Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of rooftops or deserts?
What on earth makes you think you are entitled to deface a desert landscape? Go take a look at the 395 corridor and look at what happened to owens valley. What do you think allows people to live in LA? Who the hell is polluting CA and driving 2-3 hours a day in their cars? Same people who destroyed the eastern escarpment. It's amusing listening to so-called "environmentalists" spew out such ignorance.
So it's okay to deface the entire rest of the country, but the desert is sacred? Or is your solution to abandon society, decimate the population, and go back to the caves?
There are good and bad ways to handle this. More pollution is a bad way, more solar is a good way. Nothing is 100% perfect, but continuing down a bad road because a significant improvement doesn't instantly solve all the world's problems, is downright stupid.
No, the people who defaced LA and Defaced the Owens valley now want to deface the Mojave. What is downright stupid is not doing the math on how you connect the dots.
One nit on LA: it was suffering from photochemical smog (I think that's the term) when white men arrived. Local geography and climate + lots of reactive hydrocarbons released by vegetation as a byproduct of photosynthesis.
Reagan wasn't off his rocker when he mentioned the contribution of trees to "pollution", and it's ironic that the easiest way for a lot of cities to meet EPA smog limits (which use an insane measure, not tolerating more than a few days per year of high levels of ozone) would be to cut down a lot of trees.
Heh, any worries the EPA would harass my home town were "solved" by an EF5 tornado in 2011....
Creosote is a form of ground cover, colloquially know as "scrub-brush".
Like many plants, it has active organic chemistry and was one used for medicinal and industrial uses. While creosote has been linked to naturally occuring compounds that "makes smog worse", to equate "chopping down trees" to managing "emissions" is pretty loose logic.
The relationship of man-made pollutants to smog is that the latter are not uniformly benign; local topography weather, and fora combine industrial air-borne pollution more problematic in some areas (LA) than others (eg SF).
In theory, if we paved over LA we could reduce the dust and the creosote and maybe reduce "smog", but again this is not environmentalism, but rather geo-engineering.
What on earth makes you think you are entitled to deface a desert landscape? Go take a look at the 395 corridor and look at what happened to owens valley. What do you think allows people to live in LA? Who the hell is polluting CA and driving 2-3 hours a day in their cars? Same people who destroyed the eastern escarpment. It's amusing listening to so-called "environmentalists" spew out such ignorance.