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Americans have succumbed to the myth of dams, argues the author of a new book advocating for their removal.
There are over 91,000 dams in the United States — so many that if you put them all on a map and zoom out, it looks a little like a coverage map for a halfway decent phone network. Most of these dams exist for purposes of flood control and irrigation; a mere 3%, mostly clustered in the West, are used for hydropower. These projects account for over 30% of renewable energy generation in the U.S., which is actually on the smaller side by global standards. Around the world, it’s over 53%.
As the U.S. begins to heave itself toward decarbonization, though, hydropower “pretty much has to be a part” of the solution, many policymakers, scientists, and activists say — particularly because they can run when other sources of renewable energy can’t, like when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. Currently, there is a major push to retrofit non-powered dams to produce electricity.
A contingent of activists, however, say we actually need to go in the opposite direction — and tear down the dams. Writer and filmmaker Steven Hawley argues in his new book Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World (out this week from Patagonia Books, the mission-focused publishing arm of the outdoor apparel company) that Americans have been suckered into believing in the century-old “mythology” of dams.
The reality of hydropower emissions is surprisingly complicated and understudied. Recent research suggests there are huge discrepancies between the carbon footprints of different hydropower plants. Some have negative emissions, as Grist wrote in 2019, but others are little better than fossil fuel sources. It’s all in their location and the way they’re built and operated.
Hawley and I spoke on Wednesday about the drawbacks of dams, the historically corrupt allotment of water in the West, and the future of the environmental movement. A transcription of our conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, is below.
When I was a kid, my family took road trips to Grand Coulee and Hoover dams, where we oohed and ahhed over them as engineering marvels that make life in the West possible. In your book, you call this part of the “gospel” and “mythology” of dams. Can you tell me a little more about the power these stories still hold over us?
In the post-World War II environment, we were sold this story about how building large water control projects in arid desert basins all over the West would make modern civilization possible and even desirable. We embarked on a dam-building frenzy — not only in the flagship projects in the American West but all over the country. I think there was something like 90,000 dams built from 1930 to 1980 in the United States. The idea was that you could exercise a control over nature that would allow us to furnish a rising tide that would lift all boats. That’s proven to not be true. The flood that came as a result of the dams lifted a few people’s boats, but not everyone’s. There are still, for instance, in the migrant worker community, an alarming number of underpaid and poor people.
The second part of the story, particularly with the climate chaos that is facing us in our future, is that dams are a really inefficient and horrible way to store water because we lose so much water through evaporation. Estimates have doubled: It used to be the standard cost of evaporation out of the reservoir behind any dam was 10%. Now they’re saying, okay, maybe it’s closer to 20%. It’s only going to increase with the increase in temperatures. You can’t justify that in an era where water is scarce; losing that much of the volume of a reservoir to make clouds wasn’t the intent of those projects. The intent was to furnish water for people and places that need it and if you’re losing 20% a year, and there are years where there’s low or no precipitation as we’ve seen in the Colorado basin, you’re not going to have a reservoir.
The last part that’s blown up the mythology of dams is that dams are major producers of greenhouse gases. The sixth largest producer of methane on the planet is the world’s reservoirs. And we know that methane in the short term is a much more serious problem than CO2. You can’t have the world’s reservoirs emitting methane on the same level as the country of Germany and tell me that dams are providing clean, green energy or clean, green water storage for places that need it. It’s just not true. The science on that has evolved rather quickly. It’s widely accepted even by the federal agencies, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, that all reservoirs produce methane.
The Elwha River dam removal, pictured here in 2014, is the largest dam removal in U.S. history.John Gussman/'Cracked' (Patagonia Books). Used with permission.
I had a question about that! Prominent environmentalists are calling for a green building boom, stressing that, despite the drawbacks of some renewable technologies, the most important thing is for us to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The Inflation Reduction Act offers a tax credit for the production of electricity from hydropower, and the Energy Department has announced $200 million for the modernization and expansion of hydroelectric power, calling it an important step toward President Biden’s goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035. In your opinion, can dams have a place in the energy transition?
Well, they can but they shouldn’t. We’re still subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, and the fact that these kinds of provisions make their way into energy bills should tell us more about the power of lobbying than it does about any kind of safe or sane or sound policy decisions. We know the science, we know that hydropower is not clean green energy, in addition to the destruction of salmon runs and ecological destruction of habitat.
[Dams] produce methane and we can’t have energy sources that are producing significant quantities of methane. So we should be looking at a serious cost-benefit analysis and ecological environmental analysis of every large dam project and start planning for getting rid of the ones that aren’t penciling out. Is there a variance in the amount of methane that each project produces? I don’t know, I’m not adept enough at the science to say what’s acceptable and what’s not. But some reservoirs — as one of the early researchers in this field pointed out, in terms of a CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas footprint — they’re on par with a large coal-fired plant.
In Cracked, you tell the story of Project 5311, a tribe-led effort to create a virtual power plant — that is, a network of decentralized renewable energy generators, like homeowner’s solar panels, batteries, or even EVs, that pool together to create a flexible electricity grid — as a way to offset and justify removing four Snake River dams. Could this be a model course of action on other rivers?
