> "Conservation advocates, local government leaders and nearby residents have expressed concerns about the cumulative environmental impacts of the proposed Esmeralda 7 project, which in addition to covering a huge swath of desert lands would have also included miles of roads and associated transmission lines."
> "They have argued for placing onshore utility-scale projects on previously disturbed sites and expanding the use of rooftop solar."
> "The Esmeralda 7 project “would have destroyed significant archaeology sites, rare plants, bighorn sheep habitat and wilderness quality lands,” said Kevin Emmerich, a co-founder of Nevada-based Basin and Range Watch."
> "The cancellation of the project “will give us a chance to protect the tremendous resources of the area, including beautiful and wild mountain ranges and valleys, rare plant populations, and bighorn sheep,” said Laura Cunningham, a biologist with Western Watersheds Project."
> "“Paleontological fossil beds [the Esmeralda Formation] here were formative to understanding the geological history of the Great Basin,” Cunningham added. “This is good news for recreationists and for conservation efforts of an amazing landscape.”"
> "They have argued for placing onshore utility-scale projects on previously disturbed sites and expanding the use of rooftop solar."
Thats rich.
Nevada regulators just killed rooftop solar, through a first-in-the-nation implementation of a demand charge for residential customers. People who put solar on their roofs will still get hit with demand charges when the sun goes down and in the summer it’ll be $30-70/mo. Negating a significant portion of their anticipated solar savings.
The project was given a waiver that allowed them to skip much of the endless environmental review process that makes energy projects so expensive in the US. This cancels that waiver.
The reasoning appears to be forcing politically-connected projects to be subject to the same environmental reviews as every other project, including other clean energy projects that are not politically connected. As a matter of principle I agree the rules should be uniformly applied.
If the environmental review process is that onerous, which it is, then we should reform the process for everyone rather than allow politically connected people buy waivers.
you need a godly amount of faith to accept that this is about applying the laws equally and that this is not a change in who will be getting the favours from now on.
But they don't believe in solar which means they accidentally are making their claimed emergency worse and helping their fossil donors to make more money. Like Trump expressly promised to do in return for their donations.
I assume incumbents have been demanding compensation for their "stranded assets". eg All their "known" reserves of oil, heavily inflated, propping up their market caps.
Biden Admin's IRA had boondoggles (for incumbents) like carbon capture, hydrogen fuel, and e-fuels. I assume it was mostly plausibly deniable pork.
I know that you already know:
Yes, we need to massively to fund R&D for All The Things, for the draw down. Even the moonshots.
No, none of that moonshot nascent stuff will be mature enough to help us reach net-zero. It takes decades to progress from research to industrial build out. (Govt now has a technology readiness model to better guide investment. Sorry, I forget its official name.)
What the skeptics (eg of the rainbow colors of hydrogen) didn't grok is that climate crisis is a hostage negotiation. Pretending these unproven techs were mature is just laundering the extortion payouts.
Hilariously, IMHO, the incumbents were getting a better deal under the Biden Admin. All those execs have gone full Gordon Gecko, snatching a better (short-term) deal for themselves, to the detriment of shareholders.
Oh, the irony.
Assume we get another Democratic Admin. Prospects for another hostage release deal are much dimmer. Renewable will be that much further along. And after the incumbents burned all their goodwill by sabotaging the prior payout deal, methinks the Dems will want some scalps.
Coal will be fully dead. Accelerating deployment of solar + battery, despite the roadblocks, will moot grid related permitting reform. Consumers will demand much cheaper and better electrified products. Etc, etc.
Today, only natural gas generation is cheaper than solar + battery, and only because of subsidies and tariffs. At best, the current Admin is just delaying the inevitable. At worst, they've completely obliterated USA economy, manufacturing, GDP, etc for a generation.
but at a certain point in time -- there are facts you can't dispute. utility solar is one of the cheapest forms of energy there is. & a massive plus when you consider places like arizona.
>"The American president has called renewable energy projects a “scam”."
