It’s always something with this crowd, isn’t it?
Activists fear a new threat to biodiversity—renewable energy
A small Nevada wildflower named Tiehm’s buckwheat might still be living in obscurity if it had not happened to grow in soil full of lithium. As it is, that could prove its downfall.
Lithium is needed to make the high-powered batteries that are helping the world transition to electric vehicles. Demand is soaring, and mining companies are eager to take it out of the ground at several new sites in Nevada, already home to the only existing lithium mine in the U.S.
But Tiehm’s buckwheat is rarer than lithium. It grows only on approximately 10 acres of land at Rhyolite Ridge in southwestern Nevada—right where one of the new lithium mines is planned.
“One guy on a bulldozer could drive it extinct in one afternoon,” says Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin Director for the Center for Biological Diversity and one of the flower’s biggest advocates.
He and some other conservationists see the flower and the mine as emblematic of a broad and disturbing trend: There is a growing conflict, they say, between efforts to address two environmental crises—a rapidly warming climate on the one hand, and a staggering rise in extinction on the other.
Mining isn’t the only way the renewable energy revolution is affecting landscapes, in the desert and elsewhere. In the past decade, solar- and wind-powered electricity generation has quadrupled in the U.S.— and that’s just the beginning of what experts say we need to do to transition away from fossil fuels and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. By 2030, Nevada plans to get half its electricity from renewable energy, in line with the Biden Administration’s goal to decarbonize the economy completely by 2050.
The result is what some activists describe as a renewable energy land rush putting rare species and untouched desert ecosystems at risk.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. How about we keep the good migrants who just want a better life and to be part of the American dream and deport the eco and climate wackos?
