Answering in one go the comments of yread and rapsey.
The dams are all really old (50's and 60's) with low power output (about 20MW). Maintaining them costs a lot and I suppose that if the owners agreed and partially funded the demolition is that it was cheaper to do it than to maintain the dams.
It means that if you look at the limited scope of the involved parties: "nature, salmons, energy production and maintenance" this is the best path forward and a win-win situation.
Of course we lose "reliable" power production, but because of the limited power production of these old dams, I for once agree with the ability to replace them with other forms of renewable energy + storage.
One of my friends used to work for the state of Oregon as an economist doing analysis related to these dam demolitions.
They are a good thing for the environment, full stop.
The loss of hydro with these smaller damns is not material. Their impact on hundreds of miles of habitat is. And for those who only want to think in terms of material wealth, there's real money in restoring salmon populations.
So please don't do the hackernews reflexive contrarian thing and be all "well look at those idiots don't they see we need every bit of green hydro power that exists?" because the real analysis being doing is years worth of sophisticated measurement and modeling. You haven't somehow outsmarted that with your off the cuff observation.
Edit:
I guess I can mention a bit more without too much risk to my friend's privacy. During the years he was working as a part of this we were on vacation together at one point, and we ended up pairing on some problems he was having getting his R model working with ArcGIS. The task he was working on was modeling the changes in large herbivore populations that would result from various changes to the rivers.
There are tons of these downstream effects that depend on the river. Losing the power generation is just one concern among 100s.
So yeah, they thought very deeply about the implications and tradeoffs here.
I was reading about a dam demolition in Washington a while back and the bit that really helped me wrap my head around it was this:
Salmon are one of the primary pipelines to transfer calories from the ocean inland.
Those calories—by that I mean a shorthand for "nutrition"—naturally get washed from land out to sea by stuff dying in rivers, rainfall, etc. Without some engine that cycles that material back into inland areas, you don't have a functioning cyclic sustainable ecosystem.
Salmon get eaten by bears whose poop feeds plants that are eaten by herbivores. An incredible amount of the natural world in salmon areas depends on this pipeline running. When you stop the salmon, you stop the entire circulatory system.
I’ve been making this case here in BC since the BC Hydro company began pushing hard for a new large dam in Northern BC.
It’s remarkable how well hydro was greenwashed.
People think I’m an idiot when I saw we should generate power another way. They’re incredulous. How could a dam even cause environmental damage? It’s such a limited scope. We have ways of allowing fish to spawn past the dam. No big deal.
Here we have environmentalists who are pro hydro and anti-nuclear. It’s surreal.
The major dam in Northern BC kind of makes sense in the sense that they've already got 2 major dams on that river already, but it poisons everything. It's not just salmon, it's methylmercury accumulation in the fish in all the rivers in the surrounding area, it's high levels of methane release as trees decay for a hundred plus years in anaerobic environments because they didn't clear the forest before flooding the area that's not Williston lake. Blocking of sedimentation makes it so the rest of the river is less actually habitable for spawning fish as well, so double whammy on that front, since not only is the sediment blocked, the water is still flowing, eroding what's left.
I actually thought it made sense for a few years at first, but you’re right. The massive list of significant externalities rapidly makes it seem like it isn’t worth it.
Worth noting too is that the push for more energy was actually generated in large part by resource extraction industry such as fracking, so the megawatts generated would be going towards further generation of high-carbon and otherwise environmentally destructive energy generation.
I’m not kidding myself, I know BC is in a rough spot in terms of meaningful GDP growth and outside of real estate, things like this are going to make a significant impact on the bottom line. I know modern life requires a lot of energy.
It’s so disheartening to see our province race to the bottom constantly. We’ve got opportunities to be a model province, to set an example, invest in our kids and future generations through new industries and cleaner energy generation. We consistently choose not to. We lean on hydro like a crutch and increasingly turn to natural gas as well. Our kids will resent us for it, theirs will too, and the hole we’re digging will take that much longer for them to climb out of.