This is an exciting new frontier in the West for the utility industry. It does a number of things for indigenous communities. It gives them another revenue stream — here in the Pacific Northwest, the main revenue stream for a lot of Indian nations is the casino, and so becoming a player in the energy business diversifies their economy. We’ve seen this happen on the Nez Perce reservation already.
What would be really cool is if we could get key legislators in state houses to start supporting the ambitions of the Nez Perce. They can see, as most of the rest of us can, that we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. If the kind of environment that allowed humans to flourish over the past 200,000 years is going to continue, we’re gonna have to change the way that we do things. And I think Indigenous communities are seeing that they can be a part of that change. In the case of the Nez Perce, they can see that they can have their salmon-bearing rivers back, a key part of not only their economy but their religion and their society as well.
The bathrub ring in Reservoir Powell.Justin Sullivan/'Cracked' (Patagonia Books). Used with permission.
In addition to being part manifesto, part how-to guide, and part travelogue, Cracked is also a history of water usage in the West. But I’m also curious about your history — how did you become a dam buster?
My best friend in high school growing up was a massive fly-fishing nerd. He baptized me into that world and I started fishing and paying attention to what was going on on rivers. The second part of that story is, I had a friend who was kind of a fast talker, and he talked his way into being the editor of a fishing magazine and he called me up and said, “I don’t know the first thing about this subject. I’ll let you freelance all you want to.” And so I took that job and started writing about river issues.
What really sold me on dam removal was, at the time, there was a group of commercial fishermen that were starting to pay really close attention to what was happening in the streams that produce a lot of the fish that they catch. Any salmon species ultimately has to spend some time in freshwater, of course. And [the fishermen] were actually lobbying in state houses and legislatures and in Congress. Some that were out of work, they were actually doing stream restoration and a lot of them found that work really satisfying. And a lot of them learned that the main reason why they were suffering economically is because of dams that were cutting off their supply of fish. And I thought that was a pretty fascinating story. You don’t normally think of commercial fishermen as environmentalists, or at least you didn’t back then. But that’s what sold me, that series of events.
Many people are familiar with the idea that dams disrupt river ecosystems, but you write also that “an aggression against a wild river is ultimately an aggression against people.” I was surprised to learn that historically dams have been pitched to constituents as an equalizer when you argue they mostly benefit people with power.
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a section in the book about how the supposedly egalitarian work of the Central Valley Project in California instead goes to some already very wealthy farmers. What should really raise the ire of a lot of readers who care about clean water and rivers is just the way that the agricultural lobby, particularly in the state of California, has made water “flow uphill toward money.”
There was a deal that the Westlands Water District cut to basically take ownership of $3 billion worth of federal infrastructure and they also had their water rights guaranteed. So in years where the rest of Californians might be worried about, you know, whether they’re gonna have enough water to put a garden out, or even, you know, God forbid, in the future, take a shower. But Westlands will get their water no matter what. And that’s really corrupt. They’re not forced to take part in any kind of cutbacks the way the rest of us are. And that’s wrong.
Hoover Dam.The Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division/'Cracked' (Patagonia Books). Used with permission.
Do you have any parting words for readers who are making up their minds about these complicated trade-offs?
I think we’ve reached a crossroads in the environmental moment with a number of crises — the extinction crisis, the climate change crisis coming out as full bore. It’s a perfectly human response to be overwhelmed by that.
I was impressed with a couple of people that I interviewed who beseech the environmental community to get back to making arguments based on what is beautiful, what is aesthetically pleasing, and what is right for future generations. I think that’s really what the Remove the Dams movement is all about, is putting the environmental movement back on the side of what is — well, as I quoted Martin Litton at the head of one chapter, “don’t ask for what is reasonable, ask for what is right.”
We should be arguing not over what is, but what ought to be.
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When I reached out to climate tech investors on Tuesday to gauge their reaction to the Senate’s proposed overhaul of the clean energy tax credits, I thought I might get a standard dose of can-do investor optimism. Though the proposal from the Senate Finance committee would cut tax credits for wind and solar, it would preserve them for other sources of clean energy, such as geothermal, nuclear, and batteries — areas of significant focus and investment for many climate-focused venture firms.
But the vibe ended up being fairly divided. While many investors expressed cautious optimism about what this latest text could mean for their particular portfolio companies, others worried that by slashing incentives for solar and wind, the bill’s implications for the energy transition at large would be categorically terrible.
“We have investments in nuclear, we have investments in geothermal, we have investments in carbon capture. All of that stuff is probably going to get a boost from this, because so much money is going to be flowing out of quote, unquote, ‘slightly more established’ zero emissions technologies,” Susan Su, a climate tech investor at Toba Capital, told me. “So we’re diversified. But for me, as a human being, and as somebody that cares about climate change and cares about having an abundant energy future, this is very short-sighted.”
Bigger picture aside, the idea that the Senate proposal could lead to more capital for non-solar, non-wind clean energy technologies was shared by other investors, many of whom responded with tentative hope when I asked for their thoughts on the bill.
