Happy Friday everyone!  We are kicking off this weeks' newsletter with a short questionnaire - as we fast approach the end of our renewable energy education series, we want to hear from you on what you want to hear from us!  Moving on to our headlines, these past two weeks we've seen some action at COP26, some crazy weather for our friends up north, and an infrastructure bill that many believe may have fallen a bit short. Lastly, we'll round up the issue with more info on hydroelectricity and it's controversial upbringing. Enjoy!

Lake Powell, the reservoir held by Glen Canyon Dam  / Image Courtesy of  Nick Moore

We want to hear from You!

This week we are taking a break from our Featured Writer section so that we can hear from our readers - that's right, you! Please take a second to fill out the very short questionnaire so that we can continue to bring you the content you love!

Interested in being a Featured Writer? Fill out this survey and let us know!

Weekly Headlines

What happened at COP26? Some of the Pledges from the Climate Conference in Glasgow (NPR, BBC, New York Times, Council on Foreign Relations)

• Emissions: 
  • Over 100 countries signed the Global Methane Pledge, vowing to further reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. 
  • The United States and China have vowed to work together to reduce emissions, a rare sign of collaboration, but few specifics were included in the commitment. 
• Deforestation: 
  • 130 countries, including Brazil, have agreed to halt deforestation by 2030.
• Climate Funding: 
  • Having failed in their commitment to provide $100 billion by 2020 to help vulnerable countries reduce their emissions, wealthier countries agree to double current funding for climate adaptation projects by 2025. Nations will reconvene in 2024 to assess how to better assess the needs of vulnerable countries in the future.
• Fossil Fuels: 
  • World leaders agree to “phase down” the use of fossil fuel and coal subsidies. Though this a non binding and softer agreement than originally proposed, this is the first time that delegates have pushed to stop using fossil fuels altogether.

President Biden Finally Signs his Infrastructure Package into Law (Associated Press, NPR, Reuters, The Hill)

• This week President Biden signed his nearly trillion dollar infrastructure bill - a keystone of his presidency so far - into law.
• The bipartisan bill includes billions for climate resistance, water infrastructure, public transit, electrical grid improvement, EV chargers and electric school buses.
• This is the largest infrastructure package in over a decade, and the first one to have a focus on climate adaptation. While considered a win for environmentalists, many believe that the bill does not go far enough and leaves the US behind on our emissions goals.

Vancouver Nearly Cut Off from the World as Massive Storms Wreak Havoc (Yahoo, Reuters, BBC, The Guardian)

• In what is being considered the storm of the century, rainfall totaling over three times the historical record hit the greater Vancouver area this past weekend.

• Rain and landslides have closed major railways and roads, halting ground traffic in and out of the city.  Major Rail companies have no estimate yet as to when service will resume, throwing commercial transport into a spiral.

• Further complicating an already terrible situation, Vancouver is a major hub for freight transport from Asia. Vancouver, one of the busiest ports on the west coast, was already struggling to keep up with the pandemic delays. Supply chain issues will compound in the coming months

• After the fire season in Canada leveled over 4 million hectares of land, the ground is unable to properly hold water, which contributed to the ease of landslides in the area.

• As of Thursday (11/18), one person is dead and several others are missing.  British Columbia has declared a State of Emergency.

Resistance to Thacker Pass Lithium Mine in Nevada Continues Despite Judge’s Recent Refusal to Reconsider Block (Inside Climate News, AP)

• Activists in Humboldt County, Nevada have begun to camp out on the site of the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, a 17,933 acre project that includes an open-pit mine and a sulfuric acid plant to process lithium. 

• A request to halt the project was made by the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and the Oregon-based Burns Paiute Tribe, on the grounds that the mine is a sacred site where their ancestors' were massacred.

• Judge Miranda Du denied the request, citing speculative evidence. Activists have stated they are prepared for direct action in the future.

• Lithium is the key material needed to produce lithium-ion batteries, which store renewable energy and power electric vehicles. 

• The mine, which is owned by Canadian company Lithium Americas, is expected to produce 60,000 tons of lithium a year.

Heavy rains flood Vancouver / Image Courtesy of  The Guardian

Hydropower: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

    Welcome back to yet another Friday morning ClimateRoots newsletter where, as promised, we will be discussing some of the pros and cons of hydropower. The often heated debate around damming of rivers for use as both an energy production method and water source in the United States goes back to the early 1900’s (US Forest Service). At that time Gifford Pinchot (the first chief of the US Forest Service) and John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club) were engaged in a very public debate surrounding the proposed damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in today’s Yosemite National Park. More on that later; for now, let’s dive into the good and the bad of hydropower.

