Overview

The Environmental movement in the US was predicated on stopping things because cities were choked in pollution, rivers were catching fire, and the countryside was being bulldozed to build houses and freeways with little consideration for anything other than rapid growth. I explain this history further in my invited talk to the Idaho City Club.

It’s been said the 1960’s era Environmentalism that created our bedrock environmental laws (e.g. Clean Air/Water Acts, Endangered Species Act, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency) had ‘cautious’ themes to their policy enforcement. Before new projects started construction, environmental reviews needed to take place and check what impacts they would have. We became very cautious builders because of our past mistakes.

Today’s Environmentalists find themselves in an odd position; climate change is a crisis and in order to preserve the ecosystems we’ve spent decades protecting from direct-human impacts, we need to build a lot of new energy projects. The alpine wilderness area of the Sawtooth Mountains or Sierra Nevadas will never host wind turbines, but they are now seeing less snow pack and more invasive species because of climate change. Just because there is no direct human touch on these special places, climate change is disrupting these places faster than they can adapt. If we want to save these ecosystems from collapse, we need to build a lot of new clean energy projects. And we need to build them fast.

Do you see the juxtaposition yet?

Below are just a few real-life examples. They happened while working for an environmental non-profit with a history of stopping all kinds of projects in the Mountain West. They often leveraged the impacts to the Greater Sage-Grouse as a way to ensure greater protections for the bird and its habitat. Like most non-profits, their culture developed a knee-jerk reaction to project proposals that have any negative impacts. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a zero-impact project. You can, however, avoid as much of the harms as you can, minimize the actual impact where possible, and finally mitigate the actual impacts you had in other nearby places, You should be able to identify this as the “cautious” Environmentalism, this framing makes up a substantial percentage of memberships/contributers to environmental non-profits. But remember, we now have to deal with the “crisis” Environmentalism that we exist in today.

The Lava Ridge Wind Project

In the summer of 2024 I reviewed, according to Heatmap News, the most at risk energy project in the US. It took me a few days to read through a 2,500 page Final Environmental Impact Statement, discuss the implications and places of agreement with my public lands, wildlife, and energy colleagues, then quickly write our blog, BLM releases final assessment of Lava Ridge Wind Project.

We continued working with other organizations to find out where they stood on the project, and to try and increase support if they were movable. We kept learning more of the wind project’s impacts and benefits, and eventually were able to support the project in our blog, The Lava Ridge wind project is not perfect, but it is necessary.

This wind project’s draft proposal “poisoned the well of public trust”, as someone explained me. Even though the final project size was cut in half making it more restrictive than the most restrictive alternative initially examined, there was universal outrage from local and federally elected officials and plenty of indignation from the public (especially if they’re on FaceBook). Some of the disagreement was in good faith and worthy of considering, but it was swamped by the vitriolic outrage of cultural grievances being redirected at all renewable energy projects. Why? Because they acted as actual symbols of the Biden-administration ‘looking over them from the red blinky lights on all the turbines’ (new technology makes them blink only when planes are nearby, making them far less intrusive). Fast-forward to February 2025 where Lava Ridge was the only project explicitly named in any Executive Order signed by Trump. That EO functionally cancelled the project from being built.

This saga is not over because the area in question is the perfect place to build utility scale energy projects. During the FEIS development the BLM noted there were ~3GW of additional energy projects in various stages of development also on public lands. The reason there’s so much planned development is because (1) there is large continguous acres of public land, (2) the land is of marginal ecological integrity (see below on sagebrush ecosystems), and most importantly (3) the area is crisscrossed by high voltage transmission lines and a newly upgraded energy substation.

As I write this, there are more clean energy projects being proposed on private lands nearby the Lava Ridge project, and there are more transmission lines being proposed through there. Southcentral Idaho happens to be a geographic triple junction where hydropower from the PNW can move eastward, wind power from Wyoming and Montana can move westward, and solar power from the desert southwest can move northward. They all converge on the Twin Falls area, and that Midpoint Substation will act like a major energy traffic light for the entire Western grid.

