Hydro power (i.e. dams) is the only “gravity” system worth exploiting.
But nooooo....dams kill the little fishies.
Hydro power (i.e. dams) is the only “gravity” system worth exploiting. But nooooo....dams kill the little fishies.
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The 1930s Hydro dams (construction began at Grand Coulee and Bonneville in 1933; Bonneville was completed in 1938 and Grand Coulee in 1941) on the Columbia River killed off the second largest run of Sockeye salmon in the world after Bristol Bay, Alaska where the push for a gigantic placer (open pit) mine threatens the existence of that run of sockeye. People eat salmon.
Hydro dams on the Columbia River killed a primary source of food in America, contributing to major job losses in the commercial fishing industry, as well as contributing to the US loss of self-sufficiency in food production (helping the US become a net importer of food) and lowering the US Balance of Trade drastically.
You cannot live, if you cannot eat. Killing your sources of food is always a bad idea, like burying prime top soil farmland under 20 feet of fill to make shopping centers and parking lots ; unless people like importing their food from Canada, Mexico, various South American countries, China and elsewhere. Dependency on foreign sources of food is even more disastrous a policy than depending of foreign countries to manufacture essential goods.
“Little fishies,” indeed!