Dam the Salmon

[Tigermike 3,053]

Dam the Salmon

Environmentalists can't bring themselves to embrace any sacrifice

By Shikha Dalmia

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. An archive of her work is here. Reason's environmental research and commentary is here.

http://www.reason.org/commentaries/dalmia_20070530.shtml

[DKW 86 7,440]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-0...ills-usat_x.htm

Wind turbines taking toll on birds of prey

By John Ritter, USA TODAY

ALTAMONT PASS, Calif. — The big turbines that stretch for miles along these rolling, grassy hills have churned out clean, renewable electricity for two decades in one of the nation's first big wind-power projects.

But for just as long, massive fiberglass blades on the more than 4,000 windmills have been chopping up tens of thousands of birds that fly into them, including golden eagles , red-tailed hawks, burrowing owls and other raptors.

After years of study but little progress reducing bird kills, environmentalists have sued to force turbine owners to take tough corrective measures. The companies, at risk of federal prosecution, say they see the need to protect birds. "Once we finally realized that this issue was really serious, that we had to solve it to move forward, we got religion," says George Hardie, president of G3 Energy.

The size of the annual body count — conservatively put at 4,700 birds — is unique to this sprawling, 50-square-mile site in the Diablo Mountains between San Francisco and the agricultural Central Valley because it spans an international migratory bird route regulated by the federal government. The low mountains are home to the world's highest density of nesting golden eagles.

Scientists don't know whether the kills reduce overall bird populations but worry that turbines, added to other factors, could tip a species into decline. "They didn't realize it at the time, but it was just a really bad place to build a wind farm," says Grainger Hunt, an ecologist with the Peregrine Fund who has studied eagles at Altamont.

Across the USA — from Cape Cod to the Southern California desert — new wind projects, touted as emission-free options to oil- and gas-fueled power plants, face resistance over wildlife, noise and vistas. The clashes come as wind-energy demand is growing, in part because 17 states have passed laws requiring that some of their future energy — 20% in California by 2010 — come from renewable sources.

Environmental groups, fans in principle of "green" power, are caught in the middle. "We've been really clear all along, we absolutely support wind energy as long as facilities are appropriately sited," says Jeff Miller, Bay Area wildlands coordinator for the Center for Biological Diversity, which took 12 companies to court.

Wind energy is a tiny but fast-growing share of U.S. energy — 0.4%, up from less than 0.1% five years ago. Since November, when Congress reinstated a key tax credit for wind producers, the industry is poised to expand by as much as a third this year, the American Wind Energy Association says.

In 2004, wind generated enough electricity to power 1.6 million households, the association says. Altamont's turbines are the nation's No. 2 producer. Few energy experts think environmental concerns will discourage wind development long-term because the tradeoff is too appealing.

"When you opt for wind turbines, you don't opt for pollution that harms children and crops from fossil-fuel power plants," says Dan Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

But windmills — derisively dubbed by some "toilet brushes in the sky" — draw fire when they're planned in areas prized for their pristine landscapes:

• Cape Cod groups are fighting what they call visual pollution from 130 turbines, each taller than the Statue of Liberty, sought for Nantucket Sound. Fishermen fear loss of prime fishing grounds from the USA's first offshore project.

• Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., asked the Government Accountability Office to study the effects more windmills would have in the Appalachians. Research found that existing turbines killed up to 4,000 bats on Backbone Mountain last year.

• In the Flint Hills of Kansas, the Audubon Society worries that windmills could despoil views in one of America's few remaining stands of native tallgrass prairie and harm habitats of migrating prairie birds.

• Acting Gov. Richard Codey last month ordered a 15-month wind-power moratorium on the New Jersey shore, where the desire to preserve Atlantic views has collided with plans for offshore turbines near Ocean City and other sites.

Altamont Pass bird kills have been known for years, but turbine owners and federal regulators ignored them except to urge more research, says Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity. But a California Energy Commission study in August found bird fatalities much higher than had been thought and laid out steps to limit them.

At the same time, 20-year-old county permits were up for renewal, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to crack down. "Twenty years has just been too long to resolve this problem," says Scott Heard, the agency's chief Northern California enforcement agent.

Fish and Wildlife can prosecute those responsible for kills under federal laws that protect eagles and migratory birds.

The center's lawsuit was withdrawn but filed again in November because the wind companies' bird-protection plan was "not a serious attempt," Miller says. The center is appealing Alameda County's approval of new permits.

The state study's key recommendation would be costly for companies: replace old turbines with fewer, larger-capacity modern ones, relocate them away from favorite bird haunts and build them more than twice as high so blades rotate above the birds' flight paths.

Environmentalists want 3-year permits that can be renewed only if companies show progress. The companies, citing financial pressures, have proposed at least 13-year permits and want their own timetable for installing new turbines.

Alameda County is trying to broker a deal. "We can't put them out of business by telling them to take out all their old turbines," says assistant planning director Steven Buckley.

Turbine owners say Altamont's 4,000-plus windmills are outdated and eventually will be replaced by 1,000 or fewer new ones. G3 Energy, a small Altamont operator, is replacing 180 obsolete turbines with 38 larger ones.

Others are more cautious. FPL Energy, Altamont's biggest operator with 2,000 turbines, wants the study's findings tested. "Certainly the turbine owners hope fewer, taller turbines reduce collisions," says FPL spokesman Steve Stengel. "But there has not been research done to verify that."