Make up your minds, environmentalists

David Adams, Las Vegas

Saturday, June 21, 2008 | 2:03 a.m.

Environmentalists have hounded us about “global warming” and warned us that we need to seek alternative energy sources and to avoid fossil fuels at all cost. The result is a renewed interest in promising new technologies, and Nevada is rich in all of them. Are boom times ahead for us? Well ...

The federal government, which owns most of the land likely to be used for the new power sources, wants us to wait nearly two years for a “study” to determine the environmental impact of, for example, solar arrays on the environment. Hasn’t such a study been done? Don’t we have a new solar station near Nellis Air Force Base? Global warming will have to continue until the study concludes.

Then there’s the situation in Southern California. Solar generation arrays have been proposed for parts of the desert. These could generate amounts of electricity for area cities. They would go a long way toward meeting the state’s law requiring a percentage of electricity to be obtained from alternative means.

The problem is that the solar arrays would be located in the desert, far away from those cities. Somehow one needs to get the electricity from one place to the other. Transmission lines are the obvious solution. But environmentalists are now filing suit to halt their construction. It seems that they have to cross parts of the desert that are designated as park lands.

So, while the environmentalists continue to drone on and on about global warming, they also continue to block the use of the very technologies that they are endorsing.