[env-trinity] Wall Street Journal May 30

Wed May 30 13:18:56 PDT 2007

Note that the author has not done much research as Matilija Dam produces
no hydropower. I find it to be a pretty annoying Op Ed but obviously an
argument we need to deal with.

My sound bite (pardon the provincialism-substitute your own examples):
"Due to global warming, we will need to work harder to protect and
restore our natural heritage across America and around the world.  But
we do not plan to dam the Grand Canyon or harness Old faithful in
Yellowstone for its kilowatt hours. And we can still find ways to
undertake important restoration projects, such as restoring Hetch Hetchy
Valley in Yosemite National Park, as we reduce the emissions that cause
global warming.

________________________________

From: env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us
[mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of
Byron Leydecker
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 12:17 PM
To: fotr at mailman.dcn.org; Trinity List
Subject: [env-trinity] Wall Street Journal May 30

Dam the Salmon 

Shikha Dalmia.
Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition).
May 30, 2007. pg. A.19 

Al Gore has been hectoring Americans to pare back their lifestyles to
fight global warming. But if Mr. Gore wants us to rethink our priorities
in the face of this mother of all environmental threats, surely he has
convinced his fellow greens to rethink theirs, right? 

Wrong. If their opposition to the Klamath hydroelectric dams in the
Pacific Northwest is any indication, the greens, it appears, are just as
unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes as a Texas rancher is to
sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the radicalization of the
environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to addressing global
warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of life. 

Once regarded as the symbol of national greatness, hydroelectric dams
have now fallen into disrepute for many legitimate reasons. They are
enormously expensive undertakings that would never have taken off but
for hefty government subsidies. Worse, they typically involve changing
the natural course of rivers, causing painful disruptions for towns and
tribes. 

But tearing down the Klamath dams, the last of which was completed in
1962, will do more harm than good at this stage. These dams provide
cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and California.
Replacing this energy with natural gas -- the cleanest fossil-fuel
source -- would still pump 473,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to the annual
emissions of 102,000 cars. 

Given this alternative, one would think that environmentalists would
form a human shield around the dams to protect them. Instead, they have
been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down because the dams stand in
the way of migrating salmon. Environmentalists don't even let many
states, including California, count hydro as renewable. 

They have rejected all attempts by PacifiCorp, the company that owns the
dams, to take mitigation steps such as installing $350 million fish
ladders to create a salmon pathway. Klamath Riverkeeper, a group that is
part of an environmental alliance headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., has sued
a fish hatchery that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs
-- and PacifiCorp is required to fund -- on grounds that it releases too
many algae and toxic discharges. The hatchery produces at least 25% of
the chinook salmon catch every year. Closing it will cause fish
populations to drop further, making the demolition of the dams even more
likely. 

But the end of the Klamath won't mean the end of the dam saga -- it is
the big prize that environmentalists are coveting to take their antidam
crusade to the next level. "This would represent the largest and most
ambitious dam removal project in the country, if not the world," exults
Steve Rothert of American Rivers. The other dams on the hit list include
the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley that services
San Francisco, Elwha River dam in Washington and the Matilija Dam in
Southern California. 

Large hydro dams supply about 20% of California's power (and 10% of
America's). If they are destroyed, California won't just have to find
some other way to fulfill its energy needs. It will have to do so while
reducing its carbon footprint to meet the ambitious CO2
emission-reduction targets that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set. Mr.
Schwarzenegger has committed the Golden State to cutting greenhouse gas
emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 -- a more stringent requirement
than even in the Kyoto Protocol. 

The effect this might have on California's erratic and overpriced energy
supply has businesses running scared. Mike Naumes, owner of Naumes Inc.,
a fruit packing and processing business, last year moved his juice
concentrate plant from Marysville, Calif., to Washington state and cut
his energy bill in half. With hydropower under attack, he is considering
shrinking his farming operations in the Golden State as well. "We can't
pay exorbitant energy prices and stay competitive with overseas
businesses," he says. 

Bruce Hamilton, Sierra Club's deputy executive director and a longtime
proponent of such a mandate, refuses to even acknowledge that there is
any conflict in closing hydro dams while fighting global warming. All
California needs to do to square these twin objectives, he maintains, is
become more energy efficient while embracing alternative fuels. "We
don't need to accept a Faustian bargain with hydropower to cut
emissions," he says. 

