Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! A classic holiday song, and one of my favorite sayings being a longtime winter outdoor enthusiast! Pray for snow—another excellent saying! We all know how important snow is to all winter enthusiasts. To everyone, really. Snow is water, water is life. Our winters here in the Wood River Valley have been getting shorter and shorter every year. Not just here but all over the Northern Hemisphere. There’s a great article in Scientific American about this (scientificamerican.com/article/love-snow-heres-how-its-changing/).
Last week I participated in a Zoom meeting with the Sierra Club Idaho branch. We discussed the goal of Idaho becoming 100 percent clean energy by 2035. Achieving this goal would provide Idaho with various and numerous amounts of jobs in the clean energy industry. It would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we are emitting into the atmosphere, thus reducing global warming, prolonging our amazing winters, providing clean air and water in our state, more moisture reducing the threat of more catastrophic wildfires—the list is long and very beneficial. Please get involved however you can to help Idaho achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2035. There are many ways to get involved and wouldn’t it be really great to have the bragging rights to say that we were the first state in the U.S.A. to achieve this goal! A good grassroots source to get involved is haileycac.org. Thanks for listening.
Sam Parker
Hailey
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(8) comments
sierra club and electricity? soooo more dams on our rivers to make enough electricity for your silly little cars and salmon runs being wiped to extinction---how does the sierra club explain that ? solar panels on the roof---get serious. the sierra club is a sham and has been since its granola eating inception.
Strive for '35 won't raise building costs over a very short period of time. The long term cost - to our tourist industry as well as food, schools, health and livelihoods - are at stake when considering continuing down the path of destruction caused by climate change. Cutting our carbon emissions at the source is our only answer and we have the capabilities to do that today. All electricity provided to our valley could be produced by that doable change in our energy production.
Not true. There is no way to provide “all electricity provided to our valley” using alternative fuels.
'Strive for '35 won't raise building costs over a very short period of time.' So then, it will raise costs over a long period of time? Is that what you were trying to convey, without really trying to convey?
Sam, what 'clean energy' options are you advocating for here in the WRV? Be specific, and where. Solar? Where? Are you going to go brush the snow off the acres of solar panels in the winter? Batteries? Where will you place them? Where do the materials come from for batteries? Mining. Is the mining for batteries acceptable if it is just 'away from here'? Oh, I think there are possibilities - I know there are - but we have yet to see downside effects of this 'green' energy push. Landfill of outdated solar panels, wind turbine blades, used batteries. Closed mines leaching toxic water. Think ahead.
The strive for 35 initiative is a terrible idea. It will create huge costs that will impact affordable housing alternatives.
The only way you are getting true affordable housing is a government subsidized project. And that will end up costing more than a private built project, so we all lose in the end with that.
And we all loose with the strive for 35 because it will increase all building costs substantially.
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