The Region Fiddles As Dam Burners
Advance
© James Buchal, January 3, 2005
A decline in courage may be the most striking
feature which an outside observer notices in the
West in our days. . . . Such a decline in courage
is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups
and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of
loss of courage by the entire society. Of course
there are many courageous individuals but they have
no determining influence on public life. . . .
Should one point out that from ancient times decline
in courage has been considered the beginning of the
end?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1978)
Throughout the Northwest, hapless citizens labor
to support the most expensive environmental
boondoggle in the world, application of the
Endangered Species Act to the dams and reservoirs
throughout the Columbia Basin that collectively
constitute the Federal Columbia River Power System (FCRPS).
At the behest of environmentalist litigants,
the Region's self-appointed salmon czar, Judge James
A. Redden of the United States District Court in
Portland has done his best to encourage the
federal government to spend more and more money,
setting aside the 2000 biological opinion governing
dam and reservoir operations as inadequate. Judge
Redden even struck down a rare Bush Administration
initiative to reduce the fish taxes by roughly $60
million by reducing summer spill, notwithstanding
proof that
only a handful of endangered fish might benefit,
including some of the same fish subject to a
federally-approved harvest rate of over 30% .
One reason that Judge Redden made the decisions
he did is that no one before him put up an effective
fight against the environmentalists. Since the
Region's state governments are for all practical
purposes allied with the environmentalists, the only
hope for getting the truth to Judge Redden came from
entities such as Northwest Irrigation Utilities, the
Public Power Council, Franklin County Farm Bureau
Federation, Grant County Farm Bureau Federation,
Washington Farm Bureau Federation, Pacific Northwest
Generating Cooperative, the Ports of Lewiston,
Whitman County, and Morrow, and even Shaver
Transportation Company, all of which had intervened
in the case before him. But they filed no claims of
their own, instead echoing the government's
positions, allowing environmentalists to litigate
whether salmon recovery efforts were funded with
sufficient certainty, rather than whether the
Endangered Species Act actually required the salmon
spending in the first place.
On November 30, 2004, NOAA Fisheries released a
new biological opinion proposing to continue the
spending boondoggle at a record clip, and beating a
hasty retreat from any attempt to stop the waste.
The new opinion continues the great hoax that dam
operations jeopardize the continued existence of
salmon, taking the position that jeopardy is only
avoided by additional salmon spending, called "non-hydro
offsets for habitat, hatcheries and harvest".
The Bush Administration's decision ignores
remarkable upsurges in salmon runs that demonstrate
that dam operations are not jeopardizing the
continued existence of salmon:
Judge Redden promptly set a deadline of December
30, 2004 for any party wishing to file claims
against this new biological opinion. On that day,
the environmentalists filed a
fifty-two page complaint, but none of the other
parties met the deadline. Once again, the stage is
set for the environmentalists to complain the
government is not doing enough, and for the
government and others to say that everything is just
fine.
But everything is not fine. The new biological
opinion is a pack of lies that falsely blames the
dams for every imaginable source of mortality,
presumably in order to justify the ever-growing
"mitigation" expenditures. NOAA gets both the law
and the facts wrong, and after this many years,
their errors can no longer be ascribed to mere
incompetence.
As to the law, the purpose of a biological opinion
is to assess whether dam operations jeopardize the
continued existence of listed fish. NOAA does make
an initial, twisted attempt to assess the effects of
dam operations, using a bogus computer model and
such input parameters as overstated turbine
mortality estimates from the 1950s. But then NOAA
tacks on "cumulative impacts", which it defines,
roughly speaking, to be anything bad that is likely
to happen to salmon anywhere in the Northwest, under
the assumption that everyone other than dam
operators will be allowed to kill salmon hand over
fist for the indefinite future.
As to the facts, NOAA casts aside decades of
research to conclude that smolt transportation kills
fish and finds, contrary to the opinions of its own
scientists, that there is a powerful relationship
between tiny incremental changes in river flow and
salmon survival. In the biological opinion, NOAA
goes so far as to model the effect of drying up the
Columbia Basin Project, and dumping the "conserved"
water in the River, claiming (falsely) that big
increases in survival would result. Every section
of the biological opinion is littered with junk
science, eloquent testimony to the uselessness (or
malignancy) of Bush's political appointees.
While the Region sleeps, the environmentalists do
not. Their
new complaint and
notice of intent make it clear that they seek
not only to set aside the new biological opinion as
inadequate, but also to enjoin such things as
"producing power with water otherwise necessary to
save fish" and "delivering water for irrigation". A
December 6, 2004 editorial in the New York Times
confirms that dam removal remains the long term goal
of the enemies within. If the Region cannot rouse
itself to do more than tell Judge Redden to trust
the government, instead of telling him the truth, we
can all expect, at best, even higher fish costs in
the future.
© James Buchal, January 3, 2005
You have permission to reprint this article, and
are encouraged to do so. The sooner people figure
out what's going on, the quicker we'll have more
fish in the rivers.
(Source
URL for chart)
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