I think a weird irony about BC is that we’re surrounded by some of the most overtly stunning and beautiful landscapes in the world, but we’re bizarrely content to destroy them and remain ignorant of their ecologies and how critical they are for our collective well-being. You’d think we’d praise the land here for what it has given us, but… No, even with tourism being such a large industry with incredible growth potential, we behave as though nature is an endless faucet of wealth generation.
If you think that's bad, wait until you here about what the Canadian government wants to do with the vast taiga forests.
My (unscientific) observation is that some Canadians get stuck in a frontier mentality, kind of thinking that the resources and resilience of their huge and sparsely populated landmass is inexhaustible. Especially with forestry, they do stuff all the time that would never fly in the US.
Forestry is a disaster here. Especially when you consider how integral those forests are to our water cycle. Deforestation has direct and significant impacts on local and global cycles.
As models become more detailed we only discover more ways this matters. It’s unsettling to see here in western Canada. Knowing we’re doing things like cutting trees to turn into pellet stock to get burned in the UK… and we justify it as “it’s not like those trees were valuable as timber”. No, they were valuable for capturing moisture, encouraging rain, and keeping our watersheds working.
What’s the plan for the taiga?
Another thing I’ve been considering is that we take this position because the bleak reality is that our rate of resource extraction is not scalable, but it’s the only thing that has ever allowed Canada to become relatively wealthy. We are not good at producing things of value. We do it, but not nearly as much as we should.
If we pull back on extraction, we can expect to live poorer lives unless we can participate in the global economy in a way in which we create things of value rather than just mine, deforest, frack, drill, and so on at huge scales.
Oregon hires some cool economists. Josh Lehner, here in Bend is just full of interesting information about the state. The Oregon econ blog is good reading and not technical or anything https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/
I think it's pretty clear from the comments that the hackernewses are simply assigning zero value to the fish. Which ironically aligns them with the big wealthy interests of decades long past: the rich farmers who advocated for building these dams.
>So please don't do the hackernews reflexive contrarian thing and be all "well look at those idiots don't they see we need every bit of green hydro power that exists?" because the real analysis being doing is years worth of sophisticated measurement and modeling. You haven't somehow outsmarted that with your off the cuff observation.
They couldn't produce more energy in a year, since that is limited by the rainfall and dam height.
But with a redesign/upgrade, they could probably produce more power at peak times. That allows the dam to be used like a peaker plant, earning far more per MWh than a coal plant. As more wind and solar is deployed, the difference between the peak and average energy prices will only increase.
> They couldn't produce more energy in a year, since that is limited by the rainfall and dam height.
Design also dictates the minimum water height that can be used to produce power, so a redesign could actually give a wider range of water heights at which power generation is possible.
And turbine efficiency has improved over the years, so you can generate more energy with the same water.
Hydro ramp is very quick, only limited by the delay in mechanical inertia of the turbine and generator rotors. Most dams can be at peak output in ~10 seconds.
With that said, these particular generators can be replaced with renewables and batteries trivially (and the costs are even more reasonable with the recent passing of the inflation reduction act) due to their smallish capacity (~200 acres of land for 20MW solar, small footprint for the storage system).
Because they’re detrimental to the biome in this case. Every evaluation will be different, each with nuance.
EDIT: I think, importantly, that these decisions should require the replacement of generation capacity lost with clean generation and storage as part of the cost benefit analysis.
However, electricity is very low on the utility provided by dams. Reducing flooding and stabilizing the water supply tend to be vastly more valuable in most areas.
Both are 'the future', and both will rather dramatically increase power grid demand.
Luckily, I think 'smart' pricing and demand scheduling will mean that the infrastructure changes will be minimal and gradual despite the massively increased demand - there won't be rolling blackouts or emergencies anytime soon.
At least in WA (OR may be different but as PNW neighbors we are often pretty similar) a lot of heating locally is electric resistance, so heat pumps would actually represent a net decrease in energy use.
