ARGUMENT: IRRESPONSIBLE ENVIRONMENTALISTSRemoving One Dam after Another: Water in the West

Many of the cities of the American southwest would not exist were it not for dams. In the first fifty years of the last century, the federal and state governments launched massive projects to build dams, pumping stations, and aqueducts on which more than 60 million Americans now depend to live where they live. Edward Ring, a co-founder of the California Policy Center and the author of The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California, writes in National Review that “Without dams to capture and store millions of acre-feet of rainfall every year, and aqueducts to transport that water to thirsty metropolitan customers, the land these cities sit upon would be uninhabitable desert.”

Without dams, crops would wither, people would die of thirst, and devastating floods would tear through towns and cities every time there’s a big storm. Without hydroelectric power from dams, 18 percent of the in-state generated electricity Californians consume would be gone.

But dams come at a cost. Ring notes that fish habitat is lost, and aquatic species can become endangered or go extinct. Precious sediment is prevented from running downstream to nurture estuaries and restore beaches. The natural cycle of rivers is disrupted: the cleansing pulse of spring that calls the migratory salmon to come back from the ocean, the dry trickles of summer when these anadromous species fight their way upstream to the cool and perennial headwaters to spawn, the next season’s rains that return newborn fingerlings to the ocean.

Perhaps most of all, the threat posed by the prospect of removing bigger dams, such as the ones on the Snake River, is the failure of proponents of removal to support major new water-supply infrastructure, including new off-stream reservoirs. If the proponents of dam removal would simultaneously support practical new infrastructure solutions, then rewilding America’s rivers could happen without impoverishing the farms and cities that depend on water.

There is naïveté, and also nihilism, in fighting to remove the building blocks of civilization without facing the realities of energy and water economics. Off-stream reservoirs, wastewater recycling, spreading basins to percolate floodwater into underground aquifers, desalination, and an all-of-the-above approach to energy development — more of these infrastructure investments become necessary when dams are removed from rivers. That environmental activists fail to understand the consequences of their actions will only mean disaster if they continue to get their way.

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Most of California’s reservoirs are in-stream, which means the reservoir is behind a dam blocking a river, controlling 100 percent of its runoff.

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All of this raises the question: If in-stream dams are to be removed to restore aquatic habitat, why shouldn’t development of new water sources, more than offsetting the lost water supply, be part of the project? Why consider these projects in isolation, instead of connecting them? Off-stream reservoirs, which are situated in arid valleys where water is pumped into them from adjacent rivers during storms, can store millions of acre-feet without disrupting important rivers. Wastewater treatment can reuse effluent that is imported into California’s coastal cities at great cost, only to be discharged into the Pacific Ocean after only one use. Ocean desalination finds an ideal venue on the California coast, yet its potential has barely been tapped. The answer, very often, is the [environmentalists’] refusal to consider realistic trade-offs.

Ring concludes:

Perhaps most of all, the threat posed by the prospect of removing bigger dams, such as the ones on the Snake River, is the failure of proponents of removal to support major new water-supply infrastructure, including new off-stream reservoirs. If the proponents of dam removal would simultaneously support practical new infrastructure solutions, then rewilding America’s rivers could happen without impoverishing the farms and cities that depend on water.

There is naïveté, and also nihilism, in fighting to remove the building blocks of civilization without facing the realities of energy and water economics. Off-stream reservoirs, wastewater recycling, spreading basins to percolate floodwater into underground aquifers, desalination, and an all-of-the-above approach to energy development — more of these infrastructure investments become necessary when dams are removed from rivers. That environmental activists fail to understand the consequences of their actions will only mean disaster if they continue to get their way.