This is easier done in the fantasy world of greens than in the real
world. If cost-effective technologies to boost energy efficiency
actually existed, industry would adopt them automatically, global
warming or not.

As for alternative fuels, they are still far from economically viable.
Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University, has calculated that
wind energy costs 6.64 cents per kWh and biomass 5.95 kWh -- compared to
4.37 cents for clean coal. Robert Bradley Jr., president of the
Institute for Energy Research, puts these costs even higher. "Although
technological advances have lowered alternative fuel prices in recent
years, these fuels still by and large cost twice as much as conventional
fossil fuels," he says. 

But suppose these differentials disappeared. Would the Sierra Club and
its eco-warriors actually embrace the fuels that Mr. Hamilton advocates?
Not if their track record is any indication. Indeed, environmental
groups have a history of opposing just about every energy source. 

Their opposition to nuclear energy is well known. Wind power? Two years
ago the Center for Biological Diversity sued California's Altamont Pass
Wind Farm for obstructing and shredding migrating birds. ("Cuisinarts of
the sky" is what many greens call wind farms.) Solar? Worldwatch
Institute's Christopher Flavin has been decidedly lukewarm about solar
farms because they involve placing acres of mirrors in pristine desert
habitat. The Sierra Club and Wilderness Society once testified before
Congress to keep California's Mojave Desert -- one of the prime solar
sites in the country -- off limits to all development. Geothermal
energy? They are unlikely to get enviro blessings, because some of the
best sites are located on protected federal lands. 

Greens, it seems, always manage to find a problem for every
environmental solution -- and there is deep reason for this.

Since its inception, the American environmental movement has been torn
between "conservationists" seeking to protect nature for man -- and
"preservationists" seeking to protect nature for its own sake. Although
early environmental thinkers such as Aldo Leopold and John Muir were
sympathetic to both themes, Leopold was more in the first camp and Muir
in the second. Leopold regarded wilderness as a form of land use; he
certainly wanted to limit the development of wild areas -- but to
"enlarge the range of individual experience." Muir, on the other hand,
saw wilderness as sacred territory worthy of protection regardless of
human needs. 

With the arrival on the scene of Deep Ecologists from Europe in the
1980s, Muir's mystical preservationist side won the moral high ground.
The emphasis of Deep Ecology on radical species equality made talk about
solving environmental problems for human ends illicit within the
American environmental community. Instead, Arne Naess, the revered
founder of Deep Ecology, explicitly identified human beings as the big
environmental problem. "The flourishing of nonhuman life requires a
decrease in human population," his eight-point platform to save Mother
Earth serenely declared. 

This ideological turn, notes Ramachandra Guha, a left-leaning Indian
commentator and incisive critic of Deep Ecology, has made American
environmentalism irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst for the Third
World, where addressing environmental issues such as soil erosion, water
pollution and deforestation still remains squarely about serving human
needs. By turning wilderness preservation into a moral absolute -- as
opposed to simply another form of land use -- Deep Ecology has justified
wresting crucial resources out of the hands of India's agrarian and
tribal populations. "Specious nonsense about equal rights of all species
cannot hide the plain fact that green imperialists . . . are dangerous,"
Mr. Guha has written. 

Besides hurting the Third World, such radicalism had made the
environmental movement incapable of responding to its own self-
proclaimed challenges. Since nature can't speak for itself, the
admonition to protect nature for nature's sake offers not a guide to
action, but an invitation to inaction. That's because a non-
anthropocentric view that treats nature as non-hierarchical collapses
into incoherence when it becomes necessary to calculate trade-offs or
set priorities between competing environmental goals. 

Thus, even in the face of a supposedly calamitous threat like global
warming, environmentalists can't bring themselves to embrace any
sacrifice -- of salmons or birds or desert or protected wilderness. Its
strategy comes down to pure obstructionism -- on full display in the
Klamath dam controversy. 

Yet, if environmentalists themselves are unwilling to give up anything
for global warming, how can they expect sacrifices from others? If Al
Gore wants to do something, he should first move out of his 6,000
square-foot Nashville mansion and then make a movie titled: "Damn the
salmon." 

---

Ms. Dalmia is a senior analyst with Reason Foundation

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