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Comment by waynecochran | Hacker News Reader

I live near the Columbia River where Google, Facebook, Microsoft all have data centers that rely on hydroelectric power. The dams produce clean energy, provide waterway for barges, prevent flooding, allow for recreation, and can back up water at night when demand for electricity is low. As the salmon fisherman will tell you, the salmon have adapted to the fish ladders and are spawning in the Columbia’s tributaries. Yet there are still political forces that want to breach these dams. Nothing is ideal, but hydroelectric energy is about as close as you can get to ideal in the Pacific Northwest.

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> As the salmon fisherman will tell you...

This is objectively false. Salmon populations are more often than not considered in decline. The fish haven't "figured it out". They marginally persist solely due to intensive management that plainly consists of atrocities for species less popular in the media [0][1], millions spent on fish ladder theatre, and hatcheries.

The dominant mechanism in support of the fisheries being hatcheries that are basically a strangely laundered welfare program for indigenous, sport and professional fishermen each to their licensed proportion.

If you live in the Dalles, and you don't know the Columbia basin damns are an ecological nightmare.. it's unconscionable.

Not to mention the displacement of indigenous peoples from important traditional regions, the complete loss of stochastic annual flows feeding nutrient cycles in the river... etc etc.

Im no eco-activist. I don't necessarily think removing the dams would improve anything for anyone at this point, but if we're going to advocate for doing things a better way in the future - let's be honest: dams are horrible. The dams on the Columbia will eventually result in no salmon, no matter how hard we try. It's inhospitable. They used to run all the way up the snake into Idaho. Into IDAHO. Never again.

It's ok to advocate for energy, and the things you believe in, but let's not be belligerent about it - be honest.

In the Astoria maritime museum (several years ago now) I remember reading a passage that was proud of "..taming the wild Columbia, and turning it into a beautiful series of lakes and streams to wonderfully facilitate shipping and recreation.."

Some hutzpah, to think we know what we're doing.

[0] https://www.audubon.org/news/the-corps-cormorants-and-cull [1] https://www.marinemammalcenter.org/news/response-to-columbia...

Just in case anyone who isn't from the PNW is wondering at the energy and number of replies OP has gotten about this:

Water quality and the salmon-centered river/stream ecosystem is, like, the local environmental thing everyone gets slammed with in school. Your biology class has you go look for arthropods. Your chemistry class has you go test for pH and dissolved oxygen and fertilizer contamination. Way more species (including plants) rely on the salmon than you'd guess but oh boy do you learn about it in a PNW school system.

And on the other side, the history of the dams is the history of the growth of the Northwest -- "your power is turning our darkness to dawn, so roll on, Columbia, roll on" is in the Washington state folk song and it's not even an aberration re: the region's folk songs / culture. ("Skagit Valley, Skagit Valley, / They would turn you to a mud pond / To run the Coca Cola coolers in Seattle, U.S.A.")

I just thought this would be interesting to contribute because I've found people from other regions sometimes have an ambient awareness more on the level of "Um, I guess there are fish in the water? And runoff seems bad?" and that just isn't possible for locals here, so that's why it's all somewhat heightened.

That's an interesting song in its own right. It was written under commission for the federal government by Woody Guthrie, and it was really about two of his favorite topics: improving the lives of workers and stopping fascism.

    "Now in Washington and Oregon you can hear the factories hum,
    Making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum
    There goes a flying fortress, to fight for Uncle Sam
    Spawned on the great Columbia by the big Grand Coulee dam"

"[Woody Guthrie's] 30 days at [the Bonneville Power Administration (the relevant hydroelectric institution)] is considered one of the single most productive bursts in his fruitful songwriting career."

https://www.bpa.gov/news/AboutUs/History/Guthrie/Pages/defau...

It's salmon all the way down!

From South Louisiana, it's the same for us growing up only instead of a dam it's the offshore drilling. We learn about the ecology of the delta, then go cheer the Saints in their black and gold jerseys (Who dat!).

> I don't necessarily think removing the dams would improve anything for anyone at this point

It's early days yet, but at least on the Elwha some of the signs are very promising: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-el...

I don't always express myself clearly, but I meant that in a more holistic sense. If you were to construct a Venn diagram of remove vs stay in the case of many of the dams in the Columbia river basin, it's hard to objectively weigh the costs and benefits without a perspective. Within that perspective is an implicit number of assumptions that fashion a bias.

