this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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I would point out that hydropower may be renewable but isn't necessarily environmentally friendly. Especially if you live somewhere with salmon.
Hydropower is one of the most widely available and effective sources of non-fossil fuelled electricity generation. If we're going to have a chance to stop climate change we need to use it to its fullest..
It's super destructive to the ecology of waterways though.
Climate change is also super destructive to the ecology of waterways - and also to everything else, so I'm gonna say sacrificing a few fish for the good of the rest of the fish is probably a good idea.
Same issue as nuclear though, building a dam takes years, time we don't really have.
Sure, the best time to start building more hydro/nuclear was 10 years ago, but I'll bet that we will still be using fossil fuels in 10-15 years at this rate, so the second best time to start building is today.
We need to be building all kinds of clean energy production everywhere all at once - we can't afford not to.
Sure, we are terribly behind schedule and will take losses for it (in what form I do not know, but for sure it won't be pretty).
But we need more and more energy and will need more, and even that growth in that graphic is not enough to prevent fossil fuel use from growing. At least until people wisen up that we'll just need to learn to make do with less energy per capita... I'm not convinced that part will ever happen.
Not to mention I'm not sure how much wind and solar you can do at the same time in the world. At some point everyone will need the same materials...
The bulk of what is being installed is solar and wind
Yes, but also some hydro.
But only some, as a snack.
All those dead salmon got to go somewhere.
Well, I believe about half of all species of salmon will be extinct inside the next thirty years owing to temperature increases, so, as someone who likes fishing in my local river, I’ll happily take some dead salmon now for better solar power storage if it helps the odds of keeping about half of them alive. We lose vast amounts of salmon either way, but this way we only lose salmon and a few other types of fish and not, you know, a good chunk of all marine life like we do if we keep on our current rate of transition.
It sounds like you underestimate how important salmon is to a good chunk of all marine life. Particularly orcas.
It sounds like you underestimate just how temputure dependent many types of salmon are and just how short of a time they have left to live in a 2C+ world. Many of their spawning locations are also in areas that are seeing the highest relative temperature change.
aThe point was that climate change is going to kill more salmon and vastly more other types of marine life than a handful of dams, but thouse few dams could have a significant effect on the amount of carbon emitted by the second largest polluter on earth by providing the nighttime energy that is currently done with dozens of brand new natural gas plants. With the way solar in particular is scaling up, dispatchable energy storage is going to be the primary limiting factor on how hot things get, and therefore how many species of salmon are going extinct in our lifetime.
Off to a great start.
With proper midigations it’s fast more eco friendly than the natural gas power plants were still building more of to make up for the fact that solar only ouputs in the day and we can only spin up new lithium mines and battery factories so fast.