Opinion

By Miles Johnson, opinion contributor
07/02/25

The U.S. built more than 1,000 hydroelectric dams over the last century. These dams are as different in size, shape and function as the rivers where they were built. Their social and environmental costs and benefits also differ.

Tribes, states, and hundreds of thousands of Americans have recently pushed to remove four federally-owned dams on the Lower Snake River in Washington State. The goal is to restore abundant salmon runs and honor tribal rights and treaties.

But in a congressional hearing on May 7, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he “passionately” supports keeping these four dams around. Wright also revealed that he has no idea what these four dams actually do.

Not all dams are the same. The Lower Snake River dams don’t produce the kind of “high value electricity” that Wright claimed they do. These four dams produce just 4 percent of the region’s electricity, mostly in the spring and early summer when the Pacific Northwest has far more wind, solar and other hydroelectricity than we need.

Wright has been led to believe that the Lower Snake River dams act like a gigantic storage device, such that “when demand for electricity goes up, you can release more water” and “you can hold it back when you don’t need it.” But the Lower Snake River dams don’t work like that. Essentially, these four dams continuously release as much (or as little) water as happens to be flowing in from upstream. Their inability to store and generate large amounts of energy on demand means they are not the kind of “very valuable assets” that Wright imagines.

Wright was not alone in his misstatements; he was responding to a question by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), who implied that the Lower Snake River dams also provide “flood control” and “irrigation.” They don’t. These four dams cannot store large volumes of water and therefore cannot meaningfully delay or prevent a flood. Recent studies also show there would be plenty of water for irrigation if the Lower Snake River dams were removed, and evaporation from these four reservoirs actually wastes enough water to grow 8,000 acres of apples each year.

Wright and Newhouse are relying on broad generalities about dams and hydropower that don’t apply to the Lower Snake River. For instance, both expressed their view that dams and salmon can coexist. That can be true, in limited instances, but with respect to the Lower Snake River, our country’s top federal and independent fisheries institutions found that un-damming is essential to recovering abundant salmon.

The benefits of the Lower Snake River dams are modest, but nevertheless real and important — especially to certain communities and people in eastern Washington who rely on them directly. These dams do produce some electricity, and that electricity is less harmful to our climate than burning fossil fuels (although it is definitely not carbon-neutral). These dams also facilitate some barge traffic, and a substantial amount of irrigation equipment would have to be moved or rebuilt if these dams were removed.

The Trump administration recently announced its opposition to replacing these services in order to facilitate un-damming the Lower Snake River, a move that Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called “a betrayal of our tribes and a tremendous setback for the entire Northwest.” Nevertheless, the states, tribes and organizations advocating for dam removal are dedicated to finding solutions and unlocking the Pacific Northwest’s best chance to recover abundant wild salmon to support commercial, sport and tribal fisheries; honor tribal rights and treaties; and protect endangered orca whales.

How to replace the Lower Snake River dams, and their services, is one of the most important policy questions facing the Pacific Northwest. It is not going to be resolved by politicians repeating platitudes or misinformation. America deserves a secretary of Energy who understands the problem and supports solutions that work for everyone.

Miles Johnson is legal director at Columbia Riverkeeper.

The Hill: Opinion: Energy Secretary Wright ‘passionately’ ignorant about Northwest hydropower

By The Columbian
Published: June 17, 2025

A decision by the Trump administration further imperils salmon and demonstrates the capricious nature of the president’s governing.

President Donald Trump last week rejected a $1 billion Biden-era agreement designed to restore salmon and steelhead populations. The Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, reached in 2023, was the latest effort to balance the region’s economic needs with efforts to save the endangered species. The plan did not call for the breaching of four hydroelectric dams along the lower Snake River in Washington, but it did create a pathway toward removal.

“It was one of the first times that we had a collaborative effort where people agreed to come together — nobody’s hand was forced, there wasn’t a judge or a court insisting on this,” Chris Wood, CEO of Trout Unlimited, told Outdoor Life. “Now, we’re back to the beginning — where we had been for the previous 20 years. Which is just relying on the Endangered Species Act to keep these most amazing of God’s creatures from blinking out.”