The rest of the world considers Trump and his administration 'a scam', and aren't falling for it. The side effects of all the bullshit they've pulled and continue to pull is that the rest of the world is playing together more nicely with one another, and the US is screwing over their own economy for the longer term.
We honestly need the next administration to shut down our coal- and oil-fired power plants, and shut down our coal mines. Physically ensure they can't be restarted.
With the precedents handed down from Trump, that could likely be concluded before the courts have a chance to weigh in. The owners will be entitled to cash damages. But the industries will have been politically destroyed.
(Note: leave natural gas alone. It’s cheap and relatively clean. It’s also geopolitical export currency.)
It's not revenge, it's just good policy. It will be vastly cheaper for the US if we pay these industries to shut down and replace them with renewables. We could pay every person working at a fossil fuel job their full wage to do absolutely nothing until they die and still come out ahead. Climate change isn't a joke, it's going to be really, really, really, really expensive.
It's a kneejerk response designed to obviate a political problem. Historically these will be perceived as vengeful and undemocratic.
> it's just good policy.
It's good policy if you only consider _one_ outcome. Good policy is made from compromise. Yours explicitly denies that, to the point where I'm very sure there are _better_ policy choices available to us.
> We could pay every person working at a fossil fuel job their full wage to do absolutely nothing until they die and still come out ahead.
I'd like to see your math on this.
> Climate change isn't a joke
Then shipping manufactured items from China should be a huge concern. If you're not making the replacement equipment in the USA for the USA then you are just ignorantly displacing the problem. To the point where this all begins to look like a modern colonial strategy solving local problems at the expense of global outcomes.
> these will be perceived as vengeful and undemocratic
They're vengeful. I don't think they're undemocratic.
> Good policy is made from compromise
Not always. Sometimes there is a correct answer. For energy costs and political stability, continuing to subsidise coal has turned into a corrupt and expensive mistake.
Fair; however, you do share this country with people who do not explicitly agree with all your decisions. Which is why I flagged this as a /perception/. Those still have actual consequences whether you agree with them or not.
> For energy costs and political stability, there seems to be only one here.
You're ignoring national security and resistance to natural disasters. There's the part of the argument you want to have; unfortunately, it explicitly touches on several other complicated ones. Ignoring them introduces unnecessary peril to your own stated goals.
If climate change is that important then you should really be seeking to rationalize the common concerns surrounding this approach and working to address them through incorporation into your strategy. There's more than one thing to "get right" here.
> you do share this country with people who do not explicitly agree with all your decisions
That doesn’t make a policy democratic. To the extent there is good criticism of my suggestion, it’s in it being disrespectful to the rule of law.
> If climate change is that important
I never mentioned climate change.
Coal is expensive to burn. It creates particulate emissions that are locally hazardous. And it funds political interests that do shit like shut down an 80% complete wind farm or under-construction solar panel.
I’m arguing for acting decisively to moderate energy costs, safeguard our health and remove an increasingly-toxic special interest from the board.
While in understand where you are coming from, I don't think we should completely destroy coal mines. They should be kept around as a backup.
That said, I would be 100% onboard with a future administration applying a massive tax on the wealthy to fund solar plants, rooftops, and wind energy - 100% paid for by the wealthy who are profiting from this administration at the expense of our lives.
I'm not sure this tit-for-tat is actually the best approach.
Really just start declassifying everything the administration has done. We only got just the twitter files detailing Trump's administration's interference with Twitter's company but imagine we had that for Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, etc.
I mean if Biden just released the Epstein files in October I bet the November election would've gone differently.
From what I can tell by reading the BLM and related documents, this is not canceling the solar farm. That misrepresents the situation.
The project was given preferential treatment by Biden, allowing them to skip environmental review process required for other energy projects on BLM land in Nevada. This is canceling the preferential treatment, forcing them to do the environmental review to the same standard as other energy projects in Nevada, with the costs implied.