The value extracted from the dams was never more than a tiny fraction of just the commercial value of the fishery each eliminated, wholly leaving aside the matter of causing extinctions.
California's system with dams near peaks of the Sierra Nevada range, feeding penstocks to thousands of meters below, is both massively more efficient and causes nowhere near the ecological damage of the river valley dams being torn down.
Those were largely built in the 1920s with pulley-operated (pre-hydraulics) equipment trailered up on abysmally bad roads... that still exist, unimproved.
Pumped hydro is the textbook example of a fast peaker plant, with startup times measured in seconds, as opposed to the minutes of gas and hours of coal plants.
You usually roughly follow the demand curve with hydro, coal and nuclear, fill in the gaps of their reaction time with gas (though preferably keeping the gas plant above their minimum load of ~40% during the day), and fill in the gaps of that mix with pumped hydro.
Now if you want to there's no real reason you can't outfit a dam like a pumped hydro plant instead of the setup of a baseload plant. After all pumped hydro is just a reservoir you refill manually when electricity is cheap.
I do not understand, what is quicker to spin up than a hydro power plant? Surely it's slower to heat up coal to the burning temperature than just opening the tap with water.
The problem is not the tech that is in the hydro-generators but the dams, themselves, silt up. They hold a lot less water and thus, less energy to drive hydro-generators.
To restore a silted up dam, you would have to clean it out, which is a whole nother environmental issue in itself.
I was sardonically calling out that a lot of the energy picture is much more complicated than that.
The battery production process (and PV production process) is quite ecologically intensive, and large portions of the reduction in prices we've seen has been by manufacturing in places that don't exactly have high standards for these things.
> Nuclear power plants require a connection to the grid to stay functional, as the biggest one in Europe has shown.
Not the case for all Nuclear, just really old nuclear. All the ones in Canada (CANDU reactors) have the rods suspended by electromagnets, if the station stops producing power, they drop into the reactor, ending criticality. They also use unenriched uranium (or plutonium or thorium).
To operate yes... but to keep safe when the grid goes out? Only NPPs require a permanent grid connection to not blow up. That is the key issue with the Zaporizhzhia NPP - it has been shut down for months, but still the rods need to be cooled, and it's a massive logistical challenge and an absurd amount of risk involved in keeping the grid connection alive and the backup generators supplied with diesel fuel.
> Only NPPs require a permanent grid connection to not blow up.
This is untrue, and in the next sentence you contradict this statement when you mention the backup to the power grid: diesel generators which are substantially more portable, and less powerful than an entire energy grid.
keep in mind that this is also an area that's been facing more severe drought more regularly, so the dam isn't going to be an eternally reliable source either
For the purposes of keeping water, it wouldn’t be that useful.
The Klamath is far from major population centers, and is not currently part of any long-distance water transfer. (It’s been proposed but has actually been opposed by not only the local fisheries industry but by California.)
Also I think the grandparent is talking more about power generation; there needs to be a baseline level of water to generate power, and they already don’t generate a whole lot. Holding back water also means it isn’t getting used for power generation.
Dams can release water downstream as needed. Without them, water would just drain out to sea/ocean in the wet season, and in the dry season would be completely gone. Without dams, American southwest literally wouldn’t exist.
Yeah the part you're missing is that the area that controls the dam often wants to keep as much water as possible during times of drought, so there's often a local power struggle... this very dam has faced similar control debates.
Without a dam, during times of drought, the downstream party does not have water either. It is the very presence of the dam that enables considerations of this sort. Without it, the water just drains to the ocean quickly, and neither upstream nor downstream gets any water during dry season.
How bad is a gas turbine? The biggest dam produced 113TWh [1]. Assuming half of that was peak load that needs to be replaced by a gas turbine running (and ignoring the other half), that will produce 35.000t CO2e per year [2].
If 1kg of salmon swims upstream how much CO2 does it sink/add to natural process? Wouldn't it not happen in another river? Or the ocean? Let's say it's 10kg (ie. 10:1). Will 3.500 t/year more of salmon swim upstream Klamath river?
