The Trump vs. California environmental fight nobody's talking about

Dried-out mud crackles underfoot as David Lamfrom walks across Silurian Lake toward two lonely creosote bushes, which make for as good a destination as any in this sun-baked backwater of the California desert. Patches of yellow wildflowers decorate the flat, dry lake bed, which sits in a valley ringed by mountains, 20 miles from the nearest town. That would be Baker, population 735, best known for the world's tallest thermometer.

Some of the desert's most iconic creatures find shelter here in Silurian Valley, from burrowing desert tortoises, to bighorn sheep that leave tracks across the landscape, to golden eagles that nest in the mountains. But what Lamfrom loves most about Silurian Valley is the solitude. The only signs of human civilization are distant power lines, barely visible on the horizon, and the occasional car or RV zipping by on the two-lane highway that connects Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park.

Lamfrom, who works for the National Parks Conservation Association, visits this place often. Usually he camps, but sometimes he and his girlfriend just put out lounge chairs on the dry lake and enjoy what he calls "one of the wildest places in the country." Once you leave Baker, he says, "There's nothing for 60 miles — in the best possible way."

"Just unique, beautiful arid lands. Mountain range after mountain range, the Amargosa River. The Dumont Dunes and the Ibex Dunes. Death Valley National Park. And then Death Valley National Park continues for another hundred miles north," Lamfrom says.

But on this particular visit to Silurian Valley, he's worried.

For years, an energy company wanted to build a 29,000-acre solar-and-wind energy project here, adjacent to the dry lake. The Obama administration rejected the solar component of that plan in 2014, then designated the area for conservation under a sweeping land-use plan for the California desert. But the Trump administration may now undo that plan, which protects million of acres of public lands in the Golden State.

California officials were outraged when the Interior Department announced in February that it would consider changes to the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which was finished in 2016 after eight years of collaboration between state and federal agencies. Sen. Dianne Feinstein called the Trump administration's decision to revisit the plan "a complete waste of time and money." The State Lands Commission, one of whose members is Lieutenant Gov. Gavin Newsom, adopted a resolution calling Trump's proposal "a grave threat to the fragile and complex desert ecosystem."

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Many California residents aren't happy, either: The federal Bureau of Land Management says it received 25,000 comments on its proposal to reconsider the desert plan. That's more than double the 12,000 comments the agency got on a draft version of the plan in 2015. It's likely most of those commenters opposed significant changes to the plan, following a push by conservation groups to encourage Californians to speak out.

At the same time, this isn't just a "Trump vs. California" story.

The Trump administration has argued the California desert plan makes it too difficult to build renewable energy projects here — and many solar and wind developers agree. They're asking the federal government to open more lands to solar and wind farms and loosen environmental rules in development zones. Without those changes, they say, it will be difficult for California to meet its ambitious goals for fighting climate change.

Solar companies are "cautiously optimistic" about changes to the desert plan, said Shannon Eddy, executive director of the Large-scale Solar Association, a Sacramento-based trade group. She's asking the Trump administration to make targeted changes to the plan through an administrative process, rather than throwing it out and starting from scratch.

"We think upending the plan would result in years of litigation, which doesn't serve anyone's interests," Eddy said.

But asking Trump for help is a delicate balancing act for those industries, considering the president's fervent support for planet-warming fossil fuels and his occasional hostility toward renewable energy. Trump once said the wind turbines outside Palm Springs make the city look like a "junkyard," and he's repeatedly criticized wind power for killing birds — an argument recently echoed by his Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke. The president's decision earlier this year to tax imported solar panels drew the condemnation of the solar industry, which said the tariffs would cost tens of thousands of U.S. jobs.

The way the Interior Department has framed it, supporting solar and wind in California is part of the president's agenda to promote domestic energy resources. But conservation groups suspect the Trump administration is more interested in eroding California's environmental protections, possibly to benefit industries besides renewable energy.