Geothermal energy projects in Nevada have been buried in endless environmental reviews by Democrat administrations for decades. It smells a lot like patronage to selectively waive environmental review requirements for preferred energy projects. There may be an "own the libs" aspect to it but that isn't the story.
If the normal environmental review process doesn't serve a real purpose or makes these energy projects infeasibly expensive then we should be reducing and reforming the environmental review process, not letting administrations decide which energy projects are subject to it.
Sounds like a technical reason. It's apparently 7 projects combined and the Biden administration let them file one enviromental impact assessment instead of 7 sepearate ones. That sounds banal to me, so maybe other people could explain why (if) it's important. It makes sense that Biden would cut a lot of red tape for something that's percieved to be good for the enviroment (a bit ironic in this case) but the Trump administration, who is skeptical about the claimed benefits of renewables are not so impressed. I hope some knowledgeable people can expand on it because some technical and economic analysis would be appreciated.
Just for the record i know Trump is corrupt, a felon, impeached etc etc. and it's pointless to attribute any decisions he or his minions make to reasons any normal person would describe as "rational" or anything other then serving his own interests. So please don't bother mentioning it again thank you. There, now i've cut the discussion thread by 75%.
I’m surprised people are up in arms about this here. First, there has been huge protests about the selling, er “leasing”, of BLM land to millionaires. Do they even realize what was happening here?
The headline would be better written as “some rich guy no longer gets to skip normal environmental procedures for permanently occupying public land”.
Public land should remain that way, forever. Stop selling our children’s future for profit, no matter the cause.
So... fricken... what...? "XYZ" [solar] at the cost of what? Allowing one rich guy to permanently occupy a section of public land? Without ever compensating the public for the immense wealth he'd extract from a public resource? This is basically giving the land to him permanently without ever paying for the billions the land is worth? If were a 99.999% revshare (meaning he keeps 0.001%) and a giant fund for the inevitable environmental cleanup were established I might think differently, but lets not play imagination here.
The previous generations destroyed public lands with dumping, dams, mines, etc in the name of progress or whatever, and the people that extracted the wealth packed their things and left the public with the mess to clean up. These procedures were established to sort of roadblock that, but even then it's still wrong. It's time to learn from the past. Decimating and absolutely destroying public land is something that shouldn't be on the table by alleged environmentalists.
In what way will the solar array destroy the land? Do you feel it's superior to destroy ecosystems with global warming, vs devoting land to clean energy? If so, why, and if not, why do you see the trade-off differently?
What is the reasoning behind such a move? Is it just pure corruption (ie: Qatari plane and base) or is it something else?
Generic NIMBYism,
> "Conservation advocates, local government leaders and nearby residents have expressed concerns about the cumulative environmental impacts of the proposed Esmeralda 7 project, which in addition to covering a huge swath of desert lands would have also included miles of roads and associated transmission lines."
> "They have argued for placing onshore utility-scale projects on previously disturbed sites and expanding the use of rooftop solar."
> "The Esmeralda 7 project “would have destroyed significant archaeology sites, rare plants, bighorn sheep habitat and wilderness quality lands,” said Kevin Emmerich, a co-founder of Nevada-based Basin and Range Watch."
> "The cancellation of the project “will give us a chance to protect the tremendous resources of the area, including beautiful and wild mountain ranges and valleys, rare plant populations, and bighorn sheep,” said Laura Cunningham, a biologist with Western Watersheds Project."
> "“Paleontological fossil beds [the Esmeralda Formation] here were formative to understanding the geological history of the Great Basin,” Cunningham added. “This is good news for recreationists and for conservation efforts of an amazing landscape.”"
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/10/trump-interior-depa...
> "They have argued for placing onshore utility-scale projects on previously disturbed sites and expanding the use of rooftop solar."
Thats rich.
Nevada regulators just killed rooftop solar, through a first-in-the-nation implementation of a demand charge for residential customers. People who put solar on their roofs will still get hit with demand charges when the sun goes down and in the summer it’ll be $30-70/mo. Negating a significant portion of their anticipated solar savings.