There used to be a lot more salmon in rivers. There also used to be a lot more salmon in the sea. Are there a lot that don't have anywhere to go? Salmons are said to return to their birth place. I think it's fair to say no salmons alive were born in the upper Klamath river as it's been dammed for the past 70 years. Will they go there if they haven't been born there?
Climate change is also affecting salmons with NOAA at some point made a prediction there won't be more salmon runs by 2100, due to warmer streams and acidification [3].
Or did the company running the dams just saw them as uneconomical and it was happy that the state will pay part of the demolition costs to the tune of 250M$ (out of 450M total) [4]?
Salmon have a 4 year life-cycle, so definitely none have been born in the upper Klamath. Doesn't matter if they'll go there, they'll stock the upper Klamath with fry, and in 4 years you'll have returnees.
The company is Berkshire Hathaway by the way, and the main reason that they saw them as uneconomical is that the state has introduced legislation that they have to provide by-passes for the fish, and it would have cost more to retro-fit that to demo them.
None of these dams ever produced more than the tiniest fraction of even just the commercial value of the fisheries they destroyed. They totally didn't care.
Hydro _can_ be reliable. But out in the drought-prone west it has not been especially so. California generated 33GWh from large hydro in 2019 (14.6% of total production) vs. 15Gwh (7.5%) of total production in 2021. 2022 will likely be worse.
Hoover dam kind of gets hit twice; not only is there less water moving through the system, but they've let the water levels drop to the point where the energy they could get by running, say, three gallons of water through the system now requires them to use four gallons because the altitude difference is less. (I don't know what the exact numbers are.)
Not sure if NYS generates 70% of its electricity from hydro, but is possible that 70% of the electricity that NYS consumes comes from hydro. I believe that NYS imports a lot of electricity from Canada where it is generated from hydro.
I'm assuming in this context OP made a reference to how solar + wind + battery is often seen as unreliable (intermittent). So by opposition hydro would be reliable.
but describing renewables like wind and solar is missing the whole picture.
Now I might be completely off track and putting words in the mouth of OP without any proof. Just a hunch.
I put the quotes there because at least in Europe, during peak summer time and now during the winter, we cannot reliably use the dams because of the lack of water.
The dams are not anymore as "reliable" as they used to be, not because of the construction, but because of the global evolution of the environment.
>So reliable that New York State generates approximately 70% of its electricity from hydro.
Which, it's worth noting, is also the proportion Canada's national electricity production happens to be. And of that remaining fraction, half is nuclear.
Canada has very favorable geography for hydroelectric generation to the point where they're synonyms (people will sometimes call it "the hydro" here). Having vast quantities of unproductive land on what's functionally bedrock is still sometimes useful.
I was driving through the town called Klamath Falls and asked local where are the falls. She said "I've been living here for 30 years, there are no falls". I now wonder if there were no falls anymore due to the dams.
Just moved to klamath falls. 4k feet elevation, in a frozen desert with a massive lake. On the border of California.
This is an odd town in every way. I learned this from an older local today. So grain of salt.
Apparently. Klamath was a huge lumber town, and rivaled San Francisco for who would be the larger city...hahah.
But old boys not only shut down i5 going through, but kept a strangle hold on all activities in town for a century.
The unfunny joke I was told. "Klamath Falls will become a decent town when the last 12 old boys die.".
Grain of salt here. Also the spotted owl was a bunch of Eastern Lumber companies funding hippies to shut down western lumber companies. And if you wore a tye dye shirt in town in the 80's. That was a stabbin.
The salmon populations has been dropping for a century and have reached critical levels in the last few decades. This is not a recent phenomemon. There are many causes and they are understood quite well: dams block spawning habitat, water temperature increases, food web collapse, overfishing, habitat destruction, and algae blooms from pollution are all extensively documented in the literature. Where do you get the idea that scientists are flummoxed by this?
