Let's not forget why these dams were built -- to control destructive flooding, ensure reliable water for agriculture, and provide electricity to those who didn't have it.

Sustainability at all costs has its own costs: the good which isn't done while waiting for the perfect.

It's hard to tell a family, sitting in the dark, who just lost their crops to flood or drought that they'll have to wait another 40-70 years for renewable power, and just have to deal with intermittent water access.

This!

In my experience, most people agree that ecology is _one of_ the priorities, but people who define themselves as ecologists tend to think to ecology as _the_ priority. In the end, while they think they advocate for a nicer world, they tend to alienate other people from the green path beacuse of their extremism.

The problem is our (as in the human's) environment and not exploiting it to the point where we kill ourselves out of existence. A bit of beer is okay, a lot of beer can cause a nasty hangover, too much beer and you kill yourself.

It wasn't even the primary reason in the modern america nature movement (and by modern I mean starting with the John Muir/Teddy roosevelt era, when some of these large dams started being built).

It was about keeping these places available to be enjoyed by everyone, not exploited for profits and destroyed for the benefit of the few. It's a public good and public resource.

Of course, let's not forget that John Muir was the primary opponent of the O'Shaughnessy Dam (Hetch Hetchy), which is a public resource (water supply for San Francisco).

Obviously, there are examples of protecting nature against private encroachment as well...but even if you set those aside, the core tension exists: we always have to prioritize between competing goals. Folks like Muir prioritize nature for nature's sake. Others prioritize giving water to millions of people. Neither group is wrong.

Not really. Muir argued that nature provided "spiritual nourishment" to people. Like I said in another comment, the argument was that nature was a public resource, so should be preserved so everyone could benefit and use the resource. Preserving "nature for natures sake" is a much more modern argument.

>Others prioritize giving water to millions of people. Neither group is wrong.

Given that the discussion has moved from "Is it worthwhile to protect nature from exploitation so all can enjoy it?" to include "Are we going to destroy the climate and with it our society", I think it's safe to say one group was wrong.

Sure, fine. I'm not trying to re-characterize Muir's beliefs for the sake of an argument. I'm agreeing that he had a reason to think nature itself was a public good. But then, so is the water supply. There's an inherent tension. Attempts to ignore this tension are over-simplifying the problem.

> Given that the discussion has moved from "Is it worthwhile to protect nature from exploitation so all can enjoy it?" to include "Are we going to destroy the climate and with it our society", I think it's safe to say one group was wrong.

Maybe. It doesn't change the question of whether or not Hetch Hetchy should exist, or if cattle should graze on public lands, or any of a thousand other issues of the same shape that have existed forever.

Also, frankly, there are plenty of folks who think the benefits of mitigating global warming are not worth the costs: if you believe that there's any limit on what we might do to stop the phenomenon, then you're one of them. It's a continuum, and absolutist positions on either side of the issue are more heat than light.

As per usual, we will end up in some middle ground as a society that satisfies nobody completely.

Protecting nature is both protecting ourselves and our interests. Sometimes extreme environmental harm comes with minimal benefit to anyone. Other times it’s the reverse where minimal harm results in vast benefits such as with the GPS network, generally it’s more balanced.

If anything the environmental argument is nature is extremely valuable, be sure the trade off is a net win for society.

While that's true, that's not a reason to ignore nature -- "nature" evolved over thousands of years to stay in balance. When man makes significant changes (like draining wetlands to turn into agriculture), then that balance is broken, and you can end up with catastrophic floods in developed areas.

Nature doesn't really care if new areas get flooded, that's just a new state of nature. But all of the people that were flooded out of their town care that the flood patterns changed due to the wetland loss.

Rather than creating a better-than-emergency solution up front, they could've created a more temporary solution with the intent of replacing it with a long term maintainable solution.

Consider as an analogous project temporary bridges which are built until construction of long lasting maintainable bridges are completed.

edit: I originally said "they should've", as if I were speaking from a place of authority, which I am absolutely not.

Yes, as they should. The issue is not doing environmental impact studies, but how long they take, how expensive they are, and how opaque the process is. The assumptions, methods and data should be as public as possible so objections can be made and dealt with logically.

