Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

The glass is mostly full, but the right says it’s empty

Among the roles of newspapers is to publish editorials that generate healthy, constructive community conversations and to influence public opinion on certain issues of the day. Sound conclusions should be based on facts and logic.

Today, we pose this question: What is it about the ideologically cemented, cynical, conservative media that they are so bent on finding fault in good news and, despite the facts, clutches to their denial of global warming?

Our question is prompted by a recent editorial in another newspaper that nonsensically suggests that something untoward is occurring at the sprawling Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System alongside Interstate 15 just inside California. The facility, the biggest of its sort in the world, is distinguished for its 173,500 sun-tracking mirrors that continuously reflect and concentrate sunlight at boilers atop three 450-foot-high towers. The end game: The heat boils the water to produce steam that turns turbines to generate electricity. It’s a far different process than the use of photovoltaic cells, typically assembled as panels to generate electricity in the retail market.

The Ivanpah facility has been criticized by the right for having had to rely on the federal government for tax abatements and loan guarantees to launch. Such criticism might as well be applied to government’s long history of investing in and incubating technology for the good of all. But we digress.

The solar facility opened in February 2014 and, by design, included the use of natural gas to fully accomplish its mission. The natural gas-fired burners maintain the solar plant’s boilers at a proper temperature when there is cloud cover or during the overnight hours, so that in the morning, the sun’s rays can take over and quickly bring the water to boiling. On occasion, natural gas also is used to produce electricity overnight, when there is demand for it.

A California newspaper recently wrote about how the solar plant leans on natural gas, which releases carbon dioxide but is the cleanest-burning among the fossil fuels.

That article prompted Nevada’s most conservative newspaper to write an editorial Oct. 25 beneath the headline, “Clean energy’s dirty truth at the Ivanpah solar facility.” It damned the solar plant as “a polluter.”

That’s like criticizing a Toyota Prius or any other hybrid vehicle for contributing to the carbon footprint and global warming while praising it for its miserly use of gasoline. “Cute Prius you got yourself there. Fifty miles a gallon, eh? Surprised you bought one, though. It’s a polluter, you know.”

Just as hybrid vehicles use gasoline to boost performance as needed, so too does Ivanpah use natural gas as needed. California energy officials say the operators of Ivanpah stay within their licensing agreement to use 5 percent or less natural gas and 95 percent or more solar energy to produce electricity. So it’s still a net-clean-energy operation — by far.

But leave it to the ultra-conservative, climate-change-denying, ideologically bankrupt media to complain, as one did, without merit: “If green energy isn’t as green as its advocates claim, then it stands to reason that the climate change alarmism that drives green energy mandates isn’t honest policy, either.”

To reach such a tortured conclusion — that green energy advocates are fibbing, so therefore climate change is bogus — is so totally devoid of logic and intellectual honesty, it is laughable. These people continue to put their heads in the shale in rejecting the reality of global warming.

The Ivanpah solar plant certainly weighs in on the green side of the environment. For a newspaper to stubbornly and blindly adhere to its ideology and clutch to a denial of reality is deeply troubling and doing a disservice to its readers.

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