When federal officials announced possible changes to the desert plan, they also asked for comments on ways to increase access to public lands for mining and grazing — a surprising request, since the desert plan didn't explicitly limit either of those activities.

V. John White has worked extensively on the California desert plan. As executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, an advocacy group, White answers to a board of directors that includes solar industry executives and representatives from environmental groups. So he sees both sides of the argument.

Solar industry leaders have talked about "threading the needle" with the Trump administration on the California desert plan, White said. But the problem with that strategy, as he sees it, is that "you're likely to get your eyes poked out."

If you've only ever seen the open desert while driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, it might seem like a desolate wasteland.

But stop and look around a little, and you'll learn it's a remarkable place.

Conservationists describe the California desert as one of the largest intact ecosystems in the lower 48 states. Southern California is known for its highways and urban sprawl, but most of the desert is still pristine open land, where small amounts of water nourish 2,500 native plants and animals, including dozens of types of lizards and cacti and many species found nowhere else. Every year, millions of people visit Joshua Tree National Park, where the Mojave and Sonoran deserts collide; Mojave National Preserve, home to the world's biggest Joshua tree forest; and Death Valley National Park, whose Badwater Basin is the lowest point in North America, 282 feet below sea level.

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President Barack Obama added three national monuments to the California desert, including Sand to Snow, which stretches from the desert floor near Palm Springs to the peak of Mt. San Gorgonio; Mojave Trails, which spans historic Route 66; and Castle Mountains, a remote outpost near the Nevada border that has Joshua trees, native grasslands and a history of gold mining. The Trump administration considered shrinking or eliminating Sand to Snow and Mojave Trails, but so far has chosen not to.

Those parks, monuments and other protected spaces are connected by a looser patchwork of lands that don't have the same strict protections but still provide important habitat "connectivity" for animals like bighorn sheep, Mojave ground squirrels and federally protected desert tortoises. Scientists say climate change makes it more important than ever to give animals opportunities to move from place to place, since rising temperatures are changing which areas provide livable habitat for certain species.

"It turns out in California we have more biodiversity than any other state in the union, and we're one of 25 global biodiversity hotspots on the entire planet," said Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Many environmentalists thought they had won the battle for the California desert in 1994, when Congress established Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks. So it came as a surprise when, in the late 2000s, energy companies started proposing huge solar and wind farms all over the desert. Conservationists, while generally supportive of renewable energy, worried those projects would industrialize the desert, degrading ecosystems and bringing road constructions, power lines and dust storms. They pointed to instances of endangered birds getting killed by wind turbines and solar panels.

The renewable energy "gold rush," as it came to be known, divided traditional allies. Many planned solar and wind farms got bogged down in permitting battles between environmentalists and developers. Most of the proposed projects were never built.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan — known to those who helped write it by the clunky acronym DRECP — was supposed to bring those battles to an end.

Finalized in September 2016, the plan designated 6.5 millions of acres of federal lands for conservation and 3.6 million acres for recreational activities, such as off-roading, hunting and rockhounding. It was designed to protect 37 species of plants and animals, including the Mojave fringe-toed lizard, the California condor and several flowers.

Nearly 400,000 acres were set aside for solar, wind and geothermal energy projects, including 150,000 acres in Riverside County east of the Coachella Valley, 100,000 acres in Imperial County southeast of the Salton Sea, and scattered parcels near high desert cities like Barstow, Victorville and Ridgecrest. The goal was to identify which areas are most suitable for energy development and, by putting the rest of the desert off limits, to make it faster and easier for companies to get building permits in those limited areas.

The plan covered more 10.8 million acres overall, or nearly 17,000 square miles, ranging from the Mexican border to the Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, and from the high desert of Los Angeles County to the Colorado River at Lake Havasu. President Obama's Interior secretary, Sally Jewell, who came to the Coachella Valley to celebrate the plan's completion, hailed it as "the culmination of more than eight years of thoughtful planning, deep collaboration and extensive public engagement to guide future management of 10 million acres of California desert that belong to all Americans."

