Free Republic

Business and Economics Editor Published 3/13/2002 8:16 PM QUERETARO, Mexico, March 13 (UPI) -- An uneasy calm returns to Venezuela. Beneath it, like water running underground, a host of separate currents are undermining the shaky reign of President Hugo Chávez. A week ago Guaicaipuro Lameda, ex-General, ex-head of the state-run oil company, PdVSA, ex-admirer of Chávez, said that the government's economic policies were condemning the country to worsening poverty and challenged the planning minister, Giordani, to a public debate. In Venezuela the planning ministry, it should be said, is more important than it sounds. The planning minister holds central responsibility...

Hydropower has always been touted as a clean source of generating electricity, despite of the facts that it displaces thousands of people from their natural abodes, destroys their lives and livelihoods and submerges huge amounts of lands and forests. Now, a new study claims that it is also accelerating global warming. […] The study is done by Washington State University the has found that during times of drawdown — a period in which the water level behind a dam is rapidly lowered — temperate reservoirs can produce up 20 times more methane than normal. …

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 31 — Federal fisheries officials in Seattle on Wednesday endorsed, with minor modifications, a plan for the government’s continued operation of the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. They said it did not jeopardize the survival of 13 stocks of salmon and steelhead that the government must protect under the Endangered Species Act. The endorsement, a draft analysis from the National Marine Fisheries Service, agreed with dozens of proposed protective actions that would provide enhanced measures to get juvenile fish past the dams as they swim seaward, improve habitat in the river and discourage predators...

From the eastern edge of Roosevelt Island, the past and perhaps the future of New York power are on display. Just south of the Roosevelt Island Bridge to Queens rise the smokestacks of KeySpan’s giant Ravenswood electricity generating station, a behemoth that runs on natural gas and fuel oil. North of the bridge, black cables snake out of the churning surface of the East River. They connect a makeshift control room inside an old shipping container on the island to a battery of futuristic mechanisms that could shape an energy future that does not pollute or use foreign oil —...

SPOKANE (AP) - Four dams on the Snake River continue to raise water temperatures to dangerously high levels for endangered salmon, an environmental group contends. The dams include Ice Harbor, which President Bush visited in late August to declare that federal efforts to restore salmon numbers were working. But the activist group American Rivers said Wednesday that even on the day of Bush's visit, the water temperature behind Ice Harbor Dam was 71 degrees, 3 degrees higher than the federal Clean Water Act standard of 68 degrees. ``Because of the lower Snake River dams, the water temperature in the river...

President Bush waded deeper into controversy over his environmental policies in the Pacific Northwest on Friday as he rejected calls for hydroelectric dams to be razed to make way for endangered migrating salmon. Bush viewed water ladders at Washington's Ice Harbor Lock and Dam, meant to help the fish get up and down the Snake River to spawn, after facing several thousand demonstrators angry about issues from the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq to proposed forest thinning in Oregon. On a break from his August vacation at his Texas ranch to visit states that were problems for the Republicans in the...