California is in many ways ground zero for the environmental battles that will be fought in earnest over the next few decades. California has tons of people, major water issues (as in not enough even though we bring in part of a river from another state…), and still somehow has much of the most beautiful land in the country, a slew of national parks and plenty of coastline. It’s nice to see that as aggressive and successful as the Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs are, the Congress-people can be just as passionate about their pet projects and cause both trouble and progress at the same time- ruffling feathers all along the way.

Diane Feinstein (D- CA) introduced a bill to the senate this week that would designate over 1 million acres of desert in California as wildlife and scenic conservation area. Sounds great, right? The issue is that the solar energy people couldn’t use this area for fields of solar panels.

This is destined to be a hot topic issue as the country attempts to figure out how to move from the oil based economy to the renewable energy revolution. How will we select what to use for the solar panels? What is the environmental impact of designating large areas to be covered with solar panels? Will there be a major NIMBY movement to keep solar panels and also windmills for wind energy out of certain areas?

There have already been issues with offshore wind farms along these lines on the East coast as Congress people have moved to keep them away from summer home views, though that situation is different on the ground it has parallels in the battle for how the clean energy we hear so much about will actually happen.

Feinstein is trying to protect the Mojave Desert, an area that is certainly fragile. There is already a large swath of land off I-10 in the area that has a massive field of windmills and it is, I must say, an imposing thing to behold. When driving through it I always heard Pink Floyd music playing, Welcome to the Machine, though that song, of course, refers to something much more sinister.

I love this bill because I lived in the deserts of southern California for years. They are exquisitely beautiful and dramatically unaffected by the chaos that is L.A. just to the west. Anything that can be done to keep them that way is good by me.

What I love is that Feinstein is pushing the debate that will define how we put the ambitious goals of both the U.S. and California into action.

Protecting this land will do much to preserve habitat for Bighorn Sheep and the desert tortise, but it is also envied as ideal renewable energy land by developers like BrightSource and Stirling Energy Systems. Stirling Energy Systems already canceled a project because of what Senator Feinstein is doing, their spokesperson Janette Coates: "We wanted to be respectful of what she's doing and it didn't make sense for us to develop that project further."

It’s refreshing to hear the word respect dropped in an energy debate. But how long will the debate be respectful? I hope for the whole time.

Photo Credit: steveberardi (via Flickr under CCL)