Green Energy

The more important question however, is if the short term loss in biodiversity is offset by the long term gain in both biodiversity and all the other benefits that come with not burning more coal and natural gas.

They highlight south america as an area that is seeing the largest declines and which is highly dependent on hydro power, but the only other options that area has are either to cut down the rainforest for solar, tie the entire national grid to a few offshore wind farms, pump a massive portion of their limited GDP into a rich western nation and go into dept for a nuclear program, or most likely to actually happen, build lots of new natural gas plants and buy fuel from all those new LNG exports terminals the US just built. Given a hydro reservoir is also the cheapest way to bulk store renewables for night/calm days, it actually ends up being a double cut to renewables generation as a whole.

Talior made fish ladders plus effective reserch and monitoring obviously helps eliminate most of the barriers created by a dam, but are an additional cost with little direct benefit to the local community and as such tend to be the first to go when people start to ask why the government has money to study some fish’s comfort but not for the town to get drinkable tap water or subsidize small AC units so the poor don’t die in the next climate change induced heat wave. Also harder to get the IMF to let your nation go into debt for.

Obviously every method generating electricity is going to have its sacrifices, unless you are like Australia and most of your country is desert with large lithium reserves, but I feel like this sort of conversion is best served by ‘and that’s why the West should be giving poor countries tailor made fish ladders to preserve our shared climate’ and not ‘and that’s why we can’t let poor nations build the same dams the rich countries used to build their industry and provide rural electrification a century ago. Indeed we need to go farther and replace these new dams with a vauge something(Hint: that vague something is fossil fuels).’

It is worth keeping in mind that lot of migratory fish are not expected to be able to survive the warmer rivers of the next few decades or will be right on the edge, so 2C vs 2.2C vs 2.4 is probably going to be the deciding factor and as such the oil and gas prices pants those dams took offline do matter.

Electricity is also only one of the three main reasons you build dams, with the other primary one in the rainforest being flood control. People tend to live near water, and when that water rises because of a climate change induced storm it tends to be bad for the people.

Also, while I’m certain the actual study accounts for it, the article uses loss of freshwater fish populations as a whole without acknowledging that a significant factor of that is climate change making rivers warmer, and that warmer water stresses fish, so it comes across as pretty disingenuous.