It would be easy enough to just dismiss this as one more favor for the fossil fuel industry (which it clearly was) — after all, it’s still fine to use the millions of acres of federal land for coal mining and oil and gas drilling, each of which does permanent injury. And we graze cows on millions of acres of land, doing deep damage to grasses and soils, even though all that grazing produces less than 2 percent of the country’s beef. Oh, and the same Republican Party tried to sell off millions of acres of federal land to developers in the spring, until an avalanche of public opinion convinced Congress to take a pass.
Still, it’s worth really thinking through Burgum’s point. Because in my experience many much more well-intentioned people — people who truly want a world that runs on clean energy — nonetheless believe that uninhabited lands shouldn’t be used for big solar arrays or multistory wind turbines that can be…
