An enormous solar power project in the Nevada desert that would have been one of the world’s largest has been canceled, according to the Interior Department.
The reason for the cancellation was not immediately clear. But the project appeared to be the latest casualty of the Trump administration’s efforts to thwart the construction of solar and wind energy projects on millions of acres of public lands, predominantly in the American West.
The project, known as Esmeralda 7, would have comprised a sprawling network of solar panels and batteries across 118,000 acres of federally owned land in the Nevada desert northwest of Las Vegas. It was expected to produce up to 6.2 gigawatts of energy, enough to power nearly two million homes.
The fundamental irrationality of MAGA is here laid bare. These people really seem to believe that solar is only progressing because of "woke," that it is somehow a terrible idea being foisted on America by sinister liberals. But, you know, eco-liberals have been talking up solar power since the 1960s, and from then until about 2010 they had exactly zero impact. Now, power providers can't build solar fast enough, and in fact they are building so much that they face months or even years of delays in getting their facilities hooked up to the grid, because the system can't keep up.
The company I work for is one of the nation's leading providers of services to power generators, include site assessments, environmental review, and permitting. So I see tons of power projects in their very early stages, including many that never get built. In the 25 years I have been doing this work, I have never seen a plan for a coal-fired power plant. Not because of woke, but because solar and wind are so much cheaper.
Trump and company are caught up in a fantasy of manliness. They want steel mills, shipyards, and gigantic coal-fired power plants because that fits their image of themselves as real men building a manly America. If nobody actually needs steel mills or coal-fired power plants, too bad; we're going to build them anyway.
Their nonsensical tariff policy is ravaging actual manufacturing in America, but they don't care, because the things that we really need and are good at making aren't manly enough for them. Trump wants steel and aluminum mills, not hi-tech shops producing precision widgets. He wants to bring back sewing to the old textile belt, and shoe-making to New England. It makes about as much sense as bringing back hand looms.
If anybody tries to tell you that politics doesn't matter, that it is really Wall Street that calls the shots in America, wave this in his face. Trump is making a mockery of Wall Street in pursuit of a bizarre vision of manly working men sweating over blazing furnaces. We will all pay a heavy price.
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Trump and company are caught up in a fantasy of manliness. They want steel mills, shipyards, and gigantic coal-fired power plants because that fits their image of themselves as real men building a manly America. If nobody actually needs steel mills or coal-fired power plants, too bad; we're going to build them anyway.
The silver lining is that they aren't going to actually build them, and never were. They're going to crow about building them, but they're never actually make good on their hollow claims. See also, how Trump spent years talking about building a border wall nobody actually needed, and recall how they built a few test segments and then gave up, because it was only ever a political stunt and people had forgotten and moved on by then.
It has been observed in many places that MAGA essentially only destroys things. They don't ever create anything - not even things we don't want or need, like coal plants.
I would add the observation that this is the CEO mindset of "move fast and break things"; as well as the corporate desire to keep pleasing the 'investors' (in Trump's case both figurative and literal) by telling them what they want to hear, even when reality doesn't match; all wrapped up in the trappings of Trump's fragile ego needing to be bolstered by delusions of strength and machismo.
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