Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

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Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems

False.

A river is not a static thing. Nor a lake. Rivers, lakes, swamps, bodies of water change over thousands, and even hundreds of years.

A lake today, is a river tomorrow, and vice versa. Terrain erodes, shifts, rivers dry up, or appear from nothing.

Go back in time, in 10k increments, and see how a local area changes.

To claim that a hydroelectric dam is massively damaging, is not valid, not even remotely. A dam does not destroy ecosystems, it changes them. One disappears, another appears.

And considering that some beaver dams can be seen from space, and dwarf the size of our dams, the idea that daming a river, is unnatural, is absurd!

This ridiculous mantra that dams are bad, needs to end. It needs to end, now.

If we embraced dams, we could entirely wean off of hydrocarbons, and move to h2 generation, using existing pipelines in North America.

And no, the absurd assertion that h2 is hard to store and use, is not valid either.

I swear, there is so little logic to the environmental movement.

Everything is bad, everything terrible, and so we are left with te worst outcome possible.

You're right - building a dam and waiting for a thousand years will result in a new stable ecosystem with biodiversity comparable to the original. The problem is that natural systems need 'settling time' to adapt to changing conditions. The immediate impact in dams is a dramatic drop in biodiversity, that's not even a controversial claim. It's great that the ecosystem will rebound after I'm dead but I don't think that's what most people are concerned about. Deforestation and desertification of formerly healthy riparian ecosystems isn't a trivial concern. Not all 'changes' in nature are equally beneficial to humans.

I strongly disagree. When humans alter the natural environment, it’s inherently destructive. Even if a new environment arises in its place, we have destroyed what was there before.

That said, the environmental destruction is worth it when it comes to hydroelectric power.

I think the comment above argues that every change that happens in nature is a destruction of what was there before, and that that's an inherently natural process, whether humans are responsible or not.

I assume that the problem, like global anthropogenic climate change, isn't change in and of itself, it's change faster than biological systems can adapt to or evolve for – resulting in mass extinction events or radical losses of biodiversity.

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