I don‘t know how to think about the other comments concentrating more about coal vs hydroelectric but I went to the grant canyon with my family just this summer (I‘m from Europe) and it is not just a hole in the ground. My kids did the Junior Ranger badges for the south rim and one learns a lot about the ecosystem throughout the canyon. But maybe I‘m indoctrinated now…
I know a similar plan existed for Yosemite which sounds even more crazy to me.
I think the human behavior to put its need above all other is the problem. Not withstanding the fact that we understand little about the consequences of these kind of changes.
Do you know about Hetch Hetchy? It's a valley near Yosemite that John Muir described as being equally beautiful. They flooded it to create a water supply for San Francisco.
Here's a page about towns that have been permanently flooded in the US. Elbowoods, ND is pretty messed up. Native people were displaced and lost their good farmland so that people down river would benefit.
There are a ton of dams/reservoirs on the US East Coast (I'm most familiar with New England) that flooded out towns. For better or worse, those types of projects would be extremely difficult to do today. See also the interstate highway system.
Everything has an ecosystem. Even deep ocean volcanic vents. We can either build nothing anywhere, or we have to pick and choose.
The Grand Canyon itself is a major tourist attraction and should be left alone but in my opinion the not-quite-as-grand canyon should be higher on the chopping block than yet another chunk of Appalachian hardwood forest. Sand fly and rattlesnake notwithstanding.
Opinion in the US has probably generally turned against dams. A fair number of smaller dams that needed maintenance anyway have been dismantled, a lot of people are probably of the opinion that it's good we didn't go ahead with projects like this one and the Tocks Island Dam, or that some currently-existing big dams like Glen Canyon were maybe bad ideas.
If you take a rafting trip down the Colorado River through Marble Canyon, which would have been flooded had the dam been built, you will pass by a spot where there are a couple holes dug into the side of the canyon. These holes were test holes whose purpose was to determine whether the rock was structurally sound enough to support the dam. It is an eerie feeling to slowly float by them realizing these would have been flooded under hundreds of feet of water had the Army Corps of Engineers been successful. The salvation of Grand Canyon was one of the greatest environmental victories of the 20th century.
In 2001 I took a 5 day cruise on the Yangtze river with the express reason of seeing the Three Gorges region before the dam was completed and everything was submerged. It was (and is) very eerie.
I think you are trying to say that landscape engineering is more harmful to the ecosphere than dismantling a single power plant. I guess that is right in a sense. But you happen to neglect that power generation is a process with a long chain of steps.
Coal for example has to come from somewhere. Take the Garzweiler, Inden or Hambach regions in Germany (FYI, these are coal mining areas). Through coincidence while doing some work for RWE I had the pleasure to get the long run-down on the project basics regarding the renaturalisation of these regions and the projects are on a massive scale, even if they are only a fraction of the size of the Grand Canyon. When they started exploiting the coal in the 1970s they planned very far ahead, including the renaturalisation starting in the 2030s (meaning it is all already approved). Garzweiler and Hambach are situated in one of the most densely populated areas in all of Europe. Since the 1970s whole cities and villages had to be resettled, infrastructure dismantled and rebuild, and over 100 square km of area have basically been turned into a desert. Currently Germany is preparing the first stage [1] of the renaturalisation and it is expected that it will be done around the turn of the next century.
So, yes, dams are a massive intrusion in the ecosphere but let's not kid ourselves into thinking the resources we need to run coal, gas, nuclear or oil power plants just fall from the sky. I wonder why it's OK to wreak such massive havoc on our environment for coal, but not for hydropower.
Atmospheric CO2 is fungible. We can theoretically produce less CO2 today to make up for the excesses of the past. (Not saying this is easy, or that humanity would have any detectable inclination to actually stop producing CO2.)
Destroying the habitat of thousands of species is not fungible. It can never be restored.
Massive amounts of cement would probably have been used to create the dam and in the 1960s, nothing was even close to carbon neutral. Heck, we were still burning leaded fuels in cars at that time.
I love how cement is now used to abandon climate positive projects.
"Oh, let's nkt replace NG or coal or oil with a dam, because cement!"
Note that the same is true of wind farms, tital farms, because these things use massive amounts of cement vs lifetime + power output. EG, cement footings, etc.
Probably more cement is used, per kw produced, with wind farms in ocean.