That is a crucial point. Decades worth of court arguments have slowed progress toward the shared goal of saving native species. Experts say modern salmon and steelhead runs are approximately 2 percent of their historical numbers.

Negotiations involving federal hydropower system operators, Native nations, environmental groups, sportfishing groups, clean energy advocates, and representatives from Washington and Oregon had resulted in the 2023 agreement and provided hope. As Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said at the time: “This landmark agreement will work to help restore salmon … using a combination of science, habitat restoration, and engineering efforts.”

The administration’s withdrawal from that is disturbing and is accompanied by hyperbolic rhetoric. A “fact sheet” issued by the White House heralds the decision for “stopping radical environmentalism” and “putting America first” — empty buzzwords that are the hallmark of Trump’s management.

There is nothing radical about working to save salmon, which for millennia have been a cultural and economic cornerstone of the Pacific Northwest. And America does not benefit from ignoring existential threats to those species.

To emphasize the gaslighting on the part of the administration, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has claimed that removal of the lower Snake River dams would cost the region more than 3,000 megawatts of hydroelectric generating capacity. The average yearly output of the dams is approximately one-third of that.

But the biggest shortcoming of the action is that it offers no solutions. It simply rejects an agreement, forged between multiple stakeholders, without offering a path forward for generating power, providing irrigation, enhancing river transportation and improving accessibility for salmon.

As Dac Collins writes for Outdoor Life: “In many ways, the agreement reached in 2023 provided a road map for these difficult conversations. It established a Tribal Energy Program to help the Columbia River Treaty Tribes develop their own renewable energy sources. It provided federal guidance for replacing and/or redesigning the current irrigation and transportation systems in the Lower Snake region. And it provided the funds to make these solutions workable.”

Instead, we will return to a labyrinth of litigation that had been paused in the wake of the agreement.

Trump has managed to break a deal designed to balance the region’s competing interests. In the process, he has failed to fix anything.

The Columbian: In Our View: Move to end critical fish deal offers no solutions

June 23, 2025

By Bob Rees, Vice President of Conservation, Association of Northwest Steelheaders, West Linn, Oregon

Salmon and steelhead are central to the Pacific Northwest way of life, and the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement offered a path forward where restoring abundant fish runs and affordable, reliable energy could coexist.

The Presidential Memorandum issued by President Donald Trump pulling the federal government out of this framework agreement is seriously shortsighted. This choice will derail years of community discussions and engagement. The forced implosion of the agreement will void the court-ordered stay on lawsuits. Parties will head right back to court for protracted legal actions while these fish move closer toward extinction.

Simply put, no recovery efforts will prevail while the lower Snake River dams continue to be the largest contributor of human-caused fish mortality. The Northwest was moving toward a comprehensive regional solution, and we can’t afford to turn back. We’ve already spent nearly $26 billion attempting to recover Columbia River salmon and steelhead — the most expensive species-recovery effort in history.

The Pacific Northwest wants a future with these incredible fish, and we won’t be deterred. We are deeply grateful for the hard work of our state leaders and partners who have championed this issue, and together we will save salmon and steelhead from extinction.

The Columbian: Letter: Salmon decision is shortsighted

The White House’s scuttling of the Columbia Basin pact returns uncertainty to salmon survival.

June 21, 2025

By The Herald Editorial Board

The Trump administration last week scuttled an agreement between federal, state and tribal governments, meant to end decades of court litigation over tribal treaty rights and the survival of Columbia Basin salmon stocks, while aiding the growth of clean energy sources.

It’s a move that contradicts executive orders President Trump signed just months ago to restore “American seafood competitiveness” and “unleash American energy dominance,” and is all but certain to send the federal government back to court to defend itself against a coalition of four Northwest Indian tribes, Washington state and Oregon, environmental, energy and other groups, which two years ago had signed the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement with the Biden administration.