There was only one problem: The solar and wind industries weren't happy.

The desert plan was supposed to create regulatory certainty for developers. But some renewable energy companies argued, in essence, that the plan gave them the wrong kind of certainty: the certainty they wouldn't be able to build projects.

The California Wind Energy Association said the plan closed most of the desert's windiest areas to development. Solar trade groups said strict new environmental rules would make it prohibitively costly to build even in the limited development zones.

Without significant adjustments, developers argued, California would have trouble meeting its climate change goals. The Golden State has set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and state law requires utilities to get half their electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind by 2030. Lawmakers have considered raising the clean energy mandate to 100 percent.

"Nothing matters more than our climate goals," said Nancy Rader, executive director of the California Wind Energy Association. "I just cannot understand this hostility toward both wind and solar, which we're going to need to have to save the planet."

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The Trump administration echoed the arguments of solar and wind companies, without mentioning climate change. In a February 2018 statement announcing they would consider changes to the desert plan, officials said renewable energy groups and local governments "expressed concerns to the Department of the Interior that the DRECP did not designate enough public lands for future renewable energy development."

"We need to reduce burdens on all domestic energy development, including solar, wind and other renewables," Interior official Katharine MacGregor said in the statement.

In California, government agencies were caught off-guard by the announcement. Fish and Wildlife director Chuck Bonham, who helped write the desert plan, said he learned of the Trump administration's decision when he read about it in the newspaper.

And that's how we get to David Lamfrom, nearly a decade after work began on the California desert plan, walking across a dry lake in Silurian Valley and worrying the protections he fought for will go up in smoke at the hands of Donald Trump.

To Lamfrom, this place shows why the desert plan is so important.

Silurian Valley is surrounded by federally protected lands: Mojave National Preserve to the south, Death Valley to the north, and several wilderness areas and wilderness study areas to the east and west. Lamfrom sees Silurian as a key link in a conservation corridor stretching from the southern reaches of Joshua Tree National Park, near the 10 freeway, to the northern reaches of Death Valley, closer to Yosemite than Los Angeles.

A 29,000-acre solar-and-wind farm in Silurian Valley, Lamfrom believes, would have irrevocably fractured this "kingdom of conservation" in the California desert.

"The parks are just the iconic places that people already know about. But what's really important is allowing conservation to match what exists on the ground. To forever protect a living landscape," said Lamfrom, who serves as California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit environmental group.

As he walked across the dry bed of Silurian Lake, Lamfrom spied two horned larks flying through the air. He stopped to point out possible bighorn sheep tracks in the cracked mud. He said he's seen people here flying through the air with jet packs and parachutes.

It's unclear whether the Interior Department will reopen Silurian Valley to solar and wind power — and if it does, whether companies will want to build there. A spokesperson for Avangrid Renewables, which had proposed the 29,000-acre solar-and-wind farm, said the company is "no longer actively pursuing development" in Silurian Valley.

More broadly, the solar industry says its not interested in returning to the bitter fights of the past. Peter Weiner, a San Francisco-based attorney whose clients have included many solar developers that do business in California, said the industry has learned over the last decade "how to site solar projects on land that is not resource sensitive."

"As industry has gotten smarter, and the (environmental groups) have gotten smarter as well, people have figured out that some of this land is actually pretty good. It's not going to be World War III on every project," Weiner said.

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In a comment letter to the Trump administration — written on behalf of two trade groups, the Large-scale Solar Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association — Weiner didn't ask for any conservation designations in the desert plan to be overturned. Rather, he asked for clarification that 400,000 acres known as "General Public Lands," which weren't designated for either conservation or development, are open to solar and wind energy applications. That would bring the total amount of land land where projects can be proposed to roughly 800,000 acres, out of the plan's 10.8 million acres overall.

