Good News Friday
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Good News Friday
Some nice items to get you through a sizzling spell
So, it’s gonna get hot out there this weekend, even hotter than it already is! Stay inside, keep hydrated, jump in a river if you can. And read some relatively good news from the Land Desk in today’s edition. But first, look at this forecast for Death Valley. The low temp. is 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, my:
Good News Beat
Renewable energy developer DE Shaw plans to begin construction this summer on a major solar power project near the now defunct San Juan Generating Station in San Juan County, New Mexico. It’s another sign that the long-awaited energy transition is sweeping over the Four Corners region at last.
The installation, expected to come online next year, will have a 200-megawatt generation capacity with 100 megawatts of battery storage. That’s one big solar array (and a pretty good-sized battery, too). And it’s only the first phase of what one day will be a 400-megawatt facility that will fill in part of the generation gap left when the San Juan coal plant shut down last year.
Photosol initially proposed the project after the San Juan plant’s retirement was announced. But it and other solar projects in the region were delayed by the pandemic and supply chain constraints, raising fears of inadequate generating capacity after the San Juan plant shut down, and potentially postponing the energy transition. To avoid outages, Public Service Company of New Mexico kept the coal plant running for four months beyond its planned June 2022 retirement date.
DE Shaw, a major investment firm, purchased the project in 2022 and ferried it through land-use approval processes. The array will be on private land northeast of the San Juan plant, with associated power lines crossing BLM and state land before tying into the high-voltage transmission lines radiating out from the coal plant. The construction phase is expected to create hundreds of jobs.
A new taxon of Turonian mosasaurid — that’s a kind of sea-going dinosaur — was found along the border of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. This isn’t really news: The 93.7-million-year-old creature’s remains were discovered back in 2012. But the findings were just published in Cretaceous Research last month.
The bones of the Sarabosaurus dahli were seen emerging from the easily eroded Tropic shale along the southern edge of the Kaiparowits Plateau a few miles from an arm of Lake Powell. The Tropic Shale — a sedimentary layer of mudstone and claystone sandwiched between the Straight Cliffs and Dakota Formations — piled up off the shoreline of the Western Interior Seaway during the Cenomonian and Turonian Ages of the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era. (Or something like that. Geologist friends: Please set me straight!)
Which is to say: A long time ago a big sea covered a good portion of the Interior West. Dinosaurs roamed the swampy, sultry shorelines and plied the salty waters. Mud and clay was deposited along the seabed near the western shore over millions of years, along with the remains of various critters. When the sea receded, the Tropic Shale became a massive graveyard, the final resting place for Nothronychus therizinosaur, Ichthyodectes ctenodon, Cretalamna (a megatooth shark!), Xiphactinus, and at least one Sarabosaurus dahli, which was like a seal, fish, and a lizard all merged into one sea creature, if artists’ renderings are to be believed.
Imagine running into one of those while jet-skiing on Lake Powell.
The Tropic Shale of today is what one might call the building material for badlands. It’s gray, sparse, some might even say dull to look at. And yet it’s rich in fossils — ancient shark teeth are a common find. When then-President Bill Clinton established Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, he considered the paleontological value of the Tropic Shale outcrops and included them within the boundaries. In 2017, the Trump administration shrunk the national monument, removing a good portion of the fossil-rich Tropic Shale — including the area just adjacent to the Sarabosaurus find — from monument protections, thus leaving them exposed to the extractive industries. Biden’s boundary restoration folded the Tropic Shale back into the national monument.
It’s a good thing to keep in mind when considering the scope of the Antiquities Act. Sometimes the landscapes that seem most unremarkable at first glance are the ones most in need of protection.
Alison Harford has a nice write-up on the story behind the new dinosaur find in the Moab Sun News. And you paleo-nerds can read the Cretaceous Research paper here.
Scottsdale, Arizona, is finally banning grass lawns. Well, sort of. New single-family homes constructed after Aug. 15 won’t be allowed to have natural turf — in their front yards. But you wanna plant a field of Kentucky bluegrass in the back? Go for it! Everyone knows the desert and drought end at the front door!
But seriously, this is a good, and absolutely necessary move, even if it is far too little and a bit too late. The problem is that there’s way too much turf already in Scottsdale and most other arid Western cities. If the cities really want to make a difference, they need to get folks to tear out their turf and replace it with xeriscaping.
Way back in 2021, Congress passed the massive Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It took a lot of wrangling — along with some painful compromise — to get there, but in the end the $1.7-trillion bill became law, despite serious opposition from the GOP’s right wing.
At the time, there was a lot of brouhaha. Rep. Lauren Boebert derided it as a “socialist wish list,” while Democrats trumpeted all the jobs it would create. But, as tends to happen, the whole thing sort of fell off the collective radar. The infrastructure funds were being spent on a whole slew of projects, but the public isn’t always aware of where all that money’s going. Now we can easily follow how the Interior Department is spending its share of the cash, thanks to a new interactive map.
As you can see from the screenshot below, a lot of the funded projects are in the West, including in districts represented by folks who voted against the legislation, like Boebert. I’d encourage y’all to check out the map and all the work being done on the ground.
Good News Friday
Thanks for the good news. I needed that.
Sorry to be depressing on a "Good News Friday" but just read a post from Wild Horse Education about one of the BLM's roundups where, as usual, there was at least one death - this one a Palomino stallion known to many of the advocates, who died - "euthanized" - shot, that is - because he had a compound fracture of his hind leg - aggravated by being chased by a helicopter, then "cowboys" on horseback. Theres a video but honestly the picture tells the story - couldnt watch the video.
THIS is what happens during these roundups - so that this government agency can remove Wild (native) Horses in order for more & more domestic livestock to be turned out on public land already devastated by drought AND livestock damage!
Actually there had already been at least one other death - a newborn with colic after being rounded up!
I apologize, Jonathan, but frankly, someone somewhere in "government" needs to remove their collective heads from wherever they have them & DO SOMETHING about this issue. I've written & posted & commented as have many who care about the horses AND other wildlife.