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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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Elections inspire hyperbole. Every two years, we have “the most important election of our lifetime,” America’s future constantly “hangs in the balance,” and the stakes perennially “couldn’t be higher.”
But this year, some breathlessness does seem appropriate. 2024 marks the first presidential election since the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt, which historians and constitutional scholars have described as the gravest threat to the peaceful transfer of power since the Civil War. No less existentially, tomorrow’s election will also have global consequences. Americans will either elect a leader who continues the build-out of renewable energy and prioritizes a healthy, clean environment, or they will elect a leader whose retrograde embrace of the fossil fuel industry would, in the space of one presidential term, “negate — twice over — all the savings from deploying wind, solar, and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years,” as Carbon Brief writes.
Make no mistake: Picking the next president of the United States is the single most important race of this election. However control of the U.S. House and Senate, which voters will also decide on Tuesday, will either help or hinder the next president’s agenda, whichever candidate takes the office. It’s not a coincidence that a number of those critical races involve candidates whose names will be familiar to the climate and energy world: Senator Jon Tester, a moderate Democrat in Montana who proved crucial in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, dreams of owning an electric tractor, and stands to lose to a Republican who’s vowed to fight the “climate cult”; outgoing Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who helped shape the IRA but will either leave her seat to a Republican who claims not to “be afraid of the weather” or a Democrat who voted for the law that’s brought 18,000 new clean energy jobs to the state; Congressperson Yvette Herrell of New Mexico, who voted against the IRA while at the same time being one of the top recipients in the House of donations from the oil and gas industry. The list goes on and on.
Smaller local elections will be crucial, too. Democrats need a pickup in New York’s 4th Congressional District, just to the north of deep blue New York City, where Republican Representative Anthony D’Esposito is defending his seat with the help of Elon Musk’s super PAC; former Earth sciences teacher Tony Vargas, who believes Nebraska has a “moral obligation” to fight climate change, is attempting to unseat Republican Representative Don Bacon, a climate skeptic; and Montanans will elect their next attorney general, picking between the incumbent who leads the state’s case against the 16 young plaintiffs in Held v. Montana, and Democrat Ben Alke, who has extensive experience in environmental law. As Heatmap has covered, there are also several public utilities commission races, the results of which will have “an outsized influence on the country’s energy mix.”
In many places, climate will be on the ballot even more directly. In South Dakota, the debate over carbon capture and CO2 pipelines is being put in the hands of voters; in Berkeley, California, voters will decide if they want to incentivize the decarbonization of large buildings with a natural gas tax; and Washingtonians will have two different climate-related policies to defend, with repeal initiatives on the ballot thanks to a determined Republican millionaire.
Starting on Tuesday at 6 p.m., Heatmap will update a list of our most anticipated climate-related races — 36 in all — with live results as states and municipalities count the votes. For all the models, polls, and punditry, it’s still impossible to know what will happen on Tuesday; however, it’s no exaggeration to say we can be sure we’ll be living in a different country come January 20, 2025. We can endlessly speculate about how different it will be and what the climate and energy transition will look like in the years ahead. But only tomorrow knows.
Counties that veered from Obama in 2008 to Trump in 2016 are more likely to oppose renewables development.
In Texas, the Oak Run Solar Project would have been a slam dunk.
Developers would install 800 megawatts of solar panels — enough to power 800,000 homes — across nine square miles of unused land. It would devote some of its acreage to new farming practices that incorporate solar panels. And it would sell its electricity cheaply — and profitably — because it was near the state capital and because it could take advantage of a pre-existing onsite connection to the regional power grid.
But Oak Run wasn’t proposed in Texas. It was proposed in Ohio, and that means it has faced enormous opposition. Ohio has some of the country’s strictest restrictions on solar development, and 10 counties have blocked solar development outright.
Although Madison County, where Oak Run was proposed, is not one of them, the blowback to the project cost a local Republican county commissioner his job. Oak Run was eventually approved by the state’s power siting board earlier this year, but its opponents are now appealing that decision in the state’s Supreme Court.
Madison County, Ohio, also illustrates the political transformation that has revolutionized the upper Midwest. The predominantly rural county near the state’s capital, Columbus, has favored Republicans since the 1960s. But in recent decades it has swung hard to the right. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 40% of the county’s vote. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton picked up just 27%.