The problem is the Columbia is immensely powerful, and as such it's impact on our society or environment with or without the dam create such a incomprehensible web of dependencies that it predicting the outcome would be akin to seeing the future. You can't.

The Elwha is an amazing story, but that dam was in disuse long before it was dismantled. The case for removing it was one-sided.

Back in middle school we went on a trip and saw them doing the deconstruction of the elwha dam. They were around halfway done. We stood on the banks and saw the process of the reservoir turning back into a river. There was around 50 feet of sediment with old flooded trees sticking out. It is hard to overstate the effects these dams have on nature. Seeing the photos of the elwha coming back to life is always awesome :)

Another problem of dams is the accumulation of heavy metals and other toxic sludge behind the dam itself (usually washes downstream in minimal quantities) and the deoxigenation of the watershed due to lack of flow.

On that note (interestingly and anecdotally) many of these dams are inundated with ash and sediment that should have flushed downstream from Mt St Helens!

The impact of these dams is just incomprehensible.

Edit: My comment concerning salmon was poor. The fisherman I know who fish above Bonneville, The Dalles, and even above the John Day dams do catch salmon have good reports, but this is only local and anecdotal. We know there are places where salmon are spawning where they haven't in 80 years which gives hope, but doesn't provide a good overall indicator. The dams have been a tough on the Salmon.

Thanks for that. I hate to nit pick, but the issues surrounding the dams in the Columbia river basin are so complex and frustrating.. I honestly don't even know who or what is right at any given moment. I've torched friendships debating culling - not even sure I was right or they were. It's just horrible. Everything about it.

The dams are hugely beneficial to society. The produce energy and expedite inland commerce, and that makes us all better off. At the same time everything comes at a cost, and the costs are easily just as catastrophic.

I've seen rivers three times the size of the Columbia that have no dams. They are like the arteries of the Earth. They wend and breathe through existence itself. Heave and fall feet in hours. To see this, to be near it is to feel everything upstream. It's like looking into the night sky, but instead of making you feel small it connects you.

The Columbia is dead. I get itchy about it because we've lost that and no one even knows anymore. We long ago muted a voice that used to sing to us, but people will only consider the loss in economic terms - salmon fisheries. We can't even talk about things like humans anymore.

I appreciate your words. The passion and the way you write about nature is great. I connect with it. It does remind me that humans have become numb to the world around us. That we are just animals dependent on the ecosystem and we disturb it at our own peril.

> The Columbia is dead.

And you haven't even mentioned the Hanford Nuclear Reservation yet.

I volunteered at Audubon's WetNet (Wetlands Conservation Network) for most of the 90s. Their mission was to save the salmon from going extinct. So doing stuff like saving habitat (waterways, wetlands, shorelines, etc), keeping water cooler, opposing new fisheries (the final nail in the coffin for wild runs), etc.

People just don't get how bad things have become.

When GWB was selected President, I just couldn't continue.

I agree there is a delicate balance here but the thing is, if you let global climate change run wild, the salmon, and a lot of other critters, including us, don't stand a chance, with a dam generating electricity and a fish ladder, they stand a chance and so do we.

Hydo, Wind, Solar, and yes, Nuke, probably all are needed to overcome this challenge. Until some perfect thing comes along, fusion or whatever, we will ned to make decisions between the various imperfect options.

> Until some perfect thing comes along, fusion or whatever

Fusion won’t be perfect. It will also require resources, and generate waste. The truth is that you cannot have something from nothing and any energy extraction system will need materials (metals, rare earths, concrete) and change land use patterns.

Sockeye salomon returning from the Pacific via Columbia R. to the Stanley basin in Idaho dropped from over 25000 to a few dozen. That is not adapting, rather, approaching extinction. https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/sockeye-salmon-return-...

Salmon in the Pacific Northwest on the whole is dying. The entire salmon fishery will go extinct. Don't know where you get your information from, but Salmon in the Pacific Northwest is going the way of the cod fisheries in the North American Eastern seaboard.

Don't believe what your "salmon fisherman" will tell you - their whole purpose in life, their raison d'etre is to fish the salmon until every single last one is gone. Then they will move to another place to fish.

The fish have not adapted to the fish ladders and no salmon fisherman will tell you that. The dams do a lot but helping fish or the ecology is not on that list.