I wonder, has there been extensive work done, examining life of project, comparing all types of projects, and power output, as well as "how consistent" energy output is? Adding things in like "wind power only vs a dam, means massive amounts of pollution due to battery creation and disposal, and lifetime costs".
Probably not.
And so politicians have reasons to opt out of everything. "Oh, but that's not really green" "Oh but that isn't"
All based upon some dude, smoking a fatty, saying "woha! concrete uses co2 in creation" without any numbers, impact studies, and comparatives.
> All based upon some dude, smoking a fatty, saying "woha! concrete uses co2 in creation" without any numbers, impact studies, and comparatives.
Are you serious? There are multiple university departments that study this sort of thing. The amount of CO2 released by all these various things has been very well calculated. We can definitely go into projects with good numbers to help us compare what the consequences will be.
Yet, where are those solid comparisons? Where is all the data? All I see is people repeating that "dam bad", and ignoring battery, and concrete footing costs of other project types.
So you see, I'm quite serious, because you've not showed me what I asked for. A study comparison, including all factors such as lifetime of project, battery costs(or not), and so on.
Most importantly, that study should compare co2 released by burning coal, compared to dam, wind, solar, etc lifetime.
Imagine if it is 100000 for coal vs 1.1 for dam and 1.06 for windfarm?
If so, no one has any business complaining about a dam's cement! If so, complaining only helps hurt the environment. It helps the deniers, it helps the coal industry, all for naught!
So let's see the numbers, before people go on about dam bad.
You can combine that (and others) with your global GIS map of offshore turbines, cross product against makes, models, developers, other papers on various foundations types and then add in on shore windfarms.
You then end up with a wind farm version of something like, say:
which took some years to put together and is pay to access.
Have large scale resource companies commissioned such integrated overviews with hot link to all the relevant technical reports that have been written on renewable energy?
Yes.
Is it in the public domain?
No.
Infomation want to be free, sure, but there's still a lot of high grade dark data out there.
But with a bit of perseverance you can get a pretty good ballpark on the data you're asking for with some sweat equity.
So still, there is no comparative study. And your link goes to some generic mining sector page.
My point is, I see endless people saying "dams are horrible because of cement carbon!", yet no one has the raw numbers, compared to other green projects, to validate that statement.
People are just twitter spreading, an unjustified, unconfirmed hypothesis!
If you can't be arsed doing the heavy lifting answering your own question then that's on you.
> your link goes to some generic mining sector page.
To an up to date database of every significant mineral resource deposit across the globe backed by Tech Reports (geochem, geophysics, drilling, resource and reserve estimations), company ownership structure, land ownership structures, stock exchange filings, etc. Also includes prospects and ownership and development pipeline.
The equivilants exist for energy (trad fossil fuel exploration) and the renewable sectors (capital investments in tech (wind turbines) and resource pipelines (copper, lithium, etc..))
It's an an example of what you can do if you put your mind to it.
That one was developed here where I live (Western Australia) and onsold to Standard & Poor (the S&P people) when the private backers who wanted it had what they needed and passed it on.
Cement is an interesting one as we can make cement from fly ash left over from coal fired plants; that has a much lower carbon footprint than other cement.
If you can't be arsed doing the heavy lifting answering your own question then that's on you.
You're not paying attention.
I'm saying, without validation, and proof, no one should be saying dams aren't as green as, for example, wind.
You've basically made my point for me, in that, no one has a clue, and everyone is just repeating a random thought someone had, without any comparative study done.
The California coast, perhaps, but much of the coast in North America is actually not that nice, is it? At least in the PNW I don’t believe rich people live on the coast (though I have not actually been there to verify).
California has beaches. Oregon and Washington have coast.
A rich person might have a second/third house in the most beautiful of areas. Typically the coastal towns are depressed economically, and have a lot of confederate flag flying trucks.
there are cities in "flyover country" and there are rural areas on both coasts. The offshore windmill projects sabotaged by wealthy people to keep their pristine coastal views are in places like cape cod, not in cities
And that attitude is why we are in a "death by a thousand cuts" scenario.
Even just the single plant alone is incredibly harmful: Coal power plants are estimated to cause an average of 25 (direct and indirect) deaths per PWh, 33 for brown coal. A 2GW power plant makes 17PWh per yeah, which extrapolates to 432 deaths per year.
Hardly, pollution deaths get lumped into many other statistics but you can work backwards.
