"More lies. Are you referring to some fringe far left radicals? Links to back your assertions would have been nice."

Herewith, a few links on the Stone Age left. This list includes protests against even solar, wind and geothermal development.

http://www.shac.net/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/03/state/n100606D59.DTL

http://www.nirs.org/alerts/12-06-2001/1

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Jul-25-Fri-2003/news/21806159.html

http://www.lasvegasnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=8384768&nav=menu102_2_4

http://earth-liberation-front.org/

http://www.peta.org/

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-30730566_ITM

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/06/tech/main566892.shtml

http://www.policeone.com/SWAT/articles/88640-San-Francisco-Cops-Brace-For-Anti-Biotech-Protests/

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-8030307.html

http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2008/082008/08082008/401246

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/10/science/groups-protest-use-of-plutonium-on-galileo.html

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/protests.htm

http://www.organicconsumers.org/biod/milk052104.cfm

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/nuclear

http://www.miottawa.org/healthcomm/health/pdf/Vaccine_Safety_SI_Nov2007.pdf

http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/?q=node/856

http://www.ucan.org/energy/electricity/sunrise_powerlink/court_appeal_expected_fight_stop_sunrise_powerlink

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/business/businessspecial2/24shrike.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/D/Deserts

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/25/windpower

http://www.windaction.org/news/19404

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5265/is_200309/ai_n20417233/

http://www.sciencefaction.com/respages/preview.asp?Trans_No=1005332&VisitedFrom=Search&Pos=30

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/23/us/hawaiian-in-protest-drowns.html

...We're wrong if we run up credit card debt, and we're wrong if we pay down credit card debt. The public tunes out of most econ stories because they know that all news about the economy is bad news.

"Yucca Mountain was never suited to the task of storing nuclear material for 10,000 years, and was too small anyways."

...but fortunately, it doesn't have to be. Nuclear waste can be recycled right now, as it is in France and Japan where are no stable deserts to store it in. But the process is currently rather expensive, and since we can mine our own uranium cheap (Japan has no uranium of its own whatever), it makes economic sense to store American waste for a generation or so until, like all technologies, reprocessing it gets cheaper. Think of Yucca Mountain as a uranium mine of precisely known composition and with the 'ore' in easily accessible barrels located on a railway tunnel running through the middle of the mountain. One day, when we need it, we will be glad to have this mine as a resource.

"That's exactly why pro-business conservatives have always preferred nuclear over solar. Nuclear follows the conventional centralized system. Now that giant centralized solar systems are being proposed that follow the metering model, conservatives are cautiously considering solar. But why wreck the Mojave if it's unnecessary?"

The recent shortage of energy, with its high oil prices, did exactly what market theory predicted it would do: it brought out the creative impulse in Americans. This expressed itself as fanatical promotion of energy-producing ideas right across the spectrum of scale, from big and central to small and personal. I have a friend who, being on the wealthy side and a born tinkerer, installed a tracking solar array in his backyard. He now enjoys a net power bill of zero, drawing grid power at night and selling his excess back to it in the daytime. Fortunately for him, this is Arizona. Had he tried this in California, he would still be arguing with lawyers.

Oilman T Boone Pickens instead massively in wind turbines. Did liberals, as the original promoters of wind, celebrate? Fat chance. They spent last summer blogging about possible ulterior motives, then wrote off "Big Wind" as another corporate ripoff. How typical of liberals to promote distant, impractical energy sources as being "alternative", then turn against their own proposal the moment some big corporation actually starts building one.

Of course power sources are metered. Every energy source, from a solar cell on up, has a cost of production associated with it. Metering allows energy from different sources to be compared, so that investors of all sizes can judge for themselves what to buy. The existence of a big solar plant in the Mojave does nothing to prevent a lone homeowner from installing solar panels on his roof if this proves cheaper. In fact, the big plant provides a vital point of comparison. If individual solar panels can beat a centralized array, the market will assure that every rooftop gets a set of power panels - unless, of course, the local flat-earthers decide to burn down houses that sully their neighborhoods with solar collectors. If liberals are willing to lie about large solar arrays (the shade of collector arrays on flat desert ground don't "wreck" anything, least of all an empty desert) they will gleefully lie about anything an individual can put up.

"So a "desert" is an "empty" space rather than a "unique" and "fragile" "ecosystem" comprised of a diverse range of animals/insects/birds/reptiles operating under phyaical processes (chemical/hydrological/atmospheric etc) unique to that particular locale."

The environmental impact we're talking about here is the shade under an array of solar collectors. Sorry, but any species that can't tolerate that is not a species I have any interest in preserving. Go burn a GM wheatfield or whatever it is you people do.