“The extension of the nuclear and geothermal tax credits compared to the House bill is really important,” Rachel Slaybaugh, a climate tech investor at DCVC, told me. The venture firm has invested in the nuclear fission company Radiant Nuclear, the fusion company Zap Energy, and the geothermal startup Fervo Energy. As for how Slaybaugh has been feeling since the bill’s passage as well as the general sentiment among DCVC’s portfolio companies, she told me that “it's mostly been the relief of like, thank you for at least supporting clean, firm and bringing transferability back.”
Indeed, the proposed bill not only fully preserves tax credits for most forms of zero-emissions power until 2034, but also keeps tax credit transferability on the books. This financing mechanism is essential for renewable energy developers who cannot fully utilize the tax credits themselves, as it allows them to sell credits to other companies for cash. All of this puts nascent clean, firm technologies on far more stable footing than after the House’s version of the bill was released last month.
Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures echoed these sentiments via email when he told me, “the Senate proposal is a meaningful improvement over the House version for clean energy companies. It creates more predictability and a clearer runway for emerging technologies that are not yet fully commercial.” Breakthrough invests in multiple fusion, geothermal, and long-duration energy storage startups.
Amy Duffuor, co-founder and general partner at Azolla Ventures, also acknowledged in an email that it’s “encouraging” that the Senate has “seen the way forward on clean firm baseload power.” However, she issued a warning that the unsettled policy environment is leading to “material risks and uncertainties for start-ups reliant on current tax incentives.”
Solar and wind are by far the most widely deployed and cost-competitive forms of renewable energy. So while they now mainly exist outside the remit of venture firms, there are numerous climate-focused startups that operate downstream of this tech. Think about all the software companies working to optimize load forecasting, implement demand response programs, facilitate power purchase agreements, monitor grid assets, and so much more. By proxy, these startups are now threatened by the Senate’s proposal to phase out the investment and production tax credits for solar and wind projects beginning next year, with a full termination after 2027.
“I think solar and wind will survive. But it's going to be like 80% of the deals don't pencil for a long time,” Ryan Guay, co-founder and president of the software startup Euclid Power, told me. Euclid makes data management and workflow tools for renewable project developers, so if the tax credits for solar and wind go kaput, that will mean less business for them. In the meantime though, Guay expects to be especially busy as developers rush to build projects before their tax credit eligibility expires.
As Guay explained to me, it’s not just the rescission of tax credits that he believes will kill such a large percent of solar and wind projects. It’s the combined impact of those cuts, the bill’s foreign entity of concern rules restricting materials from China, and Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made components. “You’re not giving the industry enough time to actually build that robust domestic supply chain, which I agree needs to happen,” Guay told me. “I’m all for the security of the grid, but our supply chains are already very constrained.”
Many investors also expressed frustration and confusion over why Senate Republicans, and the Trump administration at large, would target incentives for solar and wind — the fastest growing domestic energy sources — while touting an agenda of energy dominance and American leadership. Some even used the president’s own language around energy issues to deride the One Big Beautiful Bill’s treatment of solar and wind as well as its repeal of the electric vehicle tax credits.
“The rollbacks of the IRA weaken the U.S. in key areas like energy dominance and the auto industry, which is rapidly becoming synonymous with the EV industry,” Matt Eggers, a managing director at the climate-tech investment firm Prelude Ventures, wrote to me in an email. “This bill will still ultimately cost us economic growth, jobs, and strategic positioning on the world stage.”
“The only real question is, are we going to double down on the future and on American dynamism?” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, asked in an emailed response. “Or are we going to cling to the past by trying to hold back a future of abundant, clean, and affordable energy?”
Su wanted to focus on the bigger picture too. While the Senate’s proposal gives tax credits for solar and wind a much longer phaseout period than the House’s bill — which would have required projects to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and enter service by 2028 — Su still doesn’t think the Senate’s version is much to celebrate.
“The specific changes that came through in the Senate version are really kind of nibbling at the edges and at the end of the day, this is a huge blow for our emissions trajectory,” Su told me. She’s always been a big believer that there’s still a significant amount of cutting edge innovation in the solar and wind sectors, she told me. For example, Toba is an investor in Swift Solar, a startup developing high-efficiency perovskite solar cells. Nixing tax credits that benefit the solar industry will hit these smaller players especially hard, she told me.
With the Senate now working to finalize the bill, investors agreed that the current proposal is certainly not the worst case scenario. But many did say it was worse than they had — perhaps overly optimistically — been holding out for.
“To me, it's really bad because it now has a major Senate stamp of approval,” Su told me. The Senate usually tempers the more extreme, partisan impulses of the House. Thus, the closer a bill gets to clearing the Senate, the closer it usually is to its final form. Now, it seems, the reconciliation bill is suddenly feeling very real for people.
“At least back between May 22 and [Monday], we didn't know what was going to get amended, so there was still this window of hope that things could change more dramatically." Su said. Now that window is slowly closing, and the picture of what incentives will — and won’t — survive is coming into greater focus.
Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.