How much are each of those contributing? They don't know. They can't make any predictions about what effect changes will have. The link between temperature and fish numbers didn't pan out a few years ago here in the PNW when water temperatures were higher but we had a boom year in salmon numbers.
If it's really serious let's get the gill nets out of the rivers and let the numbers rebound. But that's never on the table; just taxpayer's billions for destruction of carbon-free electricity.
Yes and not. Most of it is cultured salmon. Cultured and wild are linked so in part we could say that "there is less wild salmon because people eat more domestic salmon". Is complicated.
I'm not knowledgeable in Pacific Salmon, but this is a phenomena seen in lots of species, and has a fairly basic biological explanation. A species can be exposed to individual threats that they can still cope with and adapt to, resulting in little immediate decline. But as more of these threats accumulate, eventually the sum of the whole overwhelms the species, and can lead to a sudden drop.
A steep drop can follow a more gradual decline, as well, due to loss of genetic diversity in the population making the population less able to adapt to another unrelated threat. Check out the Extinction Vortex.
The reason why is systemic pressure, as mentioned below, but the primary determinant right now seems to be raised river temperature which is the result of a number of factors, including regional warming and dams, and also results in increased toxins.
One of the only practical ways to decrease river temperatures is to allow the river to be larger, and to flow — that is accomplished by removing the dams.
Don't you mean allow the river to be smaller (i.e. flow faster and have less width and therefore less exposed surface area)?
I wonder what sort of options there are for shading a river? Floating solar panels are used in some places, and have the advantage that it's relatively easy to rotate a whole floating structure to face the sun rather than having to mount every single panel on a heliostat.
More houseboats would be a possibility, but the number required to make any noticeable difference would effectively turn a river into a city, which could have other negative side effects.
Setting up floating barriers and growing azolla or some other water-covering crop might be an interesting option. Not sure how much that would affect temperature, though; it might even cause more heating as the dark leaves convert more light to heat than open water. Also the water might move too fast or be too turbulent to be able to grow water plants. Or if successful, it might cause more water to be lost by evaporation.
(In a lot of cases, removing dams might be the best option, but some dams like Bonneville or Hoover are producing substantial amounts of energy and it would be pretty hard to do without them.)
If a river is smaller then it thermally approaches the surface soil temperature and is more subject to small changes in topology.
If it is larger more of it has more thermal isolation from not only the sun but also the ground. Since most water comes from elevation or “cool mountain streams” or melt, this is a factor, along with the time to get to the sea, because a larger river can carve and maintain a more direct route. It can also be deeper, so more of it is shaded from the sun by the materials it carries.
Deliberately shading it might be an option but a living river is also dependent on photosynthesis so…
2020 article about this dam removal project makes it sound more like a financial burden removal rather than restoring salmon habitat. The environmental impact is just the emotional baggage being used to get the voters to foot the bill for the project.
"The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission must approve the deal. If accepted, it would allow PacifiCorp and Berkshire Hathaway to walk away from aging dams that are more of an albatross than a profit-generator, while addressing regulators’ concerns."
The calculus doesn’t stop at the maintenance costs, though I agree that altruism isn’t the goal. Salmon are big business. The positive effects of helping build the population has a (pardon the pun) downstream benefit, economically.
I don’t think people who are familiar with the PNW have an understanding on how these issues have real impact day to day. The fishing has gotten worse and the attempts to help the salmon populations, like salmon ladders, is a tiny boost, if at all. And everything has a cost, including all of that infrastructure.
Put simply: The dams cost too much, provide too little, and the fish are more valuable.
This is a slam dunk no-brainer for everyone involved.
If they generated a meaningful amount of power things would be different, but they’re not even a drop in the bucket at this point.
I don't understand how it makes sense to make these decisions one-sided. I have no opinion if demolition is right or not, but should it not make sense to also in the same bill fund a project to replace the lost power? Same goes for the Diablo canyon power plant and those plans for phasing it out.
The short answer to your question is that energy supply in the U.S. is not centrally managed by the government. The U.S. energy grid exists as the sum of voluntary private efforts to generate power to make money.