Maybe it was the Enviromental Lobby?
The project was given a waiver that allowed them to skip much of the endless environmental review process that makes energy projects so expensive in the US. This cancels that waiver.
The reasoning appears to be forcing politically-connected projects to be subject to the same environmental reviews as every other project, including other clean energy projects that are not politically connected. As a matter of principle I agree the rules should be uniformly applied.
If the environmental review process is that onerous, which it is, then we should reform the process for everyone rather than allow politically connected people buy waivers.
Seems more of a 'how' than 'why.' Good stated reason that lets you keep the actual reason private.
you need a godly amount of faith to accept that this is about applying the laws equally and that this is not a change in who will be getting the favours from now on.
but we can hope
Well Trump has just declared an energy emergency and allowed the government to override many planning rules with emergency overrides.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/decl...
But they don't believe in solar which means they accidentally are making their claimed emergency worse and helping their fossil donors to make more money. Like Trump expressly promised to do in return for their donations.
Oil, gas, and coal lobby had lined up republican pockets prior to last election. This is their return on that investment.
An honest politician is one who once bought stays bought.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-pr...
I can't speak for oil and gas but for the coal industry, it's screwed no matter what lobbyists spend. No value judgement implied...
An industry being screwed and the oligarchs that run that industry getting government handouts are two different things.
Yes and:
I assume incumbents have been demanding compensation for their "stranded assets". eg All their "known" reserves of oil, heavily inflated, propping up their market caps.
Biden Admin's IRA had boondoggles (for incumbents) like carbon capture, hydrogen fuel, and e-fuels. I assume it was mostly plausibly deniable pork.
I know that you already know:
Yes, we need to massively to fund R&D for All The Things, for the draw down. Even the moonshots.
No, none of that moonshot nascent stuff will be mature enough to help us reach net-zero. It takes decades to progress from research to industrial build out. (Govt now has a technology readiness model to better guide investment. Sorry, I forget its official name.)
What the skeptics (eg of the rainbow colors of hydrogen) didn't grok is that climate crisis is a hostage negotiation. Pretending these unproven techs were mature is just laundering the extortion payouts.
Hilariously, IMHO, the incumbents were getting a better deal under the Biden Admin. All those execs have gone full Gordon Gecko, snatching a better (short-term) deal for themselves, to the detriment of shareholders.
Oh, the irony.
Assume we get another Democratic Admin. Prospects for another hostage release deal are much dimmer. Renewable will be that much further along. And after the incumbents burned all their goodwill by sabotaging the prior payout deal, methinks the Dems will want some scalps.
Coal will be fully dead. Accelerating deployment of solar + battery, despite the roadblocks, will moot grid related permitting reform. Consumers will demand much cheaper and better electrified products. Etc, etc.
Today, only natural gas generation is cheaper than solar + battery, and only because of subsidies and tariffs. At best, the current Admin is just delaying the inevitable. At worst, they've completely obliterated USA economy, manufacturing, GDP, etc for a generation.
To "own the libs"
Where can I buy those used panels for pennies on the dollar?
https://archive.is/uk5pq
lying to get voted for might be fashionable.
but at a certain point in time -- there are facts you can't dispute. utility solar is one of the cheapest forms of energy there is. & a massive plus when you consider places like arizona.
so what's trump admin endgame ?
> so what's trump admin endgame ?
Cruelty and revenge
I would add profit to that.
Trump getting and least 2 Nobel prizes because Obama got one. It‘s narcissism.
>"The American president has called renewable energy projects a “scam”."
The rest of the world considers Trump and his administration 'a scam', and aren't falling for it. The side effects of all the bullshit they've pulled and continue to pull is that the rest of the world is playing together more nicely with one another, and the US is screwing over their own economy for the longer term.