Solar companies also want changes to some of the "conservation management actions" they're supposed to take when they build projects. Many of those environmental rules "are not justified on a scientific basis and are so burdensome as to make development infeasible," contrary to the plan's goal of streamlining development, Weiner argued in the industry comment letter, which he co-wrote with another attorney at his law firm.

In that letter, Weiner and attorney Jill Yung describe several conservation management actions as especially problematic, including a requirement that projects be located at least a quarter-mile away from all plants designated as "special status." That includes plants protected under the Endangered Species Act, as well as plants that federal officials have determined need special management to avoid becoming endangered.

There are at least 398 such plants on federal lands in California, according to the Bureau of Land Management, although not all of those are found in the desert.

"A company knowing that special status plants dot the desert will avoid development rather than have large areas ruled ineligible for solar arrays after new plants appear in a single developer-funded survey," Weiner and Yung wrote.

The wind industry is asking for bigger changes.

The California Wind Energy Association says the land-use plan placed off limits 96 percent of all public lands in the desert that contain high-quality wind resources. The trade group asked federal officials to consider development in all of those areas.

"We have just scratched the surface of reducing fossil fuel emissions in California," said Nancy Rader, the wind association's executive director. "So to put this wind off the table seems to me really incongruous with our very lofty goals of getting off of fossil fuels."

Solar and wind industry officials say it's obvious by now the desert plan isn't working. It was supposed to make development easier, but just one company has applied to build a renewable energy project in a development zone since the plan was finalized, as The Desert Sun has previously reported — and that lone application was later withdrawn.

But some renewable energy advocates see other forces at work.

V. John White, from the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, said not a lot of new solar and wind farms are being built in California, period. That's because utilities like Southern California Edison have already signed contracts for most of the electricity they need to meet the state's 50 percent renewable energy mandate.

Meanwhile, there are already several big solar farms being developed in Riverside County alone that predate the desert plan, including Blythe Mesa, Crimson, Desert Harvest and Palen. Those projects are grandfathered into the old environmental rules.

"We haven't finished adding all the solar from the desert," White said.

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And not every solar developer is worried about the future.

Ian Black, an executive at EDF Renewable Energy, said environmentalists started pushing developers to live up to the standards formalized in the California desert plan years ago, long before the plan was finalized in 2016. EDF got its Desert Harvest solar farm permitted under those expectations and is now doing the same for the Palen solar project just south of Joshua Tree National Park, Black said. His company didn't submit any comments to the Trump administration on the desert plan.

"We play by the rules that are in front of us," Black said. "You pick either side of the debate and you're going to make enemies. And our job is not to make enemies."

It's also possible that revisiting the desert plan will hurt, not help, renewable energy.

Karen Douglas, a member of the California Energy Commission, said tearing up the new rules would create the kind of regulatory chaos that slows down development. If Interior Department officials throw out the California desert plan and start over, Douglas said, they will "create significant uncertainty that will make it very difficult or impossible for projects to move forward until something is resolved. And that could take a long time."

The desert plan "reflected years and years of public process and engagement," said Douglas, who was one of the document's main authors. "It involved not only work with the renewable energy companies and conservation groups and scientists, but also the recreational side, local government, tribal government, local communities. And because of all of that work, the plan...still has quite a lot of buy-in across the desert."

The solar and wind industries are wary of a broad reopening, too.

In their comment letter, the solar trade groups said they'd prefer to see changes made through administrative processes identified in the plan, rather than through a potentially far-reaching amendment process. The first approach would be faster and easier, and avoid the "significant controversy" of reopening the whole plan, industry lawyers wrote.

Nancy Rader, from the California Wind Energy Association, believes opening up more land to wind projects would only require "a pretty narrow amendment" to the plan.

It's also possible the perceived threat of the Trump administration throwing out the plan will work in industry's favor here in California, by prompting state officials to work with developers on the kinds of changes they've been asking for the past few years.