The government--actually governments, since there are autonomous local, state, and federal layers in the U.S.--do play an important role in regulating and coordinating the system. But most power generation is not owned or funded by the government, and fundamentally it is not the government's responsibility to fund new generation.
If there is a forecasted shortfall in energy, that will be expressed in prices going up, which will attract investment in new generating capacity.
So, we don't need every bit of existing generation to stay online. Power plants are idled and decommissioned every year, as more efficient (and therefore less expensive) new power plants come online and soak up the demand. Hydro power plants are not immune from this.
Each decision to build new generating capacity, or take old generating capacity offline, is made on its own merits, in the context of what people know at that moment. It might seem frighteningly disorganized at first, but in the long run it is the best way to do things because of the flexibility built into the system.
As another comment said, this dam has been producing power on the scale of a single modern wind turbine. Its power generation is barely worth mentioning.
But you can place a lot more wind farms (at higher total capacity) than hydro, which is dependent on environment.
I don't understand the anti-wind sentiment in this thread. Yeah it's not ideal, but neither is hydro or nuclear. But all of them combined and mixed, they can make up for each other's shortfalls.
1. A wind farm is built by a private company in order to make a profit selling cheap electricity. A nuclear plant is built with vast amounts of taxpayers money to sell expensive electricity.
2. Nuclear is not dispatchable. That means you need natural gas turbines, hydro or batteries on your grid to provide it. Something that's glossed over by the nuclear fans.
This is not an intrinsic limitation. Naval nuclear reactors can power up to meet demand very rapidly. Civilian nuclear reactors aren't built like this for various reasons, including gas turbines just being cheaper for this purpose.
Naval nuclear reactors use HEU and are horrifically expensive even compared to civilian ones.
Additionally when your capital and fixed O&M costs are higher than renewables with the same net power + batteries, then the costs of your peaking energy skyrocket even further.
Far better to build less nuclear + storage. And then realise that the generation doesn't need to be nuclear in most places.
10 years? You're being generous here. Flamanville has been under construction since 2007, so at least 15 years for construction itself, and anything from 5-10 years for planning, acquiring land, relocation...
No, the best time is to spend the first mover costs on renewables in the 50s through 70s instead and then never build nuclear (or in the 1910s instead of spending them on coal and oil). The second best time is to build renewables now that those costs have been paid over the last 20 years.
Mjhay is correct. Anti-nuclear activists have successfully managed to use the government to stop nuclear energy construction for decades. It is entirely a political problem, not a technical one.
Anyone interested in dams in the American west should read Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner (1986). This journal article (PNAS,USGS) supports most of the concepts introduced in Cadillac Desert:
(2010) "Reclaiming freshwater sustainability in the Cadillac Desert" Sabo et al.
Purely hydroelectic power dams are something of a special case of the overall dam programs, which were mostly geared towards providing water for large agribusiness concerns (especially high-value crops like fruits, nuts, alfalfa-dairy production, etc.) and for large desert cities (Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc.). The Colorado river is probably the main dam issue, as the ongoing fossil-fueled regional megadrought is pushing those dams towards 'dead pool' status, and there's a rising conflict between cities and agriculture over who will get the water. Recycling water is likely going to be necessary, aka 'toilet-to-tap'.
Here's the FERC decision on the Klamath. The history of the licensing of these dams goes back to the 1950s:
> "The original license order [1954] was for the construction and operation of the Big Bend No. 2 development, also known as the J.C. Boyle development. Later orders incorporated the other project developments into the license... The original license, issued to the California Oregon Power Company, was transferred to Pacific Power and Light Company on June 16, 1961 and then to PacifiCorp on November 23, 1988."
One takeaway is that investor-owned electric utilities have always been nothing but government-subsidized theft from electricity consumers; they're essentially natural monopolies and would be better as state-owned entities (see for example police and fire departments, which are not investor-owned nor subject to rent extractions by billionaires like Buffet and the B-H shareholders).