The agreement suspended litigation by the National Wildlife Federation and the “Six Sovereigns” — the tribes and states — in return for federal commitments to restore the Columbia Basin and assure plentiful fishing in perpetuity, including a promise of at least $1 billion in federal funding and efforts, including a $300 million investment in salmon habitat restoration by the Bonneville Power Administration, which administers the Snake River and other Columbia basin dams. Significantly, much of the money was to go toward the expansion of 1 to 3 gigawatts of electricity from tribally managed clean-energy projects, including solar, wind and energy storage.

At the heart of the earlier lawsuits — if not the agreement — was the fate of four Washington state hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake River, a tributary of the Columbia, which while producing some of the Northwest’s abundant electrical energy also are responsible for blocking some salmon from their reproductive cycle and threatening the health of fish.

Tribes, environmental groups and others have sought the breaching of the four dams in southeastern Washington as the best chance for restoration of chinook and other salmon runs, steelhead and other fish to which treaties since the 1850s have guaranteed tribal access, an outcome among other actions deemed as necessary for salmon survival in a 2022 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Importantly, however, the agreement included no commitment for removal of the dams, acknowledging that Congress ultimately was responsible for such a decision. Instead the pact was intended to show that what the dams provide in electricity, barge transportation and more could be replaced, while opening up 140 miles of salmon-spawning habitat.

The Trump administration’s move is likely to send the issue back for more litigation.

Back to court

“Without the agreement, there is no longer any basis for a stay,” said Amanda Goodin, senior attorney with Earthjustice, which had represented plaintiffs in past litigation. “Unfortunately, this shortsighted decision to renege on this important agreement is just the latest in a series of anti-government and anti-science actions coming from the Trump administration.”

The Trump memorandum wasn’t a surprise, Goodin said by phone earlier this week, as the administration since inauguration had been firing federal workers in related agencies and canceling grants and contracts key to the work outlined in the pact. But there had been no advance notice from the White House, she said, and no offer to accept feedback from the state and tribal parties regarding an end to the agreement.

Goodin expects that the four tribal nations — the Yakama, Nez Perce, Warm Springs and Umatilla tribes — and two state governments will continue their partnership, but that work, unsupported by the federal funding that had been promised, will be difficult to advance.

What’s lost

“This was the kind of work that salmon and fishing and orca advocates have been seeking and encouraging for a very long time,” said Joseph Bogaard, executive director for Save Our Wild Salmon, representing conservation, commercial and sportfishing groups and others.

Hoping for vindication in the courts, Bogaard said, offers less assurance.

The courts for decades have been critical to winning short-term protections for salmon, including ordering spills of water over dams to cool river temperatures to prevent fish kills.

“But they are not as good a forum for creating multifaceted policy,” he said.

That’s where, in the last four or five years, the cooperation among the “Six Sovereigns” in partnership with the Biden administration outlined the agreement’s goals, efforts and responsibilities.

“It was in every sense, a holistic approach that sought to bring folks together and then move them forward together, and that’s the missed opportunity.”

Bogaard sees no “semblance of any kind of a plan” among the Trump administration, leadership in federal agencies, the Bonneville Power Administration and utilities that will honor treaties with tribal nations by ensuring the survival of salmon species.

Meanwhile, populations of salmon — spring and summer chinook and sockeye — and steelhead continue to teeter closer to extinction. Bogaard noted that some tributaries of the Snake River, such as Washington’s Tucannon River, are seeing fewer than 50 fish returning to spawn.

Some 45 years ago, he noted, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a coalition of western states was created to balance energy and environmental needs. Its goal at the time was to ensure the return of 5 million adult salmon returning to the Columbia Basin by 2025; this year, about 2.3 million are predicted to return, he said.

Sapping energy

There’s a loss, too, for energy, both for current hydroelectric production and new sources, including projects for solar, wind and energy storage, said Nancy Hirsh, policy director for the Northwest Energy Coalition.

Even though little in federal funding had yet to be delivered, the Columbia Basin pact, Hirsh said, had made notable progress in talking through issues and setting goals and expectations and planning.

“The agreement really advanced the energy conversation,” she said. That included the start of work for power system modeling that was to be performed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, through a grant from the Department of Energy, that would have looked at how the region would meet its goals for clean energy, climate and salmon recovery. That analysis, she said, would have examined needs down to the utility level and looked at opportunities for technical assistance for energy projects operated by the tribal governments.

