Feeding your 800 pound gorilla.

What do you do to feed your 800 pound gorilla if it’s energy he wants? The present opinion seems to be “anything you can possibly imagine doing, no matter what the cost”.

If your gorilla is in L.A., you go get it from southeastern California and Arizona by trampling all over the Big Morongo Wildlife Preserve north of Palm Springs, Pioneertown near Yucca Valley, Pipes Canyon Wilderness Preserve and a corner of the San Bernardino National Forest as the L.A. Mayor wants to do as reported in this story in the LA Times.

“Wait”, you say, “you can’t do that”! But it seems that Federal Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman thinks you can.

As pointed out in this story, also in the L.A. Times, “Federal energy regulators Thursday singled out most of Southern California as an area in need of more high-voltage power lines and set in motion a process to make it happen — even if state officials balk.”

“Critics warned that the move could potentially gut local and state authorities’ control of the siting of the transmission lines, among the most controversial issues that state and local agencies address.”

“The action, authorized under a law signed by President Bush in 2005, puts power-short regions of the country “on a path to modernize our constrained and congested electric power infrastructure,” Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said in a statement.” “Under the Energy Department proposal, federal energy regulatory commissioners would have the right to overrule state and local regulators if the latter refuse to issue permits for transmission corridors on designated private lands, an Energy Department spokeswoman said.”

When intelligent beings in outer space (and I’m hoping there are some there because there apparently aren’t any here) look toward the Earth at night, and see what a fantastic picture on this NASA website shows, they must wonder why in the world we want to destroy all of the natural resources we have just to light up the night sky.

They probably also wonder why we don’t put our 800 pound gorilla on a very strict diet.