The article,
“Ruling brings opportunity to rebuild fisheries, expand
green economy” (Viewpoint, 8-18) is rife with
mischaracterizations, to put it politely. The authors claim
to speak for Northwest businesses on the topic of a recent
court ruling on a federal salmon plan. This is simply
absurd.
If you look behind the curtain, those
purporting to speak for “business” are merely anti-hydro and
dam-removal extremists aligned with a small slice of
specialty chefs, elite food retailers and commercial fishing
representatives (all of whom could better help save wild
salmon by not killing, selling or serving them) along with
eco-apparel retailers.
This is hardly representative of Northwest
businesses, which include farmers, ports, high-tech,
manufacturing, food processing, wood products, energy
generation and many, many more, including a myriad of small
local enterprises.
Furthermore, the letter the authors reference
– which asks President Barack Obama, members of Congress and
Gov. Chris Gregoire to convene a new process to craft yet
another salmon plan – suggests that they have conveniently
forgotten the last six years when state, federal and tribal
sovereigns worked together in an unprecedented collaborative
process to do just that.
The plan for salmon that resulted from this
process is being implemented and is working, as witnessed by
record and near-record returns in many adult salmon runs
this decade. The anti-hydro and dam-removal groups simply
don’t like the plan because it doesn’t support their agenda
for ripping out some of the Northwest’s cleanest, greenest
and most reliable sources of power around – the hydro energy
generated by the Snake River dams.
Fortunately, the public doesn’t buy this
nonsense. Polling done by DHM Research in Portland for
several years now shows the public believes that removing
the Snake dams is an extreme solution that would do more
harm than good. In fact, the public’s opposition to removing
the Snake dams has only increased over time, from 68 percent
opposed in 2007 to 73 percent opposed in 2011. And citizens
consistently identify hydro energy as the Northwest’s most
practical, clean, reliable and renewable energy resource.
And the suggestion that the Snake River dams
are “relatively small” is just laughable. They provide more
than 1,000 megawatts of clean energy, enough to light a city
the size of Seattle – and then some. They generate power to
back up wind resources when the wind isn’t blowing, which
happens a lot. Along with the rest of the Northwest’s hydro
system, they generate billions of dollars for the
Northwest’s economy, provide hundreds of thousands of local,
family-wage jobs and keep our carbon footprint half that of
the rest of the country.
These jobs and environmental benefits
certainly can’t be replaced by a few “fishing and other
salmon-based jobs” as the authors purport. And, isn’t the
aim of fishing to catch and kill the very salmon these folks
say they want to protect? Sounds fishy to me.
Terry Flores is executive director of
Northwest RiverPartners, an alliance of farmers, utilities,
ports and business that promote the economic and
environmental benefits of the Columbia and Snake rivers and
salmon-recovery policies based on sound science.