These two facts may seem like they have little to do with each other. But they point to one of the biggest trends in clean energy development across the country: The counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and then Donald Trump in 2016 are some of the worst places in the country to permit and build renewable projects.
The size of a county’s swing from 2008 to 2016 is one of the biggest predictors of whether a proposed wind or solar project will be contested or blocked, according to a new Heatmap Pro analysis of more than 8,500 projects and local policies around the country.
The magnitude of that swing is by far the most important political variable to emerge from Heatmap Pro’s analysis of more than 60 risk factors influencing community support or opposition to renewable projects. It is more strongly associated with a given project’s success than whether a county votes for Democratic or Republican candidates overall.
The only variables that are more closely correlated than the 2008-to-2016 swing are fundamental measures of a region’s population or local economy, such as its median income, racial demographics, or dominant industries. Towns and regions that heavily depend on farming, for instance, have become particularly reluctant to accept new solar projects in recent years.
Heatmap Pro’s analysis focused not only on whether a county’s residents support wind or solar projects in theory, but also on whether renewable projects proposed in the area are canceled, contested, or exposed to political turbulence. It surveyed more than 7,000 wind and solar projects proposed and built across the United States since the 1990s.
Many of the counties with the largest Obama-to-Trump swings have passed proposals meant to limit renewable development. Vermillion County in Indiana — where more than a quarter of voters swung from Obama to Trump — has an extensive set of restrictions on new solar projects. Solar projects in Elk County, Pennsylvania, which saw a similar swing, have also turned out against solar projects using up “prime farmland.”
There are a few reasons why the Obama-to-Trump swing might be associated with more opposition to renewables.
In 2008, solar and wind were still frontier technologies and were not price-competitive with fossil fuels. Although vaguely associated with Democrats, politicians on both sides of the aisles championed wind and solar so as to wean the country off foreign oil.
But in the following decade, the U.S. increased its solar capacity by roughly 100-fold, while it has more than doubled its installed wind capacity.. Today, solar and wind energy are major features of the electricity system, and many Republicans have openly embraced fossil fuels and cast doubt on the value of cleaner alternatives.
To be sure, the Obama-to-Trump swing was influenced by other social and economic factors, as well as a state’s specific political environment. Leah Stokes, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist who has studied the growing local opposition to wind farms, told me that the correlation with Obama-Trump voters may originate from Trump’s dominance of the upper Midwest in 2016. Because a small group of anti-renewable advocates can change an entire region’s policies, that could lead to more opposition to renewables in one part of the country or another.
“Is there a person, or a network of people, who are going place by place pushing these anti-solar and wind local laws? That would lead to a geographic concentration,” she said.
Even within individual counties, the electorate wasn’t the same in 2016 as it was in 2008. Throughout the 2010s, tens of millions of Americans moved around the country, with the largest net change moving from the Northeast to the South. Cities became younger on average, while rural areas and suburbs became older.
Even within counties, a different set of voters showed up to the polls in each election. One reason why the 2012 election might not be correlated with opposition to renewables is that many voters who voted for Obama in 2008 skipped the next cycle. Those same voters — many of whom were white and working class — showed back up in 2016 and backed Trump.
What is driving the opposition to renewables? Perhaps a county’s swing against renewable energy is happening precisely because voters there are persuadable. From 2008 to 2016, many voters in these counties changed their minds about which candidate or political party to support. As they shifted their stance to the right, they also adopted more seemingly Republican views about wind and solar development. Donald Trump has distinguished himself by his embrace of fossil fuels and climate change skepticism — perhaps as voters come to support him, they also adopt his positions.
What’s interesting, however, is that deep red counties that have not seen a political shift — places that backed, say, McCain and Romney by roughly the same margin as they backed Trump in 2016 — continue to build wind and solar at a good clip. Texas, for instance, is the No. 1 state for renewable deployment. A county’s partisanship, in other words, is not as good a predictor of its opposition to renewables as its swinginess.
Edgar Virguez, an energy systems engineer at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, has studied what drives opposition to renewables in North Carolina. He told me that some of the same factors that predict a county’s Trump support — such as its population density and education level — also predict whether that county has enacted a local restriction on renewable energy.
