Guess That Unicorn-Fart Powered “Clean” Energy Isn’t All That Clean After All

Here’s a good rule of thumb: Never trust an industry that liberals in the government keep pushing on the American taxpayer.

There’s this humongous solar power plant out in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border called the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility. According to this sourcelink, it was cleared through all the regulatory obstacles and even funded by the federal government to the tune of $1.6 billion – plus over $600 million in tax credits. Obama touted it as this awesome new future of clean American energy and it was going to lower the tides and heal hearts and the rainbows and sunflowers would hold hands and sing happy songs in the green meadows. Or something like that.

But it turns out that this solar power plant actually emits MORE carbon dioxide than a regular power plant would have done. That’s because it takes more natural gas to run the solar power plant than it does if the natural gas was used to fuel people’s homes instead. Basically, they’re redirecting resources that would have done the job they set out to do, in order to further complicate the task at hand. But hey – GREEN ENERGY! That pollutes more than a normal power plant (this is what you guys signed up for!)

What’s worse is that they spent an exorbitant amount of time and money to clear the area of natural animals and plants so a bunch of love-the-Earth city-dwelling liberals could feel good about using solar energy from a power plant out in the middle of the desert. You know – because NOTHING ever grows or lives in the desert. No birds or tortoises or sagebrush or cacti. Nope. It’s just a worthless pile of sand that no one ever uses – so let’s ruin the landscape by plopping a bunch of useless solar panels right in the middle of a desert ecosystem. From the article –

Ivanpah was built on mostly undisturbed public land that was home to desert tortoises, a species threatened with extinction, among other wildlife. Now the whole episode has greenies hopping mad and feeling betrayed.

The facility is cooking birds mid-flight, over 3,500 of them in its first year, according to the Desert Sun. Biologists discovered scores of desert tortoises during the construction Ivanpah and teams of them gathered more than 175 of the reptiles from the site plus found another 50 tortoise eggs that were later hatched in captivity. In all $56 million was spent capturing, housing, relocating, and preserving and restoring tortoise habitat elsewhere.

And now for all those billions spent, for all that destroyed pristine desertscape, dead birds, displaced tortoises and more – the darn thing emits more CO2 than an ordinary power plant would’ve anyway.

Yeah. That sounds TOTALLY reasonable.

And even people who are usually all on-board with the green energy thing are ticked off about the utter failures of this power plant –

David Lamfrom, desert project manager of the National Parks Conservation Association, said information about the amount of natural gas used at Ivanpah shows that the plant is essentially a hybrid operation that requires both fossil fuel and sunshine to make electricity. He said he doubts the project would have gone forward if it had been billed a hybrid plant. But it wasn’t.

“It feels like a bait and switch,” Lamfrom said. “This project was held up as a model of innovation. We didn’t sign up for greener energy. We signed up for green energy.”

I can’t really blame the guy. Heck, I’d sign up for a unicorn that pooped hundred-dollar bills if I was led to believe that such a thing existed.