Its great that these huge corporations use hydro power for greenwashing, but there is a limit to how much hydro any river can generate and it would be great to use these sources for regular people and/or when there is no solar/wind.

Regular people are quite often beneficiaries of the products that these companies provide.

Keep in mind that to a certain extent electricity is fungible.

If data centres weren't using the clean energy, something else could use it that's currently being produced in a more dirty way.

Don't forget, E. Washington has a lot of wind farms going, it's pretty windy, there is a reason the Columbia River Gorge is so popular for wind surfing.

Also, placing server farms in northern latitudes is smart from a cooling perspective, you can use the Economizers on the CRAC units more often when it is cool outside.

Agree E. WA is a great place for server farms.

Unfortunately, lately there is a push for lower network latency, and in response to that, there are now a lot of Edge Cloud clusters being built near urban areas where various fossil fuel power plants to meet peak loads or load leveling are often used.

Putting these edge cloud server farms in those areas will cause the carbon producing facilities to be activated more often. That low latency comes at a price to the environment more so than the centralized ones positioned in places like E. WA.

The salmon have adapted to the fish ladders

That's a strange use of "adapted", there. The logic here seems to be:

"Sure, salmon and trout numbers have gone down -- but not all runs have been completely wiped out. Therefore, they have "adapted" and there's really nothing to worry about. All so-called scientists talking about a 98 percent reduction in return counts since 1880, and warning that some runs are on the verge of extinction due to the combined effects of habitat reduction and climate change -- they have no idea what they're talking about, really."

Is the decline caused by the dams though? From where I'm standing (half a planet away), it's not so clear, they could go extinct and be perfectly adapted at the same time.

Consumption really can lead to the development of clean energy sources. People need to develop a growth-mindset on this issue.

Consumption cannot scale to infinity. There's little harm in periodically taking account of the externalities of the things we value.

We don't need to it to scale to infinity. It's a weird objection. It's like saying human lifespans can't grow to infinity so we should stop trying to be healthy.

The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years. We can do more with less like we've been doing for centuries.

For example, the US economy is bigger than ever, yet we emit less carbon than we did 10 years ago, both total and on a per capita basis.

> We don't need to it to scale to infinity. It's a weird objection.

Is it? The proposition was that folks should have a growth mindset about consumption. Yet we're already reaching the limits of long term sustainably. I'm not advocating to stop trying to do better. Rather that we shouldn't assume we can indefinitely.

> The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years. We can do more with less like we've been doing for centuries.

Have we really been doing more with less for so long? Or have we just learned to extract more and more nonrenewable resources more quickly than ever before?

For example if your lifetime worth of waste had to remain in your own yard then how would it compare to those from past generations?

We should grow the good things and shrink the bad things.

That is very easy to say and hard to know how.

I do not think that our economic system depends on economic growth in reality. (It would be sick to depend on economic growth in PPP terms for economic justice) The entrenched power structure's path of least resistance for maintaining their position is economic growth. That is a different thing.

> The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years

It’s not truth. It’s a form of techno-libertarianism bordering on religion. I can’t find a single working scientist in any relevant field who believes this claim. Most scientists believe we are on our way out, along with the biosphere we’ve destroyed.

Engine pollution and particulates have dropped significantly over the past decade. Much of this is due to tighter tolerances and electronic controls.

Yes, and on the other hand, there are more cars on the road.

Also, let's wave the magic wand and make all cars non-polluting during operation (not even dust from the brake rotors).

Where do the natural materials which are used to make the car come from?

What about the materials which make the road network that the cars drive on?

What about the natural environments which get turned into suburbs because mobility is "easy"?

How much of the surface of the earth is co-opted for human-dominated and human-determined?

I know I'm not going to change your mind because that would require changing your whole worldview, but I would push back on the notion that this is a "techno-libertarian religion". It certainly has experts that endorse the view. A whole field of them. In fact, it has its own term in the discipline of economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)

You can be an expert and a techno-libertarian ideologist, though. Particularly in economics, which is a field rife with unverifiable dogma.

Besides, considering that we are living on a finite world, we don’t need to merely decouple economy from materials, because any use at all will at some point exhaust available resources. Sure, we can say “fuck everything, I’m going to keep going on as usual because in 100 years I’ll be dead and they’ll have that one wonderful technological panacea that will change everything (be it Mars colonisation, asteroid mining, or anything else)”. I don’t know how to call that attitude except for “techno-libertarian dogmatism”.