As an example, my parents live in a relatively conservative location and the public utility decided that they were going to replace all their coal power plants with wind power. There was a huge uproar and their response was “here is our model and our data, please find plausible scenarios where wind power isn’t cheaper than coal.” The opposition died away because it was obvious that the switch was the best move.

Of course many geoengineering projects likely are way more beneficial over their lifetime, but the analysis must be done to look beyond immediate benefits to ensure we don't destabilize the future in the process. To do things right we have to be better at making calls on which technologies are needed yesterday or today versus tomorrow or never.

Sustainability now is far more important than in times past, as we are now reaching the ceiling of earth's carrying capacity. When we exceed that we risk generations of (or permanent) suffering. As our technology gets better, carrying capacity increases, but our sustainable capacity is far lower than the temporary capacity certain sugar rush solutions provide. These minimal to negative LTV solutions are foolish, not virtuous.

I agree that message is hard to deliver to people, hopefully our species gets wiser so that we won't need to ever have conversations like that in the future. But the only way to reach that point is to break the cycle of unsustainable growth.

So much water is controlled and diverted on the Colorado that it is rare that it reaches the Gulf of California, yet we rarely talk about the havoc that has wreaked on the communities in Mexico downstream from the dams.

The death of the Aral Sea is a more well known environmental disaster.

> Sustainability at all costs has its own costs

You know what else has its own costs? Choosing to live in a place with flooding and without electricity. Same as following poor farming practices.

You can't take bad decisions from others and use shuffle the responsibility onto the environment. "Oh looks like we can't do the sustainable thing because then we'd have to deal with the consequences of our own actions."

Choosing only to settle in places without flooding (or any other natural disaster) and with infrastructure already built out is what some might characterize as unreasonably limiting.

Citation please; and who is this "we"? Major infrastructure failures are rare and large expensive assets are generally well looked after. This Mullaperiyar dam situation sounds very concerning, but it has failed more slowly than the empire that built it. It wasn't built this century and it wasn't built last century either. It was built the century before that.

It is not obvious why this situation has arisen, but it is pretty much certain that the builders of the dam have no regrets and didn't forget anything. Nor did people around the dam for many generations.

I remember seeing an old video depicting the development of the Florida Everglades, probably from the 40's or 50's, forget where I saw it. The narration was the most infuriating example of mans hubris as the narration was set over footage of bulldozers plowing down trees and brush. I can not recall the narration in detail but it went something like "Man has learned to conquer the land and bend nature to his will..."

Many of the dams we're talking about here were built with this insane hubris. A time when building technology was advanced and we could seemingly defeat the laws of nature with sky scrapers that reach into the heavens and dams that hold back the mightiest of rivers. As if the only goal was the defeat of nature and make a crap load of money in the process...

I think the issue is less the lack of knowledge, and more the lack of political will to meaningfully tackle the problem.

People see what a good job you've done getting a dam built or a bridge constructed, they vote for you. People don't vote for you because they didn't suffer the consequences of reduced maintenance. People vote against you if you raise taxes to pay for maintenance or if they're inconvenienced by shutdowns while they repair your dam or bridge.

The problem is systemic.

The work is being done, probably not at a scale or pace big enough to meet the needs of the infrastructure (see: all those old and ailing bridges across the country) but it is being done at some level.

We could fulfill the world's nuclear waste storage needs with a couple landfills if the will was there (though any geologist will tell you are better options than near surface storage).

From an ecological perspective nuclear is the best option by a mile because the amount of stuff you need to pull out of the ground, move around, use and dispose of is so small per energy produced.

Tiny local hydro (with natural dam) is the future, but getting a building permit is near impossible. (I leave it to the reader to guess why)

We need to switch off electricity for everything except (low power) computers and networks. = hand pumped water, wood stove for water heater, earth cellar as fridge!

Mass transports are completely over, grow/breed/preserve your food locally!

Even ignoring the CO2 aspect, the particulate emissions from this would be quite problematic in any sort of dense area. Not to mention what fraction of those particulates would end up inside the house...

Also, you don't mention heating (houses, not water). That is a huge part of energy consumption in many parts of the world.