It’s the same basic math as figuring out how many cancers were caused by Hiroshima. Individually some people would have gotten cancer either way so you can’t guarantee some specific person died from that exposure, but you can compare populations and find statistically significant differences.
> you can compare populations and find statistically significant differences.
No, you can't. There are far too many variables involved, people confuse correlation with causation, ignore the null hypothesis, and most of all: the people doing these calculations in the first place (on either side) have an axe to grind.
The people doing these studies have access to the same data, access to multiple bomb detonation exposure data, and have a broad background in terms of axes to grind.
The bulk of those involved want to know the true risks and aren't motivated to under or over report.
Discrepencies in results stand out.
Here's one study (third in a series, IIRC) on the two bombs in Japan.
Everyone has an axe to grind. In this case the "axe" is trying to avoid the lung cancer, reduced immune system efficacy, reduced cognitive development of air pollution, as well as the environmental damage (which resulting forest fires escalate) from ever increasing temperatures.
Of all the axes needing grinding, this one should get serviced first.
> ... blah blah imperfect data
Sure, the data is imprecise but we are all very sure that "air pollution == very bad". What's your suggestion, doing nothing and letting the problem grow just because there might be an percentage error margin in the numbers for how badly we are screwed?
Doesn't matter if the real numbers are a quarter or 10 times higher, it's horrible compared to the alternatives regardless - unless you are somehow arguing that solar and wind are unknowingly extremely deadly.
(Nuclear is a trickier discussion - the reason it is seen as safer per Wh than even wind despite the horrible incidents is due to the massive power generated by the few hundred reactors in the world, where installing hundreds of thousands of huge windmills make construction and workplace disasters more common and an insignificant cause of death.)
I actually did find the excess death calculations to be questionable.
The formula for expected deaths I saw used in the media was “the average of the last 5 years of deaths”.
That seems like an incredible oversimplification. Population growth and age demographic trends alone would cause the actual expected deaths to trend upwards over time, and not capturing that would make this formula underestimate expected deaths (and therefore overestimate excess deaths).
I did not see this problem addressed anywhere, did anyone else?
It’s an oversimplification in the media, this is a time series analysis esp. at the macro level. Then you do some fancy math and estimate the counter factual -> the delta between observed and estimated is your excess mortality.
Google has a tool for doing this called CausalImpact (available as an R & Python library if you want to play with a tool that can do this analysis).
That very much depends on the source. Look at our world in data’s formula [1], and you will see it does take into account that 2020 won’t have the same death as 2019, by using a linear model with previous years.
Sure, there might be a sudden and expected increase in population growth (and especially in the 70+ people), but one would have to have to explain how that happened…
niagara falls: “At any given moment the water diverted upstream from the falls, to run the various power plants, is anywhere from 60 to 75%. That’s an average of 1,200,000 gallons (4,542,500 liters) of water per second with only 600,000 gal/sec (2,271,250 liters/sec) left to run over the Horseshoe Falls and a mere 150,000 gal/sec (567,811 liters/sec) for the American Falls. Although it may seem as though the Falls are being deprived of their natural flow, the water that remains to cover the falls is still an impressive sight. Many waterfall enthusiasts agree that reduced flow makes for waterfalls with more “character.””
https://nyfalls.com/niagara-falls/faq-4/#diverted
“The Grand Canyon today is so immense that if you poured all the river water on earth into the Grand Canyon, it would still only be half full. The Grand Canyon is about 1,218.37 acres or 1904 square miles in size.“
There is a great book called The Emerald Mile that touches on some of this history, and other Grand Canyon history, using the story of the fastest traversal as the narrative device. Highly recommend. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803144-the-emerald-mil...
Not every hydroelectric project is zero carbon. Big lakes inside amazon forests (as an example, I'm brazilian) cause a huge carbon footprint due devastation, rotten submerse wood, and also bring uncertains.
Also, those damns were designed to extract water from a fragile environment.
It's probably more accurate to say that most of the zero carbon hydroelectric that can be built already has been (and some of the not so neutral ones as well). That was the conclusion I came away with years ago when I wanted to know more about the topic of both why we weren't building new and why we were breaching old.
So even looking at the average footprint of existing projects will steer you wrong because most new ones will drag us back to the mean, which is pretty bad.