We're living in a finite world, but we're going to have finite growth.

How likely is it that phenomena will cause a net improvement with population and per-person consumption increases?

Jevons Paradox also comes into play.

Does Jevons Paradox extend indefinitely?

What I mean is, e.g., when the cost of energy drops people's energy bills in general do not go down, the have warmer homes. That has been known for a while. But is it still true if everybody can keep their houses at 21 degrees permanently? At thatr point does a reduction in energy costs reduce their bills or do they find something else to spend the energy on?

Judging by the lifestyles of billionaires I don't think human appetites should be underestimated. Especially on a planet of billions of people.

Billionaires tbf are a self-selecting sample of people who made it past $1m, $10m and $100m, and still decided to keep going.

As a % of the population, I don't know how many have those traits - 10%? 1%? - but with a population also numbered in billions, "enough to totally screw the planet" is a reasonable guess.

Yes. They need treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Really? Like in the next 200 years? That’s ridiculous. The scenarios from IPCC envision a future of prosperity, albeit at a reduced level than if we could somehow drastically cut carbon emissions.

Perhaps not infinity, but if we manage to exploit space then it'd be close enough.

That's a big 'if'. And IMO pointless to explore seriously until we can sustain ourselves on our native planet.

I'm not talking about expansion into space (yet), but simply consuming resources from space. Energy, materials, etc.

We definitely should explore that (and are).

This logic is really no different from stupid Bitcoiner logic that PoW induces demand for cheap clean energy.

Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.

> I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.

Because Bitcoin literally is designed to waste electricity on proof of work. The Ethereum network has the processing power of a Raspberry Pi and wastes fantastic amounts of electricity to deliver that paltry power. Bitcoin alone uses more power than all of Google's operations.

I doubt that the total power used by the world's yachts and private jets per year is even half the power the Bitcoin network literally wastes.

Even worse: Bitcoin alone uses as much as the datacenter sector as a whole, not just Google.

energy is not wasted by proof of work, it is valuably expended to achieve the immutability of the ledger

Sorry, this is Poe's Law territory. I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic. A blockchain doesn't need some wasteful mechanism to be immutable. Boring old cryptographic signing does the same thing. But Bitcoin et al want their ludicrous "No one can be trusted! Except all the points of trust required to make the system works of course!" system.

> Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy?

Now this is probably not a good comparison, but the first thing that i thought of was something along the lines of: "Burning tires is bad for the environment, so we should burn more tires until some factors force us to stop doing that."

Surely if there's a recognizably bad behavior, we should be able to stop doing it without being forced to, right? Where did the idea of being cautious in service of a potentially better future go? Why do we have such an exploitative mindset?

> I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.

I don't have a yacht and i don't see why people should have them either, outside of sports or transporting many people (albeit there are more efficient ways).

I don't have a private jet and i don't see why people should have them either, maybe apart from transporting government officials in certain situations. Actually, planes in general are overused and people should rely more on trains, which are environmentally friendly.

My "gaming rig" draws around 100-200W in total under load, with a 65W CPU and a GPU that's power limited to 50% of its total power draw for longevity purposes. My homelab servers run off of 35W CPUs with iGPUs and both of them run with a total wall draw of 100W. Honestly, outside of media production, there is no reason for overpowered devices, plus the developers of games and much other software should be more concerned about doing more with less.

And i don't own a personal car, thanks to the public transportation infrastructure in my country not being crippled. I studied for both my Bachelor and Master degree in the city and never felt the need for a car due to being able to take the bus, tram or trolley bus wherever i needed to go. And even when you need a car (e.g. living in the countryside or needing to transport tools or other things), you shouldn't got for wasteful ones.

In summary, the human existence is one of excess, unnecessary luxury and waste. We absolutely should address that.

Or even "the cloud."

The opposite is true. People already have this unhealthy growth mindset in regards to energy production, when in fact the only possible way of averting the worse disasters of global warming at this point is to adopt a de-growth mindset. There is absolutely no way to replace all dirty energy with clean energy in the 10-20 years we have left to avoid terrible global waing (>2 degrees), and not even in the maybe 30-40 years left before catastrophic global warming (>3 degrees).

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