Hydropower dams, the modern pyramids, are generators of environmental and social disasters. Ultimately all dams become expensive waterfalls. Hydropower can emit more greenhouse gases per kilowatt-hour than fossil fuels, including dirty coal.
The environmental impacts of large dams and reservoirs
Jacques Leslie is a foreign correspondent turned non-fiction writer who once covered the war on Vietnam for the Los Angeles Times. When he did a cover story for Harper's Magazine, entitled "Running Dry: What Happens When the World No Longer Has Enough Freshwater?" he began a lasting involvement with the environmental and political issues of water. What Jacques Leslie discovered when he wrote for Harper's was that "At the core of every argument about water are dams, the modern pyramids, generators of extravagantly apportioned electricity, water storage, and environmental and social disasters."
Some dams are so huge that they can be seen from space. Dams have shifted so much weight towards the equator that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth's rotation the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field.
Jacques Leslie http://www.jacquesleslie.com/ is the author of: Deep Water, The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment. He was recorded at Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA.
A battle is being fought by independent scientists and those employed by the hydropower industry over the discovery that reservoirs behind the world's dams are a source of global warming pollution. In the case of big reservoirs in the tropics -- where most new dams are proposed -- hydropower can actually emit more greenhouse gases per kilowatt-hour than fossil fuels, including dirty coal.
The worst example studied by an independent scientist, the Balbina Dam in the Brazilian Amazon, had a climate impact in 1990 equal to an astonishing 54 natural gas plants generating the same amount of power.
Patrick McCully is the author of Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the United Nations Environment Programme's Dams and Development Project - and the Executive Director of the International Rivers Network. <http://www.irn.org/> I interviewed him right after his return from the November 2006 UN negotiations on global climate in Nairobi.