It’s not clear, she said, if the Department of Energy will pull the salmon portion of that effort, or eliminate the entire scope of work.

At the time of the signing of the agreement, even the Bonneville Power Administration, loath to part with any of its dams, recognized the agreement as key to avoiding further litigation while providing more energy reliability.

Ending the agreement, along with delivering less certainty, will likely mean a loss of potential energy projects and add to the abandonment of grants and other Biden-era funding for clean energy projects throughout the U.S. — many in Republican congressional districts, such as in Eastern Washington — already announced by the Trump administration and outlined for elimination in the budget reconciliation bill that has passed the House and now is being considered by the Senate.

“Any slowdown in the development of those resources in a responsible and environmentally and culturally beneficial way is going to impact our climate commitments and our salmon recovery and tribal commitments,” Hirsh said.

Broken promises

At heart, the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, was a commitment to respect the treaty rights of the region’s tribal nations and pursue solutions to the survival of salmon and more.

“The federal government’s historic river management approach is unsustainable and will lead to salmon extinction,” said Gerald Lewis, Yakama Tribal Council chairman in a statement. “Courtroom battles cannot provide the innovative, holistic solutions we need. This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”

Under a different administration in coming years, there might be hope for restoration of the agreement and a recommitment to its provisions, but with lost momentum and with a hastening approach of extinction for at least some wild salmon stocks.

“We reserved the right to actually catch fish,” said Jeremy Takala, chair of the Yakama Fish and Wildlife Committee, “not merely the right to dip our nets into barren waters.”

Everett Herald: Editorial: A loss for Northwest tribes, salmon and energy

Recently, Gov. Ferguson signed legislation raising fees for hunting and fishing licenses by nearly 40% and increasing the Discover Pass from $30 to $45. In a time of severe statewide budget deficits, revenue generation through Washington’s recreation economy is a reminder of the other recreation-based economic opportunities that we are missing out on throughout the state as a result of our nearly extinct salmon and steelhead populations and sick waterways, namely the lower Snake River.

In the U.S., the sports fishing industry generates $230.5 billion annually and supports 1.1 million jobs. In rural areas especially, spending on gear rentals, guide services and licenses can serve as a huge force of economic stimulus. Currently, however, many communities along the lower Snake are missing out. Many salmon and steelhead populations are too close to extinction to be fishable, and the river itself has been dammed into a series of too hot reservoirs – sometimes with toxic algal blooms – that most recreationists choose to avoid.

I urge our members of Congress to move us on a pathway toward healthy rivers, abundant salmon and thriving local economies through comprehensive solutions like the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. Let’s duplicate the Klamath, where salmon are already rebounding less than two years later, numerous rapids have been uncovered and recreation is ballooning. If we instead continue to allow salmon to go extinct, it would be a failure by the government to uphold its treaty obligations and prevent us from realizing a massive economic opportunity.

Chris Pinney

Walla Walla

Spokesman-Review: Investing in salmon would boost regional economy

May 25, 2025
By Stan Kuick, Richland

Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s recent remarks on the Lower Snake River dams and claim that dam removal would be “going backward” ignores decades of research showing that restoring a free-flowing Lower Snake River is essential to recovering Columbia Basin salmon populations.

Large dams are no longer being built in the U.S. In fact, they are being removed, especially in the Northwest, with a 100% success rate in improving fish runs.

These four dams are not irreplaceable. They produce about 3% of the region’s energy, mostly in the spring when demand is low, and studies show their output can be replaced with cleaner, more seasonally appropriate alternatives like solar energy. Barge traffic on the river has dropped 50% since the 1990s, despite large subsidies, and expanded rail infrastructure will offer a competitive alternative. Irrigation needs can be met with a restored river.

If we are to “think boldly,” as Secretary Wright suggests, we must move forward, not backward, by breaching the four Lower Snake River dams and replacing their services with available alternatives. A free-flowing Lower Snake River will be a rafting and paddling paradise, a hiking destination with trails along a finally healthy river and a mecca for salmon fishing.