On Wednesday, Abby Smith reported House Republicans tapped Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers to replace Oregon’s Greg Walden as the party’s lead on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Though her acceptance statement said a lot more about “the battles for freedom to beat socialism” and “countering the Left’s lurch toward socialism” than it said anything energy-related, Smith noted McMorris Rodgers’ potential openness to climate action vis-à-vis her support for hydropower, having introduced “legislation to speed up licensing for hydropower projects and expand their development.”
But before you bust out the celebratory champagne, a couple points. First of all, on a pure emissions calculation, dams probably aren’t the climate solution you might hope — it turns out that when you flood an area to create the reservoir feeding a large hydro plant, you often cover a bunch of plant life with water. And as those plants decompose, they release methane, which means over the course of some dams’ life, they can end up emitting more greenhouse gasses than a coal plant. On top of that, the threat of dams bursting has already proven fatal, and as climate change increases precipitation, more dam failures can be expected. On top of all that, it turns out that turning rivers into stagnant bodies of water and then turning up the heat with climate change sets up the perfect conditions for toxic algal blooms in dam reservoirs, a problem the native Karuk people in California are trying to fix.
Even if those issues could somehow be addressed, there just isn’t a huge potential for the sort of growth in traditional hydropower that we need to tackle climate change. While some river-rich states, like Washington, can easily generate a considerable amount of electricity from smaller hydroelectric power plants, most of the best places for dams have already been built. Until relatively small-scale, next-generation micro-hydro and tidal or wave projects that work more seamlessly with bodies of water are ready to scale up, building big new hydroelectric power plants means big dams flooding new areas.
And that’s a serious drawback. One that’s all-too evident in how energy companies behind hydro projects trample the rights and well-being of local communities here in the US, including in Washington, and abroad. Though worlds apart, there are many similarities between the environmental justice movements that organize in opposition to big dams. For one, they all face considerable obstacles in the monied energy interests willing to flex every violent muscle they have against the rural and/or indigenous communities whose lands are to be flooded. The violence is particularly acute in developing countries, a continuation of the centuries-old colonial traditions of wealthy foreign corporations exploiting indigenous peoples to extract profit from their lands, either ignoring or enjoying the cultural genocide that entails.
According to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters, hydro power faces more opposition and conflicts than any other type of low-carbon energy project, making it on par with the level of opposition encountered by fossil fuel projects.
The study authors mapped over 600 resistance movements worldwide, breaking them out into fossil fuel (FF) projects like wells and pipelines, and low carbon energy projects (LCE) like wind, solar and hydro. They found that renewable energy projects are just as contested as fossil fuel ones, “and that both [FF and LCE projects] disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as rural communities and Indigenous peoples.”
Hydro stood out as having the most conflicts among LCE projects, and they found that violence was particularly common in hydro protests, making up a significant portion of the rate of “10% of all cases analysed involving assassination of activists.”
Overall, “over a quarter of projects encountering social resistance have been cancelled, suspended or delayed,” a figure that applied to both FF and LCE projects.
So while folks like McMorris Rodgers may push for an even quicker permitting process for hydro power, the reality is that one of the only ways to prevent protests from slowing things down is to involve affected people from the very start. That’s why it’s so important to prioritize local communities, and incorporate a social or energy justice framework in the policy-making process. Beyond being morally just, it's politically prudent to listen to the most-impacted communities and earn their support before there’s a need for protest.
This study shows that the growth of “place-based energy-related mobilizations” means that energy companies, clean and dirty, are going to need to make even more of an effort to work with local communities to ensure their energy projects are good neighbors. We’re going to need to build a lot of clean energy projects, all around the world, so not getting buy-in from the public is not an option. And if a particular project is so damaging to its immediate surroundings that it can’t win support of those locals, then maybe it should be built somewhere else!
After all, what’s the point of stopping climate impacts like sea level rise from flooding communities, if the dam solutions require flooding other communities?