When he and his colleagues studied local policies in North Carolina, they found that lower density and less educated counties “had significantly higher reductions in the land available for solar development” when compared with denser or more educated counties, he said. Once a county has fewer than 35 people per square mile, or when less than 20% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, the number of restrictions on local land use shot up. That’s a problem for decarbonization, he added, because less dense counties also usually have the best and most affordable land available for solar development.
That finding may not hold true in other states. Heatmap, for instance, has found that whiter and more educated counties are more likely to oppose renewables. And to some degree, less dense counties are exactly where you’d expect to see more solar and wind projects get built — and thus more local policies restricting them pop up. But it is nonetheless not great news for advocates, given that a couple of America’s political institutions — namely, the Senate and the Electoral College — favor rural voters or Midwestern states. If the trend takes root, then it could eventually curtail renewable development across the country. That question — and many others — will partly be decided in this week’s presidential election.
On dry conditions in the Big Apple, biodiversity goals, and the future of the IRA
Current conditions: Schools are closed this week in Lahore, Pakistan, due to unprecedented pollution • An extreme red alert for torrential rain has been issued in Barcelona • A storm system in the Caribbean could strengthen into a hurricane by Wednesday.
The COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia came to a disappointing close over the weekend, with negotiators failing to agree on how the world can monitor and fund nature restoration. There were high hopes that the meeting would produce a roadmap for protecting large swathes of land, water, and degraded ecosystems by 2030, but rich nations blocked a proposal for a new fund to help pay for poorer nations’ efforts. “This COP was meant to be a status check on countries’ progress toward saving nature and all indicators on that status are blinking red,” said Crystal Davis, the World Resources Institute’s global director of food, land, and water. There were some bright spots, though, including the creation of a subsidiary body that will ensure Indigenous peoples have a seat at the negotiating table in future UN conservation talks, and a plan to encourage corporations that derive biotechnology products from nature to pay into a conservation fund.
New Yorkers are being asked to conserve water after Mayor Eric Adams placed the city under a drought watch. Last month was the driest NYC October on record, The Washington Postreported. Just 0.01 inches of rain fell in Central Park, far short of the 4 inches or so that usually fall during the month. Residents have been told to take shorter showers and fix leaks, and Adams called on the city’s agencies to draw up plans to conserve water. “Mother Nature is in charge, and so we must make sure we adjust,” he said. More than half the country was under drought conditions last month.
In case you missed it: Regulators from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Friday rejected a proposal to increase the load capacity of Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. The proposal was part of a deal to supply more power to a nearby Amazon data center. FERC voted 2-1 to block the move, citing concerns about grid reliability and rising energy bills for the public. FERC Chairman Willie Phillips dissented, and said the decision “fails to recognize the creative approach the agreement took and fails to demonstrate flexibility to ensure the grid can reliably and affordably handle rising demand.”
The CEO of oil giant TotalEnergies called for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to keep existing environmental laws in place if he wins this week’s election. Patrick Pouyanné told the Financial Times that revoking climate rules enacted under President Biden would create a “wild west” situation and hurt the oil industry’s reputation. “My view is that this will not help the industry, but on the contrary it will demonize, and then the dialogue will be even more antagonized,” Pouyanné said. Trump has promised to rescind much of the Inflation Reduction Act funding. Exxon’s chief financial officer Kathy Mikells told the FT that the IRA is helping support the economy, and “that gives a lot of people a lot of incentive to stand behind the IRA.”
Canada, the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, will publish a proposal today to cap greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel energy production. Energy is Canada’s highest-polluting sector, with oil and gas accounting for a quarter of all emissions and producing “more than double the greenhouse gas pollution than all other industries combined,” according to Hermine Landry, a spokeswoman for Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault. Landry toldReuters that the cap-and-trade system would incentivize high-emitting companies to invest in projects that reduce pollution, though an earlier report from Deloitte said the cap would likely nudge companies to cut production. Canada has a goal of curbing emissions by at least 40% compared to 2005 levels by the end of the decade. Whether this new proposal comes into effect will depend largely on the outcome of the next election, set to be held in late 2025.
“This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.” –Tim Stevens at The Vergetries to describe the digital acceleration tone produced by Rolls-Royce’s first EV, the ultra-luxury Spectre, which starts at $420,000.
Rolls-Royce