"Environmentalists" reveal their true colors

Reason Magazine has a good article about environmental groups which are fighting against solar power plants here - http://www.reason.com/news/show/128044.html

Solar electric power costs something like four to five times as much as power from coal plants but even if you want to pay that you have to realize that there are a lot of environmentalists who are going to fight big time against building solar power plants. The biggest problem with solar is that you need a lot of land, a lot of land at least as understood by people who live in cities.

Anyone who has been to the Mojave Desert or Death Valley knows that there are many areas out there where you could put a huge power plant that would never be seen except by the most dedicated hikers. And don't even get me started about the amount of no-name waste land there is in Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. My brother Jas and I drove a twenty three hundred mile circuit out there a few years ago during a week of hiking and sightseeing. There are some very beautiful and interesting areas, but there are also long, long stretches where no one but a crazy prospector in deep love with his burro would be eager to leave the main roads. Even in the national parks there are large areas where you see no one for long periods of time if you walk more than a couple of miles from the main park headquarters.

If environmentalists won't allow solar power plants to be built on waste land what will they allow?

Surprise! There is a yellow water lily blooming in the pond

Louise Venezia's husband gave me three water lily bulbs after he, Louise and I ate the excellent cheese steak he went out and got while we were planting flowers at Mom's and Grandmom's graves down at St. Patrick's cemetary earlier in the Spring. Louise had asked me to come over and help her to do the planting when we sat together at the service for Matty Raimo.

One of the bulbs apparently didn't survive the two moves I had to make of them as water levels in the pond have receeded with the drought, but the other two plants seem reasonably healthy. I didn't expect blooms this year, but there it is. It's one pathetic little flower but it's hopefully a sign that the lillies will survive and spread to take over the pond and displace or at least hold down the algae.

Meanwhile, today I'm agitated about the subject of nuclear waste. The whole controversy over nuclear waste makes me wonder whether we deserve to survive as a species. The Egyptians were able to build pyramids 5,000 years ago that have survived quite well. A couple of pyramids could hold all the nuclear waste we can conceivably generate in the next 1,000 years. And you could tuck a couple of pyramids into Death Valley in spots where only a supernaturally dedicated hiker could reach them, spots that would bother no one. Surround them with a ten foot fence patrolled by marines who have to go into the desert regularly to train anyway and they would be safe from anything short of an invasion by Martians.

As to worrying about primitive peoples breaking into them and burning their fingers in 100,000 years I can't understand the concern about stuff like that unless we're going to start fencing off volcanos and hot springs all over the world so primitive people don't fall into them in the event civilization collapses.

Update - maybe we do have to worry about an invasion by Martians. It turns out that a former astronaut believes NASA is covering up visits by aliens - see below from an Australian site news.com.au

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist.And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us