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The Trump administration left President Biden a dilemma in the California desert: a plan to remove protections from millions of acres of public lands and open vast areas to solar and wind farms.
Biden’s team could easily block the proposed changes, which were slammed by conservationists as a last-gasp effort by the outgoing administration to support private industry at the expense of wildlife habitat and treasured landscapes.
But even if Trump’s 11th-hour proposal goes nowhere, it offers a preview of the battles that could play out on public lands in California and other Western states as Biden looks to fight climate change by ramping up renewable energy development.
The Trump administration on Wednesday unveiled a substantial rewrite of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a landscape management strategy that balances conservation, renewable energy development and cultural resources across 10.8 million acres of the Southern California desert.
Dropped a week before President Donald Trump leaves office, the move was quickly lambasted by politicians and conservationists, while the renewable industry approached it cautiously, arguing that the plan does need a second look.
Agreed to in 2016, the original plan took eight years to construct and was shaped by more than 16,000 public comments as well as input from dozens of stakeholders including the military, conservation groups, solar companies and state agencies.
Another year, another climate record broken. Globally, 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest year ever recorded. This was all the more remarkable given that cool conditions in the Pacific Ocean – known as La Niña – began to emerge in the second half of the year. The Earth’s mean surface temperature in 2020 was 1.25°C above the global average between 1850 and 1900 – one data point maybe, but part of an unrelenting, upward trend that’s largely driven by greenhouse gases from human activities.
Limiting the average global temperature increase to 1.5°C could help avoid some of the most harmful impacts of climate change. This target will feature prominently at the COP26 discussions, scheduled for Glasgow in November 2021. But whether the world warms by 1.5°C or 4°C, it won’t translate into the same amount of warming for everyone. Previous research with climate models has shown that the Arctic, central Brazil, the Mediterranean basin, and the mainland US could warm by much mo
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