Some other discussion:
An Immense Solar Project Just Got Canceled Under Trump (11 points, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542159
Trump administration has killed a massive solar power project in Nevada (15 points, 8 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540426
We honestly need the next administration to shut down our coal- and oil-fired power plants, and shut down our coal mines. Physically ensure they can't be restarted.
With the precedents handed down from Trump, that could likely be concluded before the courts have a chance to weigh in. The owners will be entitled to cash damages. But the industries will have been politically destroyed.
(Note: leave natural gas alone. It’s cheap and relatively clean. It’s also geopolitical export currency.)
I have disagreed with you on a number of discussions, but I am 100% behind you on this.
I don't think escalation and revenge is a good strategy for our country long term. This shit shouldn't be normalized.
It's not revenge, it's just good policy. It will be vastly cheaper for the US if we pay these industries to shut down and replace them with renewables. We could pay every person working at a fossil fuel job their full wage to do absolutely nothing until they die and still come out ahead. Climate change isn't a joke, it's going to be really, really, really, really expensive.
The grid would collapse and there would be frequent blackouts if you just killer fossil fuel plants
> grid would collapse and there would be frequent blackouts if you just killer fossil fuel plants
Absolutely. I wouldn’t touch natural gas. We make it. It burns cleanly. It’s cheap.
> It's not revenge
It's a kneejerk response designed to obviate a political problem. Historically these will be perceived as vengeful and undemocratic.
> it's just good policy.
It's good policy if you only consider _one_ outcome. Good policy is made from compromise. Yours explicitly denies that, to the point where I'm very sure there are _better_ policy choices available to us.
> We could pay every person working at a fossil fuel job their full wage to do absolutely nothing until they die and still come out ahead.
I'd like to see your math on this.
> Climate change isn't a joke
Then shipping manufactured items from China should be a huge concern. If you're not making the replacement equipment in the USA for the USA then you are just ignorantly displacing the problem. To the point where this all begins to look like a modern colonial strategy solving local problems at the expense of global outcomes.
> these will be perceived as vengeful and undemocratic
They're vengeful. I don't think they're undemocratic.
> Good policy is made from compromise
Not always. Sometimes there is a correct answer. For energy costs and political stability, continuing to subsidise coal has turned into a corrupt and expensive mistake.
> I don't think they're undemocratic.
Fair; however, you do share this country with people who do not explicitly agree with all your decisions. Which is why I flagged this as a /perception/. Those still have actual consequences whether you agree with them or not.
> For energy costs and political stability, there seems to be only one here.
You're ignoring national security and resistance to natural disasters. There's the part of the argument you want to have; unfortunately, it explicitly touches on several other complicated ones. Ignoring them introduces unnecessary peril to your own stated goals.
If climate change is that important then you should really be seeking to rationalize the common concerns surrounding this approach and working to address them through incorporation into your strategy. There's more than one thing to "get right" here.
> you do share this country with people who do not explicitly agree with all your decisions
That doesn’t make a policy democratic. To the extent there is good criticism of my suggestion, it’s in it being disrespectful to the rule of law.
> If climate change is that important
I never mentioned climate change.
Coal is expensive to burn. It creates particulate emissions that are locally hazardous. And it funds political interests that do shit like shut down an 80% complete wind farm or under-construction solar panel.
I’m arguing for acting decisively to moderate energy costs, safeguard our health and remove an increasingly-toxic special interest from the board.
> don't think escalation and revenge is a good strategy for our country long term
I agree, but if the precedent is set it doesn’t go back in the bag because it skips an administration. Unilaterally disarming doesn’t work.
Ending qualified immunity and letting people be prosecuted for stuff not authorized by the government would be enough.
There's no reason ICE should be protected from the courts for arresting US citizens.
This would still be ex post facto. We need to be able to put guys like Stephen Miller and the DOGE bros in jail based on existing violations.
> no reason ICE should be protected from the courts for arresting US citizens
Nor those in the military executing unlawful orders.
Since when is sensible policy considered revenge?
While in understand where you are coming from, I don't think we should completely destroy coal mines. They should be kept around as a backup.
