Today Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) showed tremendous leadership by supporting protection for an important and ecologically fragile area of the California desert. The City of Los Angeles spoke with one voice and rejected buying power from the ecologically damaging Soda Mountain Solar project. Given the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) recent decision to approve the project, this leadership from Los Angeles is well timed and makes a powerful statement.
The Soda Mountain Solar Project is a massive development in an ecologically fragile area less than one mile from the boundary of Mojave National Preserve. The project threatens bighorn sheep populations, desert tortoise habitat, unique natural areas, and the ecological integrity of adjacent wilderness study areas. Environmental groups including the Sierra Club oppose this project, and so does the Bureau of Land Management’s own Desert Advisory Council. Nine retired Interior Department employees, including five former Park Service Superintendents, have spoken out against development at this location. Desert residents have also demonstrated their support for this special area; recently a remarkable coalition of local business owners, hunters, recreationists, residents and environmental groups jointly petitioned the BLM to designate this entire proposed solar site as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, in recognition of its unique ecological value.
Protecting and caring for the environment is a core value for Angelenos. With his Sustainable City pLAn, Mayor Garcetti has established a course of action to make Los Angeles a more sustainable city, including building as much as 1,500 megawatts of local solar by 2025. That is a much better path than environmentally damaging, poorly located projects like Soda Mountain. Sierra Club applauds these efforts.
As former Sierra Club Board President Dave Scott recently wrote in an op-ed, while the United States has made great progress in developing renewable energy projects to fight climate change in the last few years, “we also have learned some painful lessons. Many of the projects on public land have caused unintended damage to lands and wildlife. Habitat has been lost, migration corridors cut off, and wildlife harmed. Soda Mountain is a place where our wisdom is needed and our ability to learn from these harms is being tested. In our climate crisis, we must act quickly and yet we must act with wisdom.”
With today’s act of leadership, Mayor Garcetti and the LADWP helped make it more likely that future generations of Angelenos and others from around the world can enjoy Soda Mountain. We hope other utilities and companies will follow Los Angeles’s lead in saying no to this ecologically destructive project.