What has changed such that you could not remake the power grid? Do we lack the raw materials or know how?

For a commodore user you are very optimistic about things getting better!

More nuclear plants are getting closed than built.

In short: ((by 2035)) nuclear generating capacity ((will be)) 7.7% out of predicted total electricity generating capacity.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#History

They, however, built renewables like crazy.

Not sure if this is a good example of "know how to build dams". It's a dam foolish design, built on an earthquake fault zone that's been made unstable by the excavation that's being done to build the dam. The design has been changed to include this ridiculous earthfill section (https://www.sitecproject.com/about-site-c/site-c-project-com...) to compensate for the weirdness of the geography there. It's probably going to fail catastrophically at some point and destroy a lot of homes downstream from it, and the controversy over the project basically caused the downfall of BC's last government.

The true cost will be somewhere around 3x the expected, in the long run. They lied through their teeth to offload the lemon onto the feds.

Huge portions of the Comox Valley and Coquitlam are precarious; a strong shake will send a wave of water that will wipe out thousands of homes.

https://thenarwhal.ca/fracking-induced-earthquakes-buffer-zo...

> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/sep/12/they-are-barb...

A lot of severe stress environmental damage could have been prevented if we had built more nuclear power plants.

Compare that to what are considered massive world news nuclear power plant tragedies like Chernobyl (about 31 direct deaths, long term effects are up for debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...) and Fukushima (1 direct death, low counts of radiation poisoning that can be attributed to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... ).

Not to be pedantic, but...

Neither can many other pollutants, but it can easily be detected, in fact it's probably one of the most easily detected.

If the choice is between environmental damage from fracking or coal mining and deaths from coal pollution or flooding a valley somewhere...

The Guardian kind of forgot to mention these as factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il%C4%B1su_Dam

Governments ignoring or not funding that is their problem.

"we always forget that maintenance in perpetuity is much much harder"

I imagine that part of the problem is that the heavy maintenance for large engineering projects begins years or decades after completion. Upon completion, it's hard to imagine these huge creations falling apart; add to this an element of "this won't be my problem (I won't be here in 50 years)" and you've got a recipe for short-term thinking - especially by those who don't have the expertise (read: the politicians and bureaucrats).

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2015/05/19/americas-infrastructu... [2] John Oliver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8

Nuclear, you can spin down a plant and balance generating capacity elsewhere.

Bridges, you can provide access via detours or ferries.

Almost every other mega-engineering project we have is network related: in that there exists alternate connectivity.

Dams are intrinsically linked to their topography and hydrology. Where can you source replacement water at that volume? Where can you put excess water? They essentially have to be hotfixed in-place, while in operation.

Drain down, dig a bypass, temporary dams inside both sides of the bypass, do the offline / bypassed work, reverse the procedure. Maybe the second time we'll have the foresight to make the bypass more easily serviceable again.

Btw, the time scales are quite long even if it can be done. Filling Lake Mead took from late 1934 to may 1937 or about 2.5 years. Assuming the downstream infrastructure can take double the normal flows, you'd need 2.5 years to drain and another 2.5 years to refill after the maintenance is done. The opportunity costs are huge, it seems at least worthwhile to check if you can do the works underwater with robots or something like that.

This rings especially true in relation to much of our work in tech, as I think you were pointing to. It’s easy to run an AB test and look at the win, forgetting that for every new thing, you now have to support it. For the easy to maintain stuff, you might even forget how it works, so the team of ten who built it turns into a single part time maintainer.

Our whole human society is based on outwitting nature. Previously, open fractures were uniformly fatal. Now, they are routinely treated. Previously, you had to get infected with a disease to get immunity, now we have vaccines. Previously, crossing oceans was a rare event, maybe a small animal got trapped on a log in the right current? Now we can cross oceans in a matter of hours. Previously, you relied on your own skin to try to keep warm. Humans, however, learned they could keep warm by wearing animal skins or other clothes.

All of human progress has been built on outwitting nature.

How can I discover if some action X is an attempt to outwit nature?

This is the same problem I have with capitalism. The end result is never good enough. Why not perfect one thing? There's a reason why so much software has lasted decades and it isn't because it gets a daily update.