In a renewables-centric future, we (all the western states) can share our electrons via transmission lines so we don’t have to overbuild each and every state. If there are regional extreme-weather events that put the grid under immense stress like the January 2024 cold snap, the desert southwest can use its excess solar production and send it northward so we don’t have blackouts. Having an interconnected grid helps with cost savings, grid reliability, and it minimizes how many energy projects we need to build. This does mean, however, that we need to build a lot more transmission lines even if, as the Audubon Society argues, there are some negative impacts to birds. When giving a TV interview to our local news station I was quoted as saying, “Yes, the Lava Ridge Project will kill some birds. But if we don’t stop burning dirty fossil fuels then thousands of birds will go extinct.”

There are no right answers, only trade-offs.

Bureau of Land Management’s Western Solar Plan

As hinted at in the authors section of the blog, Here Comes the Sun: Proactive solar thinking from the BLM, I spearheaded our position on solar development on BLM land. However, it required careful internal conversations with our Public Lands, Wildlife, and Energy-focused colleagues. Trying to find the space in the venn diagram where we can all agree was no small feat because of our own unique perspectives. Trying to find the literal space on the map where we agreed energy projects can and should go is easier said than done. This robust effort inside the environmental non-profit world is beginning to seep into the public discourse through Klein and Thompson’s Abundance framework.

To briefly summarize, Klein & Thompson argue that government “needs to justify itself not though the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.” They also critique the post-1970s development of “liberal legalism” because it has “convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned though compliance with an endless uncatalogued of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.” While many will be sympathetic to these arguments, the policy atmospherics of the book need to be implemented on the ground. And that’s where you find reasonable, but uncomfortable, trade offs.

Idaho has ~53.5 million acres, 22% is BLM-administered land mostly in the southern portion of the state where you’ll find an abundance of sagebrush-step ecosystems. Of the 11.7 million acres of BLM-administered land in Idaho, only 0.7% of that (90,000 acres) are reasonably foreseeable to have solar on them in a 2050 fully decarbonized scenario. You can imagine how folks felt about public lands having solar on them when the Western Solar Plan was presented. Of course, there’s more outrage today (Summer 2025) now that 21.7 million acres of Forest Service and BLM administered lands in Idaho are up for sale.

For decades, the Mountain West has been pressured by invasive species like cheatgrass, Medusahead, and other annual species that are swallowing up the sagebrush sea. But this is an old problem. Cheatgrass in particular was likely introduced in the late 1800’s by ranchers wanting more feed for their cattle and the invasion front has continued onward ever since. While there are plenty of Sage-grouse in southern Idaho, new modelling from the United States Geological Service shows the only place sagebrush (and thus the sagebrush-obligate species Sage-grouse) will survive in Idaho is in the upper elevations of the Salmon-Challis National Forest. Think of living in a two story house where you have free roam, but within my lifetime the only place you can survive is on the 2nd story, and only on the queen-sized bed.

Their range contraction is sad, especially so because there are dozens more species that depend on sagebrush for their life cycles as well. Energy balance models used by the USGS are fauna and wildlife-agnostic because they’re physics forward. We can lament their range contraction, but we cannot pretend like we can maintain sagebrush and sage-grouse in the current places they are today for the next generation. There simply won’t be enough water, it will be too hot, there are too many invasive species pressures, and wildfires will eat them up faster than they can grow. This situation isn’t unique to Sage-grouse. There’s a two part series from Sammy Roth’s podcast about an endangered flower growing on boron-rich soils that are also at the edge of a lithium mine. Climate change is threatening the habitat range of Tiehm’s Buckwheat, and we need lithium for batteries so that we can stop burning fossil fuels and use renewable energy instead.

I say above and will reiterate, “there are no right answers, only trade-offs”. The intersection of energy and environmental issues are where it’s most obvious. I encourage you to read the ICL blog about BLM’s plans for solar development on public lands because it is a real life example of grappling with those issues. It doesn’t do so perfectly, with the second Trump administration most of these solar plans are on hold, but the careful analysis and practically constraints are well reasoned to the point that not only did I agree with the BLM, but I convinced my colleagues to support their preferred project pathways as well. That’s a winning plan, but it may take a few more years before being implemented.