![]() Like many conservationists who spend their lives tracking birds and beasts, he wants to see Los Angeles and other cities blanketed with solar panels - on rooftops, warehouses and parking lots - before paving ecosystems for solar and wind. Molvar is no climate obstructionist, at least not in his view. ![]() “They’re adapted for smelling their natural predators, and humans are their predators,” the wildlife biologist says. But as we pull over on the side of Highway 71, Molvar spots a pack of elk in the distance, trotting away from us. We don’t see any sage grouse - they’re nearly as reclusive as Anschutz. Overland Trail Ranch is covered in a delicate sheet of snow from a storm the night before as Molvar leads us on his own tour. “We probably shouldn’t be building utility-scale renewables projects on public lands at all,” Molvar says. “Look at what’s happening with Lake Powell, Lake Mead, all the other surface water sources throughout the West.”Ĭlimate change is “happening in real time, right in front of us,” he says. Then of course you read about it in the paper, practically every day,” he says. The lack of precipitation in the Rockies the last few years, he says, “has been pretty startling.” As his truck jostles on the bumpy road up the hill, he describes the strips of early-May snowpack still coating nearby slopes as the dregs of a poor winter. He told Forbes magazine in 2019 that although he believes heat-trapping carbon dioxide “is a problem,” it’s “not as extreme as some would think.” His team declined my interview requests for this story.īut Miller, who talks with Anschutz most mornings, doesn’t mince words on climate. The 82-year-old conservative mega-donor made his initial fortune drilling for fossil fuels, and he’s rarely spoken publicly about his views on climate change. He leases those lands for cattle grazing, and they’ll be part of his wind farm too. So Anschutz is getting ready to construct a 732-mile power line across Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Nevada, to ship electricity to the Golden State.īecause of the West’s checkerboard land pattern, Anschutz owns only about half of the ranch’s 320,000 acres. ![]() Wyoming’s half-million residents don’t need all that energy. Pads are being cleared for roughly 600 turbines. Not far from the Oracle of Omaha’s clean energy kingdom, the reclusive billionaire Phil Anschutz - who owns the Coachella music festival, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team and L.A.’s Arena - is preparing to build the nation’s largest wind farm.Īfter nearly 15 years of planning, crews are constructing gravel roads. But this part of southern Wyoming - where the Rocky Mountains drop down in elevation, creating a funnel-like effect - is streaked with thick veins of dark blue.įor wind energy developers, that’s the really good stuff: speeds of 20 mph and above.īuffett isn’t the only ultra-wealthy investor looking to cash in. Most of the West is rendered in pale shades of green and light blue, meaning average wind speeds of 10 to 15 mph at best. ![]() To understand why, look at a wind resource map of the United States. ![]()
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