We are doing something fundamentally wrong with sediment management in dams. Practical Engineering talks about how dams cause erosion downstream because the suspension capacity of the water is not occupied with material from upstream, and nature abhors a vacuum.
We need some way to continuously siphon sediment and expel it with the exhaust from the hydro and overflow pipes.
One of the more terrifying things about the destruction of the dam over the Dnipro in Ukraine is thinking about what will be in the clouds of dust that are going to blow off the bottom of that reservoir.
Complete erasure of the role of indigenous peoples in the California ecosystem? He was a racist fuck who wanted First Nations people off their lands to protect it. Lands that were substantially improved by stewardship by those people.
The California ecosystems may be some of the most intensively agrarian lands by putatively nomadic peoples in the world (or at least, the ones we have any documentation on before Europeans destroyed them utterly)
Fuck John Muir. [edit to add] At absolute best he was a pastoralist, which is now a dirty word. At worst he is everything people are claiming and more. He should sit at the same table we've put H P Lovecraft at.
Replying to my own since it's weird to edit at this point.
About 12-14 years ago I was trying to figure out where to donate money for environmental concerns. Sierra Club was one of the first names to come to mind. They have pretty good PR and brand recognition (Green Peace had already painted themselves as ineffectual tantrum-throwers and phone botherers by then).
Even in the early 10's there was already a lot of bad press about John Muir with respect to First Nations and pastoralism. He was a very good man, but he was not a great man, and we don't make a habit of creating role models out of the least problematic person amongst a bunch of drastically problematic people.
But that stuff bothered me enough that I donated money to The Nature Conservancy instead and even put them in my will. They're not saints either, and by 2013 I was donating time, energy and a small quantity of blood to environmental causes instead of paying money for other people to do it. I am still a Legacy Club Member, but they get donations every few years and I donate a few hundred hours of my time to local projects instead. For a few years there, that was almost 10% of my free time.
If John were to walk up to me I wouldn't say 'fuck you' to his face, I'd shake his hand. I would say fuck you to everyone who wanted his autograph. The man was above average. The icon needs to die.
So I don't think the president of Sierra Club denouncing Muir in 2020 is some sort of overnight epiphany. It was feedback from years or decades of lost opportunities for fund raising, because of Muir's tarnished legacy.
All I can find is that he made a few racist remarks as a young man, although it seems like he was less racist than the average white person in America (eg was not a fan of slavery, and he wrote at length about how regardless of the color of your skin we're all alike in the ways that matter)
> Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than birds and squirrels.” As author Kenneth Brower says, “It is time for those of us who know wilderness, and who understand the idea of it, to wrest that idea back from its hijackers, a coterie of academics and historians too clever by half and stuck too long at their desks. We need, first, to reestablish what wilderness isn’t, because it isn’t what they say it is. No wilderness advocate–not Muir or anyone else–ever said wilderness means no people. Seasonal visitation by humans does not disqualify a place as wilderness, nor does subsistence use of it.”
This is the faintest of praise. Even in 2014 when Brower wrote this, this thinking was on the way out (Tending the Wild, 1st edition, October 2013). There were already substantial questions being asked about this sentiment. To think of them as benevolent visitors is still eurocentric thinking. They weren't visitors, to be tolerated. They were stewards, whose ancestors were materially responsible for everything you saw in those woods.
I sound like I'm demonizing Brower, but that's not my thrust. My point is that it's 2023 and their defense, which started as a refutation of a July 2020 article, is still using statements from 2014, which I find damning.
There is even some evidence that these organizations have had covert support from the Kremlin for the purposes of domestically sabotaging US/UK/EU energy production.
At this point it looks like turning the Grand Canyon into the largest reservoir in the western US would've been a smart move. Water is the limiting factor for millions of people and important food sources.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell are already drying out because there's not enough water coming down the Colorado river, I'm not sure how another reservoir between the two would help
People aren’t dying of thirst, or hunger in the American Southwest.
All damming the Grand Canyon would have done is destroyed an amazing natural area, and made it so we didn’t have to worry quite so much about watering our lawns and golf courses in places where they don’t belong.
It just would have brought more people to the region faster. In the end we'd be where we are now, but with bigger stakes if the whole system collapses.
I know a similar plan existed for Yosemite which sounds even more crazy to me.
I think the human behavior to put its need above all other is the problem. Not withstanding the fact that we understand little about the consequences of these kind of changes.