They frequently suffer from misaligned incentives, with damns mostly being judged by the existence of a fish ladder, not its effectiveness. And while a stronger current helps fish find the way, that's water that's "lost" for the dam operator.
The other problem is the fish need to go downriver too. The dam extracts energy from the water flow and slows down the river - making it difficult for newly hatched salmon to even get to the ocean in the first place.
The dams simply need to be removed, starting with the ones that offer minimal value in other dimensions (electricity, water supply, navigable waters, recreation, etc...) until eventually the vast majority are gone and only a few are left to protect important infrastructure that cannot feasibly be moved.
There's this super over-engineered fully automatic fish elevator to go up a 20m tall weir [1] (pdf and German warning). Interestingly, there is no safe way for the fish to go back down, yet.
Most of the big damns up here in the PNW already have fish ladders. They help but they only partly mitigate the issue.
There's a pretty crazy company developing this system that actually shoots fish up the damn like those pneumatic canisters bank drive throughs use (or used?). I just remember seeing a video about it but don't know anything more.
That's interesting. It shows the struggle of sustainable solutions: Water power vs fish population; wind power vs bird population. Such arguments, however, are distorted by lobbyists of coal, oil and gas. After all, no one is asking how many fish or birds are killed by coal, oil or gas - and it's certainly a lot.
Essentially, water and wind power production must be preferred, but unfortunately it's not always the case. While it might make sense in this concrete example to tear down the old damn, there are so many other renewable projects that fail because of this discussion...
As someone whose lake was reclassified as man made after we were promised that wouldn't happen if a dam was built (because our lake exists with or without their damn dam), whose lake ecosystem has been wrecked by the damn management to keep downward water commitments even though we were promised that wouldn't happen, and to top it off, our water rights stolen so that the Feds could allocate it to other visible 'prestige' and/or court ordered commitments that supersede our water rights and local ecosystem, I have zero trust in Pacific Northwest watershed management.
They may have their 'prestige' projects like this to show the good they are doing, but the damage they are doing to less visible water sheds and their failures to keep to their previous commitments is just more of the same. And again a lot of this isn't about science but about lost court cases to restore certain 'winning' watersheds, meaning this isn't being done in the best manner just in the matter to meet the first winners to get to court. What happens when we all go to court and they can't just reallocate everything to their 'prestige' and first to court judgement projects?
Climate change applies negative pressure to keystone species like salmon. As their numbers dwindle we see die offs of other species of plants and animals.
Ecosystem maintenance is part of Earth's homeostasis, and restoring salmon can have major positive environmental effects (increased nutrients upstream, increased food stocks in the ocean, more really available salmon for fishing, etc.)
Dams like this produce little energy, require dredging and maintenance, pose safety risks if they aren't well maintained.
> Isn't that part of the concern about climate change - wildlife and ecosystem conservation?
It is, but more from the point of view of the idea that the climate changing will affect things everywhere, and we should prevent that, rather than every action we take should improve the lot of a local habitat.
Wildlife and ecosystem conservation can be roughly divided into two areas of interest:
1. Functional - all the complex interactions and feedback loops that make this planet habitable and comfortable for humanity.
2. Entertainment - look at all those beautiful colors, watch all these creatures frolicking (and ignore when they try to brutally slaughter each other).
The climate crisis threatens both, but it makes sense to focus on the first one first. Yes, it's human-centric, but who-else-centric should it be instead? There's hardly a point in preserving some wildlife if we erase ourselves from the universe in the process.
(At least, I haven't heard any convincing argument made by alien conservationists or future intelligent time-traveling beings that would arise on Earth after us.)
What if we screwed up the classification of fingernails versus internal organs and focused on the wrong things? The fact is that Earth is a huge, vastly interconnected ecosystem that is entering a long spiraling crash, due to us, and we aren't smart enough to figure out what is a support beam and what is a weathervane.
If you go far enough into this "what if" thinking, suddenly it's not clear if the ecosystem is collapsing. After all, how would we know? Maybe we screwed up the classification?
