautiful Wildlands Survive an Energy Grab?

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/can-utahs-beautiful-wildlands-survive-energy-grab


Uranium tailings in Moab, Utah.
Photo Credit: Tara Lohan
June 12, 2013 |
Editor’s Note: Tara Lohan is traveling across North America documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new AlterNet project, Hitting Home. You can follow the trip on Facebook or follow Tara on Twitter.

Utah always blows my mind — the red rocks, the canyons, the rivers, the mountains and ... the love of industry, the dirtier the better.

The first stop on our Hitting Home tour was Moab, Utah — a town surrounded by the gorgeous Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Fisher Towers, Dead Horse State Park, and tons of “undesignated” wildlands of astounding beauty.

In town we also saw a tailings pile of uranium mining waste; talked with local residents concerned about impacts from a new plan to fly helicopter tours over the area; we trekked up into the Book Cliffs outside of Moab and saw a test mine for what may be the first U.S. tar sands mine; we saw oil pumpers adjacent to national parks and gas being flared from towers along breathtaking ridges; and we met people who were fighting to protect their land, and the local watershed, from encroaching drilling operations.

In Nearby Dutch Flats, a company is accepting wastewater from fracking operations across the Colorado border, and neighboring Green River has plans for a nuclear power plant and perhaps also a refinery that could process the tar sands coming down from the Book Cliffs.

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1. No

They will forever be changed and not for the better.

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2. Conservationists in CA's Mojave Desert also fighting an energy grab

Fight Over Solar Power in the Mojave Desert

"In Tuesday’s Times, I write about Senator Dianne Feinstein’s bill to create two Mojave Desert monuments in California that would ban renewable energy projects on lands that are both coveted for solar farms and valued for their sweeping vistas and populations of rare wildlife.

The mere prospect of the legislation has derailed several massive solar power plants planned by Goldman Sachs and other developers. But Mrs. Feinstein, a California Democrat, has included provisions in the bill that could, if enacted, accelerate renewable energy development and ease tensions over endangered species that are slowing other solar projects outside the monument area.

In a big concession to renewable-energy advocates, Mrs. Feinstein would allow transmission lines to be built through existing utility rights-of-way in the monument to transmit renewable energy from other desert areas to coastal metropolises. That will not likely sit well with some of the senator’s environmental allies. (Nor will a provision that permanently designates areas of the desert for off-road vehicle use.)"

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/fight-over-solar-power-in-the-mojave-desert/