That said, I would be 100% onboard with a future administration applying a massive tax on the wealthy to fund solar plants, rooftops, and wind energy - 100% paid for by the wealthy who are profiting from this administration at the expense of our lives.
> I don't think we should completely destroy coal mines. They should be kept around as a backup
Totally agree. I’m talking about taking out heavy machinery. Turbines. Elevators. Generators.
I’d also argue for doing this on federal lands, or federally-permitted equipment, first.
[dead]
I'm not sure this tit-for-tat is actually the best approach.
Really just start declassifying everything the administration has done. We only got just the twitter files detailing Trump's administration's interference with Twitter's company but imagine we had that for Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, etc.
I mean if Biden just released the Epstein files in October I bet the November election would've gone differently.
Just for scope, I really really enjoyed seeing this NYT article & photos, on the 16.2 GW Talatan solar install in Qinghai China. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/business/china-solar-tibe...
The 6.2 GW here would have been significant.
From what I can tell by reading the BLM and related documents, this is not canceling the solar farm. That misrepresents the situation.
The project was given preferential treatment by Biden, allowing them to skip environmental review process required for other energy projects on BLM land in Nevada. This is canceling the preferential treatment, forcing them to do the environmental review to the same standard as other energy projects in Nevada, with the costs implied.
Geothermal energy projects in Nevada have been buried in endless environmental reviews by Democrat administrations for decades. It smells a lot like patronage to selectively waive environmental review requirements for preferred energy projects. There may be an "own the libs" aspect to it but that isn't the story.
If the normal environmental review process doesn't serve a real purpose or makes these energy projects infeasibly expensive then we should be reducing and reforming the environmental review process, not letting administrations decide which energy projects are subject to it.
Sounds like a technical reason. It's apparently 7 projects combined and the Biden administration let them file one enviromental impact assessment instead of 7 sepearate ones. That sounds banal to me, so maybe other people could explain why (if) it's important. It makes sense that Biden would cut a lot of red tape for something that's percieved to be good for the enviroment (a bit ironic in this case) but the Trump administration, who is skeptical about the claimed benefits of renewables are not so impressed. I hope some knowledgeable people can expand on it because some technical and economic analysis would be appreciated.
Just for the record i know Trump is corrupt, a felon, impeached etc etc. and it's pointless to attribute any decisions he or his minions make to reasons any normal person would describe as "rational" or anything other then serving his own interests. So please don't bother mentioning it again thank you. There, now i've cut the discussion thread by 75%.
Once again the environmentalists and conservationists have won.
I’m surprised people are up in arms about this here. First, there has been huge protests about the selling, er “leasing”, of BLM land to millionaires. Do they even realize what was happening here?
The headline would be better written as “some rich guy no longer gets to skip normal environmental procedures for permanently occupying public land”.
Public land should remain that way, forever. Stop selling our children’s future for profit, no matter the cause.
> Stop selling our children’s future for profit, no matter the cause.
This sounds quite ironic when juxtaposed with the fact that the cause in question is solar power.
So... fricken... what...? "XYZ" [solar] at the cost of what? Allowing one rich guy to permanently occupy a section of public land? Without ever compensating the public for the immense wealth he'd extract from a public resource? This is basically giving the land to him permanently without ever paying for the billions the land is worth? If were a 99.999% revshare (meaning he keeps 0.001%) and a giant fund for the inevitable environmental cleanup were established I might think differently, but lets not play imagination here.
The previous generations destroyed public lands with dumping, dams, mines, etc in the name of progress or whatever, and the people that extracted the wealth packed their things and left the public with the mess to clean up. These procedures were established to sort of roadblock that, but even then it's still wrong. It's time to learn from the past. Decimating and absolutely destroying public land is something that shouldn't be on the table by alleged environmentalists.
In what way will the solar array destroy the land? Do you feel it's superior to destroy ecosystems with global warming, vs devoting land to clean energy? If so, why, and if not, why do you see the trade-off differently?