I propose that perhaps we do know enough, and the problem is that at social / economic level, we fail to prioritize what needs to be done.
> I propose that perhaps we do know enough, and the problem is that at social / economic level, we fail to prioritize what needs to be done.
We could quibble about the first part (for one, species are disappearing faster than we can study them, so there is really no way to be sure we know fuck all about how things work), but the second part is clear. We aren't prioritizing anything but economic growth. We can't even conscience using less energy, like e.g. the amount of energy (per capita) our parents or grandparents used. Like leaf blowers. FFS, unless you are a lawn care service, most people could get by with raking.
The biggest issue in North America imo is that our cities and build environments are all wrong. Suburbia, oversized homes, big oversized SUVs, no serious transit option - all require massive amounts of energy. And as a pretty hard core libertarian and capitalist, I'd say this situation arose mainly due to government incentives (cheap land via interstate highway system, cheap mortgages and tax credits, etc).
To survive as society, we need lots of trees growing as fast as possible to fixate CO2 from the air and clean our mess. Ok?
Trees need nitrogen to grow, but this conifer forests lack typically nitrogen so the tree's grow is stunted.
In fact this ecosystems work because there is a major and main external source of nitrogen: The Sea
And more precisely, Salmon migration
The majority of the nitrogen stored in this wild areas came from the salmons. How do we know it? Ecology research.
So, protecting salmon (= removing CO2 from the air) is suddenly a very important issue for us and definitely not a caprice, or something to joke about it.
> To survive as society, we need lots of trees growing as fast as possible to fixate CO2 from the air and clean our mess.
Unless you're going to then burry all the wood that won't come close to enough. The mass of carbon in oil and in the air is far too much to make up with tree planting.
Also, society can definitely survive a couple of degrees of heating. Though it might not be that pleasant for many.
Do you mean buried, like the tree roots do? then half of this biomass is yet buried so we don't need to.
"Some help" is better than "no help at all", and we need a lot of help currently so, what If --we try-- at least?. We could buy some very precious time. If all that we need is to eliminate some old dams, this is a solution that we can afford.
> Society can definitely survive a couple of degrees of heating
We will know the answer to this question in a few years.
It's a matter of efficiency. What is the best use of man hours and land?
I suspect planting trees will very rarely be the answer (judging by some back of the envelope calculations), while making low regulation nuclear power plants or researching energy storage mechanisms will often be.
That flooding is actually highly beneficial to the ecosystems
While I don’t see a way it’s going to reduce future flood intensity like regular low intensity fires do, but like regular fire it’s needed for a lot of the ecosystem balance to function as it used to
I highly recommend people read about floods and wetlands, and how we’ve tended to destroy wetlands in order to build things like highways and buildings. It’s incredible how much damage wetlands mitigate, and just as critically, how much water they stop and put back into the water table.
We do want floods, and we want wetlands to absorb them. Where that isn’t possible, engineering ways to absorb the water in small scale and environmentally friendly ways do exist, too.
Yes! The flood dynamics are what create viable salmon habitat. The dams are a double-whammy for salmon - salmon can't access habitat above them, plus dams alter the natural flood regime and destroy habitat below them.
Dams aren't necessary, but yes, it probably was a problem before the dam was built. That's usually why dams are built. But I think it's better to just not build there.
If you can't live somewhere without significant terraforming, you shouldn't be living there. There are unbelievably huge swaths of the country with abundant water and existing infrastructure - look at Buffalo, Pittsburgh etc. Go live there and leave the West alone.
The dams are all really old (50's and 60's) with low power output (about 20MW). Maintaining them costs a lot and I suppose that if the owners agreed and partially funded the demolition is that it was cheaper to do it than to maintain the dams.
It means that if you look at the limited scope of the involved parties: "nature, salmons, energy production and maintenance" this is the best path forward and a win-win situation.
Of course we lose "reliable" power production, but because of the limited power production of these old dams, I for once agree with the ability to replace them with other forms of renewable energy + storage.