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Save Our Wild Salmon

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June 07, 2010 - Economic effects have long been cited as reasons to keep the dams in place. While some inland businesses and farmers are willing to look at how dam removal could work for their communities, the leadership for a larger conversation has been missing. Are you listening, Sen. Murray?


By Daniel Jack Chasan
If the four lower Snake River dams come down, will they drag the economy of eastern Washington and western Idaho down with them? Salmon advocates don't think so.
They think that anyone who takes an unbiased look at the costs and benefits of those dams will call in the bulldozers. They have argued for years that the dams should be breached, so that Idaho salmon populations have a better shot at recovery. But they say they'll take a chance that if someone weighed all the costs and benefits, the dams would stay. They want somebody to do the math.
Save Our Wild Salmon and its allies in a new Working Snake River for Washington coalition have gotten more than 60 "business owners and community leaders in eastern Washington and its border communities in Idaho" to write Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, asking them to "bring the affected stakeholders in our region together, to talk and work directly together to seek solutions."
Last year, Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo — who received a similar letter from business representatives in the Lewiston area — talked about convening such a group. "Some Lewiston businesspeople believe that taking out the dams would kill this region's economy," Doug Nadvornick reported last year on Spokane public radio. "That's why they've fought dam breaching so fiercely here.
"But the concept isn't going away," Nadvornick said, "and Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo knows it." But as a Republican in a Democratic Senate, Crapo didn"t have the political clout to pull everyone together.
Murray does.
The lower Snake River dams are keystones of the status quo. They generate power, irrigate some Washington farms, and make Lewiston, 465 miles from the Pacific, a deepwater port.
Congressman Doc Hastings, who represents central Washington, claims that breaching the dams would create an economic disaster. He calls breaching "an extreme action that would cause real economic harm" and suggests that "the future of our region's economy and thousands of jobs could depend on" the administration considering it only as a last resort.
No one has ever really done all the math. But a 2002 RAND study commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trust found: "The four dams on the lower Snake River could be removed without negative consequences to economic growth and net employment."
In fact, "removing the dams would provide economic benefits associated with fishing, recreation, and tourism, and would have a significant environmental benefit," the RAND researchers found. But the effects would be mixed.
Dam removal "would also have a negative economic impact on some agriculture. . . . Bypassing the four dams would require investments for modifications to the municipal and industrial water-use infrastructure, highway and rail infrastructure expansion, and creation of a new irrigation infrastructure. While these changes would cost taxpayer dollars, they might also create thousands of jobs."
The issue of climate change makes the arguments more complex. Inevitably, defenders of the status quo have seized on the fact that the dams generate 1,250 megawatts of electricity without producing greenhouse gases. The argument may be disingenuous, but the megawatts are real.
On the other hand, breaching the dams would not mean building another coal plant, although it might mean running gas turbines a little more often. And it would not risk brownouts. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council says that — with or without the lower Snake River dams — the region can meet its goals for the next 20 years with conservation and renewables. Losing the dams would not even bring higher utility bills. The Council's new plan foresees so much conservation that even though dam breaching would drive wholesale power rates up slightly, the individual household's utility bill would go down.
And we might have Columbia Basin fish a good deal longer. The prospect of climate change increases the significance of salmon populations that migrate through the Snake.
If average temperatures rise, spawning streams will get warmer, and many of the Columbia Basin's salmon populations may be toast — make that poached — leaving primarily the populations that spawn at higher elevations, where the water will stay cooler. Those are largely Snake River populations, which spawn in the mountains of Idaho. A lot of their spawning habitat is already protected. The trick is getting to and from it. The lower Snake dams don't help.
The same dams that make it hard for Idaho salmon to survive their journeys up and down the Snake make that same journey possible for barges. The lock system has been a good deal for people shipping wheat or lentils downstream. Grain growers are noticeably absent from the list of business people who signed the letter to Murray and Cantwell. But if the public were willing to invest in new rail infrastructure, grain growers are among the people most easily made whole. It's just a question of which transportation modes governments choose to subsidize.
 
 
 
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