A tale of Leftists running the Bureau of Land Management, and an "unspoiled view"

Back around 1980 our family company applied for an oil and gas lease roughly nine miles from Interstate-70 in the Utah desert.

The Leftists at the Bureau of Land Management refused to lease it to us.  Their argument was that drivers on the interstate, seeing the mast of a drilling rig nine miles away, would ruin their view of the pristine desert landscape, unspoiled by human activity.

The leftist pencil-necks at the BLM literally argued before the Department of the Interior's court of appeals that the distant rig would spoil the "natural beauty of the scene" and would have a "jarring effect" on drivers--*driving on that totally natural four-lane concrete interstate!*

And to really appreciate how goofy these leftists were, consider that the top of a big land drilling rig is just under 100 feet above grade.  How noticeable is a 100-foot mast nine miles away?  To find out, pace off 40 feet and stick a kitchen match in the ground.  That's the scale.  Got it?

It was my first encounter with the BLM, and if I'd read it as fiction I wouldn't have believed it.  But that's what they argued.

By huge contrast--astonishingly--today the Left has no problem with 20 square miles of solar cells in the formerly pristine, all-natural desert, or forests of wind turbines on formerly pristine mountain ridges, or new transmission lines from those sites to cities.

Amazing how effortlessly the Left ignores their own earlier arguments when they realize those earlier arguments would prevent 'em from achieving their real goal.

Democrat voter: "I don't get it."