What's this? Environmentalists suing the good guys?

There they were last week in San Francisco federal court, lawyers for more than a dozen conservation groups, playing plaintiff to defendants such as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the heads of various Obama-administration federal land-management agencies.

They're bringing action to halt the march of Bush-era "energy corridors" through the American West — New Mexico included. The corridors — 6,000 miles of them and anywhere from half a mile to several miles wide — were part of the 2005 federal energy act.

That year's Congress was in the hands of a corporate-Republican majority that had New Mexico's Pete Domenici in a starring role as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Domenici has since departed — but his successor in the chair, fellow New Mexican Jeff Bingaman, has yet to roll back the worst effects of the law's energy-corridor provisions. Nor have secretaries Salazar and Chu stayed the bureaucracy's hand in their advancement.

We're pretty sure there'll be revision, if not outright repeal, of the Republicans' designs — but the enviros are less so; they're applying the legal version of the 2-by-4 to the side of our new leaders' heads to get their attention.

The energy-corridor idea made at least an ounce of sense: Designated routes for running electricity cables, pipelines and the like could mean less environmental damage than letting energy companies criss-cross the country to suit their profit-maximizing notions.

But as the corridors were being drawn up, the corporate types came up with shortcuts — through three national parks, six national wildlife refuges, seven national monuments and scores of wilderness areas, designated or proposed.

In New Mexico, the corridors could wind up crossing the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge and the Organ Mountain foothills — and nearby in the Four Corners, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument lies in the path of, uh, progress.

As attorney Amy Atwood of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs, notes, "It doesn't make any sense for the agencies to invest all of this time and energy into a network of corridors that must be obsolete very soon if we're going to avoid the worst effects of climate change." Some local leaders in Colorado and New Mexico have pointed out that the federal government ignored citizen concerns expressed during public meetings after the energy act was passed.

And, say the enviro-attorneys, the corridors being designated don't meet one of that law's leading purposes — improving reliability and relieving congestion of the national energy grid.

The corridor plan, of course, clings to the old, wasteful idea of long-lines energy delivery — at a time when enviros and scientists alike are pressing for generation closer to the customers. Much of our country's alternative-energy progress so far has involved wind and solar farms far from where their electricity is needed. With better technology, that could change. Sen. Bingaman should be in the forefront of reform; so should secretaries Chu and Salazar, whose attorneys should hasten to calm conservationists' nerves by settling this latest lawsuit with a timeout on energy corridors.