It was Eleanor Roosevelt who famously said, “Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you will be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Advocates of resolving the problem of climate change are finding that most approaches to cut the negative effects of climate change cut both ways. Electric cars don’t use gas, but they often rely on fossil fuel to generate electricity, and then the spent batteries may pollute the environment, especially if many users will not deposit them in the right places, and if enough of the right places will not be available for them or availed of by them.
Similarly, cutting gas production in the United States seems like an appealing way to go, until one stops to realize that U.S. industries are better regulated than those in most other countries that produce the most oil and gas, so that U.S. gas is cleaner, and importing oil or gas from places like Iran and Venezuela means we are importing more dirty oil instead of producing more clean oil, and we are polluting the environment by transporting oil from these other countries, especially using tankers and trucks at the expense of pipelines.
Damned if we do; damned if we don’t.
One approach to clean energy has been around for millennia, long before climate change entered the lexicon in any language, but it is hardly ever even mentioned. “Damn it,” consider dams!
Without any of the technology we have today, dams were built going back thousands of years. Now, of course, hydropower already produces much more electricity worldwide than any other low-carbon energy source — nearly eight times more than solar power and 1.5 times more than nuclear — and it is renewable.
One need not be a scientist to understand that there are at least six reasons that come to mind, right off the bat, to advocate building more dams than ever, now. The most obvious are that (1) the population of the Earth continues to grow, and (2) the uses to which water is put continue to increase, so we need to conserve and claim or reclaim as much water as possible. (3) As we build more and more infrastructure on concrete and comparable materials, less water seeps into the Earth, and more just glides over into the rivers and oceans. This flows into a fourth reason for the need for more dams: (4) California is one of the states suffering most acutely from droughts, but when there was a recent flurry of rainstorms in the vicinity, it was estimated that as much as 80% of the water was not retained for use, but flowed into rivers or directly into the ocean. As a result, consider reason (5): the water levels in the ocean continue to rise, when compounded with the melting of glaciers and ice caps in the arctic regions of the globe, so water that is not recaptured for use by civilized people will add to the rise in the ocean’s water levels, bringing coastal cities closer to catastrophe. And (6) the more water that will expand the oceans, at temperatures well below freezing, the faster the erosion of glaciers and ice caps.
The first dam, Jawa, was built in what is now known as Jordan, which is adjacent to the Dead Sea, located between Jordan and Israel, still acknowledged to be the lowest place on Earth, though the dam wasn’t adjacent to the actual Jordan River that flows into the Dead Sea. The dam is not likely to have lasted more than a generation, but civilization has come a long way since then.
As of this year, there are an estimated 60,000 large dams in the world (those storing more than 100 million cubic meters), storing about a sixth of the globe’s annual river flow to the oceans. Counting dams that are not defined as large, there are an estimated 84,000 dams in the United States alone. The building of dams was said to peak internationally as recently as in the 1960s and 1970s, but the number of dams has leveled off and receded since then due to environmental concerns.
A not insignificant downside to dams has been an alleged 84% average decline in freshwater wildlife population sizes since the 1970s (although there may be other causes for this, including increased and more efficient methods of fishing and loosened regulations). More than a quarter of the Earth’s land-to-ocean sediment flux is said to be trapped behind dams (which may work both ways in being beneficial as well), water collected in dams often gets polluted (though technology is available to cleanse the water), and the dams are said to impact the Earth’s climate in complex ways via modification of the carbon cycle (though some modifications of the climate caused by dams could work to the benefit of civilization, as noted above).
Even environmentalists with top credentials have to concede, however, that dams are needed for consumption by farmers and consumers, and for generating electric power, which of course is considered relatively clean and desirable compared to fossil fuels.
We have come a long way since Jawa and the Roman aqueducts in learning how to build dams, canals, reservoirs, and other water management systems, and how to limit their negative impacts on the environment. Let’s hope scientists will continue to figure out how to make God-given water serve expanding humankind and the animal kingdom without humans causing water to cause more harm than good.
Aaron I. Reichel is a member of the bar in New York who once worked in the Environmental Protection Bureau in the office of the attorney general of the state of New York.
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