Burning Man's Climate Reckoning Has Begun

https://news.yahoo.com/burning-man-climate-reckoning-begun-140000244.html

Burners treading through the muck following a heavy downpour at the 
Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, September 2, 2023.

Burning Man, the transient bacchanal that attracts more than 70,000 
partygoers to the remote Nevada desert for eight days every August, prides 
itself on its environmental bona fides. One of the festival’s main 
operational tenets is “leave no trace,” an essentially impossible feat for 
an event of its size. The Burning Man Project, the organization that runs 
the festival, has set a goal of becoming “carbon negative” — removing more 
emissions from the environment than the festival produces — by 2030.

It’s a tall order: The festival generates around 100,000 tons of carbon 
dioxide every year, the equivalent of burning over 100 million pounds of 
coal. A series of disasters at this year’s festival have brought the gap 
between Burning Man’s rhetoric and reality into sharp relief: First, a 
half dozen protesters demanding stronger environmental commitments from 
the organization blocked the festival’s entrance for roughly an hour 
before they were forcibly removed. Days later, torrential rain — the kind 
of event made more likely and extreme by climate change — stranded 
revelers in a dystopian free-for-all. But the greatest irony of all may be 
Burning Man’s less-publicized opposition to renewable energy in its own 
backyard.

A broad consensus exists, of course, on how to slow the climactic changes 
that are beginning to wreak havoc like this: Replace the fossil fuels that 
currently power much of the world with a wide variety of carbon-free 
sources. In fact, the federal government approved one such project, a 
geothermal energy initiative in the Nevada desert a mile outside of 
Gerlach, last year. The exploratory project, funded by an international 
renewable energy company called Ormat Technologies, aims to find out 
whether geothermal — which taps naturally occurring heat under Earth’s 
surface to produce clean energy — is commercially viable in the Nevada 
desert.

But the venture faced immediate pushback from the Burning Man Project, one 
of a group of plaintiffs that sued the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, 
over its approval of up to 19 exploratory geothermal wells in the Black 
Rock National Conservation Area. The Burning Man Project, the lead 
plaintiff in the lawsuit, also worked with residents of the tiny town of 
Gerlach, the hamlet closest to the geothermal development, to appeal the 
BLM’s decision. The wells, the organization said, would “threaten the 
viability” of Burning Man’s various projects in Nevada by potentially 
jeopardizing local hot springs in the area and disrupting the desert 
ecosystem. The plaintiffs argued that BLM had approved the project without 
adequate environmental review and hadn’t sufficiently consulted local 
communities, including the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, in its permitting 
process.

“People travel to Gerlach to experience the solitude of the vast open 
spaces and undeveloped vistas present in the Black Rock Desert,” the 
lawsuit said, “as well as to attend numerous events and to pursue a 
variety of recreation experiences in the undeveloped desert.”

After the lawsuit was filed, the Washoe County Commission in Reno 
ultimately voted 3-2 against the proposed geothermal project, a move that 
baffled clean energy experts and overturned the county’s prior approval of 
the project.

The claim that the region remains relatively undisturbed, given the 
70,000-person party that rolls in every year, rang particularly hollow.

“Some of the hype around Gerlach has been disturbing from a scientific 
point of view,” James Faulds, Nevada’s state geologist, told Grist. “The 
Gerlach area has already been disturbed by man.”

Faulds added that no hot springs in the area besides the ones located 
immediately above the actual geothermal wells would be affected by the 
development, and that the geothermal power plant itself wouldn’t be 
visible from the Burning Man festival. (The Burning Man Project did not 
respond to Grist’s requests for comment.)

Ormat may try to appeal the county’s decision or scrap the project and 
apply to build new geothermal development elsewhere in the state instead. 
“Ormat will continue to press forward with exploration and development of 
its renewable energy projects throughout the State of Nevada to help the 
state and federal government meet their renewable energy goals,” the 
company said in a statement following the county commission’s vote.

A single megawatt of geothermal energy can provide enough power for up to 
1,000 residential homes year-round. That gives it a smaller land-use 
footprint than either wind or solar power, Faulds pointed out.

“Let’s say that power plant is producing 30 megawatts. You could drive by 
that and say, ‘Huh, that’s 30,000 homes,’” Faulds said. “That could be a 
big chunk of homes in a city in Southern California or Northern 
California, wherever the power is being sold to — where a lot of the 
Burning Man folks, of course, come from.”

This article originally appeared in Grist—a nonprofit, independent media 
organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just 
future.



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President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed 
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