    Many of the benefits of hydropower were discussed in last week’s education session (click here if you missed it), but we’ll recap a few of them here as well as introduce a few that are new! For starters, hydropower is not only a clean and renewable energy source, but it is extremely flexible. Dams are able to release a precise amount of water to produce power when we need it most. In this regard, it mimics the fossil fuels that currently provide energy to our energy grid; something that wind and solar power are unable to do. Not only does hydropower easily match our energy demand, but it is also extremely efficient. The precise control of energy output leads to minimum wasted energy while production itself boasts 90% efficiency, compared to solar, wind and coal whose efficiencies are all in the mid 30%'s (Kiwi Energy). An inevitable side effect of dams are the reservoirs that they create. These reservoirs provide a great outlet for outdoor recreation in the communities they serve, including swimming, fishing and boating. In the same vein, the reservoirs held behind dams help with flood control and irrigation support while providing clean drinking water to millions of people. For example, nearly every state in the Western United States relies on dams for farm irrigation and drinking water. The use of a natural resource (i.e. a river) for human benefit in a sustainable fashion (i.e. dams) is generally referred to as conservation.

    When studying the negative consequences brought on by the use of hydropower, it is important to start at the beginning of the damming process: the construction itself. Dams are made almost entirely out of concrete, and a whole lot of it at that! The production of concrete is an extremely carbon intensive process; one ton of CO2 is released for every ton of cement (the main ingredient in concrete) produced (Columbia Climate School). For reference, the Hoover Dam used over 8 million tons of concrete for the main and supporting structure. Construction projects as large as these are also bound to cost loads of money upfront, even though the operation costs of dams are market competitive (Kiwi Energy). Some of the more obvious reasons hydropower can be harmful is the drastic impact on the surrounding ecosystems. This would primarily include the upriver and downriver ecosystems. The reservoir impedes river flow flooding large areas, destroying natural habitats and killing vegetation upriver of the dam. Dams will also reduce the oxygen content in a river, harming aquatic species downriver. Salmon, in particular, have been nearly wiped out because they can no longer return to their breeding grounds due to dams clogging up rivers. The natural erosion properties of a river (which carries sediment downstream) are drastically slowed since the sediment builds up behind the dam. Recreation activities downstream from dams, including rafting and fishing, are also impacted. Lastly, for a hydropower plant to produce power it needs a source of energy: water! This might sound obvious, but reservoir levels in areas that rely on hydropower the most are decreasing at an alarming rate due to drought.
 

To provide some context of this heated debate, let’s dive into two examples of highly contested dams in the United States; the O’Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park and the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River in The Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The O’Shaughnessy Dam was built after a long and heated debate between preservationist John Muir and conservationist Gifford Pinchot in the early 1900’s. The basic principle was that the dam would be (and still remains to this day) the principal water source for the city of San Francisco (Yosemite National Park). In Pinchot’s mind, this would provide the greatest good for the greatest number. Muir, however, would not stand for it. He argued that flooding Hetch Hetchy Valley, an area of Yosemite National Park that rivalled Yosemite Valley itself in beauty, would forever ruin the pristine wilderness and impede the wild ecosystem of the area. The Glen Canyon Dam found itself in the middle of a similar debate in the mid 1900’s when the flooding of the not well known, yet stunning Glen Canyon was proposed for the dam. The dam would flood the Colorado River at Glen Canyon, submerging many historic Native American sites and impede the flow of the river just upstream of the Grand Canyon itself. The construction of this dam provided power and water that helped grow the American West, but in the act all but destroyed the downriver ecosystem of the Grand Canyon and submerged Glen Canyon into the history books. There are still environmentalists today who push for the destruction of the dam to revive what was lost.

The bottom line is that all dams will have their pros and cons. The debate will never be resolved; rather the key to hydropower is in which dams are constituted as good and which are considered harmful. There are roughly 91,000 dams in the United States today (National Geographic). This is a huge number impeding thousands of miles of river. The vast majority of these dams were completed during the Dam Building Era in the mid 1900’s, meaning they are decades old today and in many cases have out served their purpose. With limited resources to maintain all of these dams, many have begun to be removed, leading to extraordinary results for river ecosystems. Removal may make sense in many cases, but in others it may cause more harm than good. Many have claimed that we have now entered the dam removal era in the US, but in deciding which dams stay and which dams go, the dam debate will be here to stay!
 

To read this piece with works cited, check it out on our blog!

Hetch Hetchy Valley, before and after Flooding  / Image Courtesy of  San Francisco Chronicle

Missed our last issue? Want to start from the beginning? No worries! Click below to catch up on all our newsletters.