Anti-growth environmentalists have piled up scores of small victories by executing their remarkably simple playbook: complain, obstruct, delay, sue. This game plan cost Nevada taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and untold hours of lost productivity by dragging out the widening of U.S. Highway 95. Now the greens have set their sights on another project of immense importance to the Las Vegas economy: the planned Ivanpah Valley airport.

McCarran International Airport, which already handles more than 44 million passengers each year, will run out of expansion options around 2011. By that time, the valley's population will top 2 million, and about $20 billion worth of planned resort construction and renovation will have added nearly 20,000 hotel rooms to the Strip. Demand for air travel to and from Las Vegas is going nowhere but up in the decades ahead.

County and federal officials have anticipated McCarran reaching its capacity of 53 million passengers. Over the past several years, they've been laying the groundwork for a new major airport in the Ivanpah Valley, about 40 miles south of the Strip on the east side of Interstate 15, between the Jean and Primm exits. That planning includes a five-year environmental impact study.

The soonest the new airport's initial facilities could open is 2017, meaning McCarran will be operating at capacity, bursting at the gates for at least six years. Any delays in the approval of the Ivanpah Valley airport will prove costly to Nevada's tourist economy.

Enter the greens. With the initial public comment period for a draft environmental impact statement set to close Nov. 6, the National Parks Conservation Association dropped a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration and the federal Bureau of Land Management on Oct. 31 demanding a 45-day extension. The environmentalist organization said the extension was warranted because the federal government didn't schedule costly "scoping" meetings (which generally require eight to 10 highly paid federal scientists and bureaucrats to spend an evening collecting comments from even fewer interested constituents) across the state line in California.

The Ivanpah Valley airport site is about 10 miles north of the edge of the Mojave National Preserve. The conservation association is worried that air traffic might be seen and heard from the northernmost part of the preserve, which extends from the California state line south to Interstate 40.

The idea that someone standing on the edge of a preserve is entitled to the same, silent bliss that exists in the center of a 1.6 million-acre preserve is frivolous, to say the least. But that's their claim for today. By law, there will be other public comment periods before the environmental impact statement is finished. Which means environmentalists will find new reasons to oppose it in the years ahead. If they can't stop the airport project, they'll at the very least try to delay it. The letter from the National Parks Conservation Association is merely the first volley.

That's bad news for Nevada. County, state and federal officials must do everything within their power to keep the new airport on schedule.