In a letter to the Trump administration, the California Energy Commission and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife offered to convene a working group with industry to identify possible changes to the environmental rules in the desert plan. Bonham, the Fish and Wildlife director, said state agencies are ready to work with developers on resolving their concerns, as long as they're not trying to undo the entire desert plan.

"If your beef is we got something wrong, OK, let's have the discussion," Bonham said. "But chill out on the zeal to throw the entire thing out and start over."

Underlying the entire argument is the question of how much solar and wind power California will need from the desert to meet its climate change goals.

It's a difficult question to answer. Conservationists point to the many options for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, from reducing energy use overall, to importing clean energy from other states, to making it easier for homes and businesses to put solar panels on their roofs. Renewable energy companies counter that large-scale solar and wind farms are among the cheapest options available, and that the desert is one of the few places where there's plenty of open land owned by a single entity, the federal government.

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In the small towns that dot the California desert, from Joshua Tree to Apple Valley, many residents oppose putting any solar and wind farms on public lands, seeing large-scale energy development as an attack on their communities. But that point of view has failed to gain traction among policymakers and major environmental groups, who are focused on how much renewable energy to build on public lands, not whether to build it at all.

David Lamfrom, from the National Parks Conservation Association, said he wants to see California build renewable energy on public lands. He said it's important for the state not only to meet its own climate goals, but to demonstrate international leadership.

At the same time, he knows he's been personally responsible for holding up projects — and anybody doing that kind of work, he said, would be "crazy not to feel conflicted." He knows the California desert faces serious climate change impacts, including Joshua trees dying in parts of their namesake national park as temperatures rise. Limiting those impacts will require a fast, dramatic transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

As he drove north on Highway 127 earlier this month, away from Silurian Lake and toward Death Valley National Park, Lamfrom reflected on what makes the California desert special — and fragile. The lack of water, he said, makes this place different.

"You're not talking about an eastern forest, where if you really mess up, you cut down all the trees, you can have an old-growth forest again in 200 years," Lamfrom said. "The time scale of the California desert, it's geological."

"If you're going to do a project, let us help you, let us find a good place, because that's forever," he added. "That impact that you're making is forever."

Even if the solar and wind industries are right, and significant changes are needed for California to meet its climate goals, it's hard to predict whether the Trump administration will actually take action to support those goals. The Interior Department didn't respond to requests for an interview with Katharine MacGregor, the deputy assistant secretary who was quoted in the statement announcing the department's review of the desert plan.

But recent history might offer some clues on the Trump administration's approach to the California desert.

In late 2016, the Obama administration said it would block new mining claims on 1.3 million acres, or more than 2,000 square miles, of federal lands, including Silurian Valley. Those areas had been given a high level of protection in the DRECP, after federal officials determined they belong to a class of lands that "epitomize the remarkable values that public lands have to offer" and "represent the diversity of landscapes, cultures, and experiences that are the building blocks of the United States."

That designation was informed by the thousands of pages of analysis that went into the California desert plan, including a 70-page appendix describing in painstaking detail the lands to be protected, known as California Desert National Conservation Lands.

But blocking new mining claims in those areas required a separate legal process from the DRECP. That process got started just before Trump took office. In December 2016, Obama's Interior Department temporarily withdrew the 1.3 million acres from new mining claims and said it would study whether to make the withdrawal permanent. Officials promised to host meetings, solicit comments and prepare an environmental analysis.

Then the Trump administration took over. The public meetings never happened. The environmental analysis was never finished.

But the mining withdrawal was soon reversed. In February 2018, the Interior Department said it would reopen those 1.3 million acres to new mining claims.

The administration offered no documents or analysis to back up its decision. Interior's only explanation: The department had "concluded that impacts of future mineral exploration and mining, subject to existing environmental regulations, do not pose a significant threat to the protection of cultural, biological and scientific values."

Now, companies looking to mine gold, sand and rare-earth metals like europium and neodymium can stake claim to those areas as they see fit.

Sammy Roth writes about energy and the environment for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.