I guess I don’t see how this is necessarily a problem. Hydro dam or not, the water still goes down river. We get lots of hydro power from Niagra Falls, but the water still winds its way to the ocean.
I can see how it could impact fish life, but don’t see an obvious impact on the forest.
I still don’t see your deforestation argument. Changing the flow of a river isn’t going to deforest an area. You aren’t going to get hydro power unless you let the water flow steadily. I don’t doubt some of the impacts in your article would happen, but I didn’t see deforestation there in my quick review.
This isn’t like damning the Colorado River to irrigate the Southwest kind of situation, essentially bleeding the river dry.
My image of the Amazon must be mistaken though. I think of it as an extremely slow flowing river, not suited to hydro electric power. It is a long river though, so I guess there are places that would be candidates.
Don’t forget all the chopping down of forests to grow sugar cane to support the ethanol economy.
I would think the subsistence farming would be a much worse threat.
You have to think of a nozzle. You take all that slow moving water and force it through a small space to make it move faster. Also, it comes out the other side at a different temperature which is bad for the ecosystem, not to mention the fact that the water isn’t the only thing that’s supposed to move down river.
I have made pretty clear that I don’t dispute that there would be environmental impact, just not deforestation because of this policy.
Besides, I thought we were supposed to pursue non GHG emitting renewable energy.
This gets so confusing.
I think the deforestation he was referring to goes like this. They are building the damn to provide power for something. That smething is likely to be placed near the damn, which means they’re likely to need to cut some forest down to make way for it.
I don’t often agree with Ken, but his reasoning is always better than that. I am pretty sure that reasoning would apply to any power plant located anywhere. That is nothing compared to the clearing of the area every day, mostly for low value agriculture.
What you are really saying is that this will enable agriculture. I guess I don’t get that at all. Cheap electric power is not a big factor in establishing agriculture infrastructure. It is a big factor in manufacturing and the like.
Fighting the power plant seems like a backwards approach to me. If the economic forces drive clearing and using the surrounding area, (and they probably do) I don’t think the power availability is going to affect that process much one way or the other.
On the other hand, if you want to join people like the McArthur Foundation and others who want to buy up rain forest, you might have a viable plan.