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Comment by kevin42 | Hacker News Reader

Idahoan here.

Just a guess here, but most people don't realize how pristine and beautiful it really is here. The reason I mention that is, outdoor activities like hunting fishing, camping, boating, etc. are a huge part of people's lives here. We have massive areas of protected wilderness.

My point is, as conservative as it is here, I think even our conservatives care more for the environment than average, because they spend a lot of time enjoying it.

It's a similar thing with wildlife. The avid hunters are often the biggest protectors of habitats. Same with fisherman and rivers and streams.

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>how pristine and beautiful it really is here. The

Keep talking like that on the internet and it will rapidly take a turn for the worse.

Colorado used to be a lot like Idaho then it achieved a "brand image" as a vacation spot, after about a generation of people retiring to their vacation spot and people moving there because they can and the state is in a tailspin (being an early adopter on weed probably didn't help but that's beside the point). Now the cost of living is skyrocketing and Denver/Boulder seem to be hell bent on recreating all the bad (bad for people who aren't wealthy, that is) decisions of a certain west coast state.

Economy, people, natural environment, no place can be highly favorable to all three. You can make big bucks and enjoy nature all you want in CA but the rest of your life will be a rat race. You can live a nice life and make good money in some places on the east coast but god help you if you want to get outdoors once in awhile. There are still many highly rural states where you can enjoy nature and have a nice life but you won't be making big bucks there.

> Now the cost of living is skyrocketing and Denver/Boulder seem to be hell bent on recreating all the bad (bad for people who aren't wealthy, that is) decisions of a certain west coast state.

This is the net result of asset inflation. The North East and California got rich via big-bank (Federal Reserve and Wall St) driven asset inflation. People are logically cashing out and moving to lower cost of living areas.

What are the bad decisions?

Another Idahoan here. Agreed. The outdoors here is very valued. Idaho also has a lot of hydroelectric generation which I think also counts are renewable?

Yes, take hydro away and the entire conversation changes. Now... how many people actually understand the effect hydro has on the environment?

There is a reason that the big sandy beaches seen around highway 12 around McCall and Riggins are fairly rare in Idaho now.

Washingtonian here: they drill in the negative effects of hydro into our heads in high school civics class (but it’s primarily centered around fish). We still do it, but have began removing many of the older less productive dams in the state (eg on Elwa a few years back).

British Columbia has built about 125 new hydro plants in the last 30 years. The environmental studies take about 5 years and cost millions and employ many biologists and environmental specialists.

Negative effects can be mitigated if the plant is designed to take them in to account. Be it not changing flows and levels except very slowly to avoid stranding fish, keeping some water flowing past the intake structure to keep sediment moving, creating fish ladders, fish spawning channels, etc.

Hydro is really one of the least bad energy sources if you have to pick one.

Sure, for new dams. The ones built a hundred or more years ago are the ones with huge problems. Well, there is always a cost, the Columbia will never run free, for example.

There must be some solution to the huge problems. The entities operating and maintaining these old hydro electric facilities probably don't have the budgets to resolve the huge problems, but it is hard to believe the situation is so bad and so hopeless that we'd be better off removing all of the dams and installing natural gas turbines in their place.

Drove through Idaho on the way to Spokane from Omaha and was so struck by Coeur d'alene I made sure to go back for a vacation years later.

The panhandle is cool like that (we used to go to priest lake a lot), southern Idaho reminds me more of Utah (a lot of scrub and irrigated farming going on).

Also Idahoan here - but not sure that matters. No doubt it is pristine and beautiful here. But this implies that "conservatives" don't care about the environment where it's not pristine and beautiful. I don't think that's the case. I think that financial realities will always win out and what is happening in Idaho is a sufficient government distortion of the market to make these other technologies financially workable.

The folks who don't care about the environment are not conservatives in general, but the big money that owns the corporations that do resource extraction and their employees, who happen to be mostly in conservative areas. Which gives a lot of people the wrong idea about conservatives.

Plus a few ideologues who idolize the free market and don't care about externalities. Which also gives people the wrong idea about conservatives.

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