Blog: Hydropower can help solve climate change, groups tell Biden
Conservationists in California and across the West are deeply skeptical of hydropower, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s a long history of government agencies damming spectacular canyons, choking off rivers, obliterating fish populations and cutting off access to Indigenous peoples. … But despite the environmental damage they’ve done, many dams also generate electricity that is free of planet-warming carbon emissions. Tearing down dams can revitalize ecosystems, but it can also contribute to a climate crisis that is making rivers around the world drier in some cases, more prone to flooding in others, and in many cases hotter and more polluted.
-Written by Sammy Roth, a Los Angeles Times staff writer.