This area here is one of the areas you might find a Dixie Valley toad.
They like these really thick vegetated areas
in this remote stretch of Nevada desert, about 3 hours from Reno.
Researchers made a surprising discovery, a new species of toad.
And I was like, There's no way this is impossible
because a new toad species north of Mexico hasn't been described in like 50
years. The Dixie Valley toad is about the size
of a credit card, has big bulging eyes, and is believed to have inhabited the
valley since the time of the woolly mammoth.
There's no place on the planet that has a Dixie valley, just this one small
spot. All that time the toad has survived to
be a the heat of underground hot springs.
The hot water allows it to survive through the winter and then burrow and
actually maintain its life cycle. But the tiny toad has a big problem.
The same heat that warms its habitat also makes the area attractive for a
coveted type of renewable energy. We're in Dixie Valley, Nevada.
Behind us, we have a partially constructed geothermal plant.
In 2021, an international energy company received a permit to build a geothermal
power plant next to the toads habitat. Geothermal energy drills deep
underground to the hottest layers of the earth and converts that heat into steam.
The steam then turns turbines which generate electricity.
It's not exactly a new idea. Is this a viable solution?
Geothermal It definitely is. Today, the Biden administration sees
geothermal as a 24 seven renewable energy source to help fight climate
change. With the right investments and
incentives, we can increase the power that we generate from from the heat
beneath our feet. 47 followed by 2052, The Biden
administration has really emphasized geothermal energy as a way to provide
carbon free power to the grid. But in the Dixie Valley, biologists have
raised concerns that the plant could impact the hot springs.
That, in turn could end up threatening the toads.
In 2021, the Bureau of Land Management gave approval for the plant to move
forward. Weeks later, an environmental nonprofit
sued. The nonprofits case was helped in 2022
when the Dixie Valley toad was listed as an endangered species.
The plant sits half built while the government undertakes further
environmental review. There is this kind of clash right now
between clean energy evangelists who want to develop and provide renewable
energy to the grid and local conservation groups like the Center for
Biological Diversity that see this as being a really special place.
We've been pretty clear that, you know, one of the lines we're going to draw is
extinction. The power plant itself has no impact on
the toad whatsoever. We've never had a take of a species, the
renewable energy plant or the threatened toad.
A central issue should a decades old permitting law that has been a bedrock
of American environmentalism be reformed.
Air pollution already is so bad and getting worse so rapidly that some
scientists are predicting that we'll run out of fresh air to breathe in 10 to 35
years. In the 1960s, industrial pollution was
rampant. Images of wildlife drenched in oil
filled the evening news. Rivers were catching on fire, but no big
river. No, that was a clear indication that
environmental protection was becoming more important to Americans than it had
been previously. People stuck the pollution camps.
Welcome. So.
Over the next decade, Congress passed a slew of environmental laws.
In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, or
NEPA, which really the first federal statute adopted to deal with
environmental problems and kicked off what many referred to as the
environmental decade of the 1970s. This is Robert Flaxman, a professor of
environmental law at George Washington University Law School.
He says the law required the government to study the environmental impacts of
proposed actions and then make those findings available to the public.
NEPA was designed to force federal agencies to think about the
environmental consequences of what they were proposing to do before committing
to particular projects. Here's how the National Environmental
Policy Act works. There are three categories of actions
that trigger some kind of NEPA evaluation.
The least comprehensive is a project that is covered by a categorical
exclusion. Those are actions that typically aren't
going to have environmental consequences.
The routine. The vast majority of agency actions up
for review are granted an exclusion, meaning they are cleared to move
forward. But a project that does have the
potential to impact the environment, the agency conducts an environmental
assessment. And the core feature of environmental
assessment is what's called a finding of no significant impact.
We've looked at this. We've studied whether or not this is a
problematic project from the environmental perspective.
We've determined that the answer is no. But if the impact is significant, the
agency must conduct an even more stringent review called an Environmental
impact statement. It's got to really consider all aspects
of the action in the ways in which it might have significant environmental
effects. At each level of analysis.
The lead agency makes the finding available for public comment.
In the past, environmental advocates have used NEPA to slow or kill fossil
fuel projects. But in recent years, renewable energy
has become a target to permit a geothermal facility today on federal
lands. In a best case scenario, it takes about
four years. Which brings us back to the Dixie
Valley. As you may have guessed, the geothermal
plant did not receive a categorical exclusion.
It required a more thorough environmental assessment.
In 2021, the Bureau of Land Management had an environmental assessment, and it
found no significant impact on the toad species, which then allowed construction
of the plant to begin. But here's where things got wonky.
In 2022, a separate agency came in with a different finding that a geothermal
plant could affect the 12 species and a list of the toad under the Endangered
Species Act. The plant's developer agreed to halt
construction pending further environmental review.
That project, we spent about six years on the permitting of the power plant
where we could have been looking at all of these issues in Washington.
A movement to speed the development of clean energy projects is gathering
steam, pun intended. And today, in the wake of a climate
crisis, the Biden administration is looking for further ways to speed up the
permitting process in this administration with this president, who
has an incredibly ambitious agenda to address climate change.
These are issues that really require us to take action at the moment.
Brenda mallory heads the Council on Environmental Quality or CQ.
It's an office in the White House that was created under NEPA to give agencies
guidance on how to comply with the law. Mallory says climate change has created
an urgency to reform NEPA while still balancing community interests.
I always feel like you have to be a balance on like what's appropriate.
How do you make the system work faster, but do it in a way that still continues
to protect people? NEPA supporters worry that changing the
law will come at the expense of local environmental concerns.
Like the Dixie Valley Toad. At the center, we support renewable
energy. Not every site is appropriate for
development. If we want to meet the administration's
goals of developing this prolific, fantastic renewable resource, we need to
expedite the permitting process. Meanwhile, in the Dixie Valley, the toad
carries on, as it has done for millennia, unaware of the fight over
which is a greater threat to its existence, the geothermal plant or the
climate crisis. It's being built to solve the.