Biodiversity Is Climate Action Strategy

This park is a documented climate resource

California is in a race against time on climate. We know that. ABF knows that. And we are not here to slow that race down.

But there is a question at the center of the Golden Pacific Powerlink that California has not yet answered honestly: at what point does destroying a functioning natural system in the name of clean energy stop being climate strategy and start being something else?

Because that is what routing this line through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park would require us to accept.

This park is a documented climate resource

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is the most biodiverse state park in California. Its 650,000 acres contain more than 600 native plant species, habitat for the federally endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep, the richest concentration of reptile species in California, one of the most significant Pleistocene fossil records in North America, and more than 4,400 documented archaeological sites. Nearly three-quarters of the Park, more than 480,000 acres, is designated wilderness, representing 85% of all designated state wilderness in California.

It is also a functioning natural system that contributes to California’s climate strategy. Desert ecosystems are often underestimated, but the science increasingly shows that intact desert wilderness, with its deep-rooted plant communities, biological soil crusts, and undisturbed soils, stores carbon in ways that matter. When you fragment or industrialize this landscape, you are not just affecting a park. You are affecting an ecosystem California has committed to protecting as part of its broader conservation and climate goals.

The Park is also an International Dark Sky Park, one of only a handful in California, and a Designated Quiet Conservation Area recognized by Quiet Parks International. The experience of standing in this desert under a sky full of stars, in genuine silence, brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to Borrego Springs each year and sustains the economy of a small, socioeconomically disadvantaged community that has no other economic engine.

The question that hasn’t been asked

SDG&E has described this project as supporting California’s clean energy future. But there is no binding commitment in any project documentation that this line will carry renewable energy. It will carry whatever is connected to it. And the renewable generation this line is designed to serve has not yet been built.

What no one has done is carefully analyze whether the environmental cost of routing this line through Anza-Borrego might offset the climate benefit of the infrastructure being built. That analysis is absent from the record so far. California cannot pursue clean energy goals and conservation goals simultaneously without being willing to ask that question honestly before making irreversible decisions about its most biodiverse and protected landscapes.

What we are fighting to protect

The dark sky bowl. The Tamarisk Grove Campground. The bighorn sheep migration corridor. San Felipe Creek. The Angelina Spring Cultural Preserve. These are not abstractions. They are real places that belong to all of us. See what’s at stake here.

Help us defend what you love

We are approaching the point in this proceeding where ABF’s participation will require legal support. Engaging as a formal party before the CPUC, conducting the kind of technical and evidentiary work that moves a regulatory proceeding, and doing it at the standard the Park deserves requires attorneys with CPUC expertise. That is our next step.

If this park matters to you, if the argument you have read over these past months feels worth defending, please consider making a contribution to ABF’s today. Your gift affords ABF a seat at the table and to fight at the level this landscape deserves.