Fish over people...again...

[billc]

Well the green shirts are siding with fish over people again...

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Govern...ists-win-fed-backing-to-shut-down-hydro-power

Environmentalists have persuaded the Department of the Interior to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. These dams not only provide clean, green energy to the Klamath community, they sustain area ranches and farms with continual access to water. An environmentalist’s dream, right?

But the fish! We must always put fish ahead of people!
It seems that once upon a time, salmon would migrate upstream the Klamath River to spawn, a process that has become interrupted by the dams. For several decades, ranching and farming families have relied upon the steady stream of not only water, but also renewable energy provided by the dams. Destroying the dams would destroy these people’s livelihoods.
Grace Bennett, the board chair for the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors, says:

“With the dams gone, it will impact our area … because there won’t be enough water in our river. It will not be a matter of when you irrigate, or how much you irrigate; it’ll be a matter of can you irrigate? Can you do these things? And if we don’t have the dams in, to give the water for the fish that return, and we’re taking that water from our farmers and ranchers, we won’t have any farmers and ranchers.”
​

What is the government’s obsession with prioritizing fish over people? This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing in California. The Delta Smelt has destroyed much of the farming community in central California, because the ugly bugger ended up on the endangered species list and politicians decided to cut off the water from the San Joaquin Valley to the farmlands in order to ‘save’ it.
Now the salmon need saving too. Except maybe they don’t. It’s hard to tell, with all the twisted ‘evidence’ going into the decision-making process over the removal of the dams. Professor Paul Houser was a science advisor to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation before he was fired for alleging “that the Obama administration intentionally falsified scientific fact in a proposal for dam removal in the Klamath River.”

And here is an interesting snippet from the above qoute...

Professor Paul Houser was a science advisor to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation before he was fired for alleging “that the Obama administration intentionally falsified scientific fact in a proposal for dam removal in the Klamath River.”

http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/05/f...m-removal-intentionally-biased/#ixzz1szitBSY5

A former science adviser to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation was fired in February, shortly after he alleged that the Obama administration intentionally falsified scientific fact in a proposal for dam removal in the Klamath River.
Professor Paul Houser of George Mason University, in a written Feb. 24 allegation to the Office of the Executive Secretariat and Regulatory Affairs in the Department of the Interior, said that Sec. Ken Salazar’s determination to remove the dams resulted in “intentional biased (falsification) reporting of scientific results.”
He also alleged that when he voiced his concern about the scientific integrity of the Department of the Interior’s decision-making process, “[m]y disclosure was never directly addressed.”
And, Houser added, “I faced systematic reprisal.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/05/f...m-removal-intentionally-biased/#ixzz1tCRBEaHF

 

[K-man]

Is there a reason they can't put in 'fish ladders'? They work here.

 

[Empty Hands]

Is there a reason they can't put in 'fish ladders'? They work here.

All of those dams have fish ladders, which is why the salmon runs are threatened, not extinct. Oregon salmon are also a critical part of the livelihoods of thousands, and I can remember many years growing up with crashed runs - no or few salmon that year.

So maybe you should say that the decision puts fisherman over farmers instead of fish over people. Salmon are extremely important to Oregon, and the dams on the Columbia and Klamath and other rivers are a big part of the problem with dwindling or crashing runs. There are 14 dams on the Columbia alone, 15 on the Snake, and so on. Crash 7 runs in a row, and Oregon salmon become extinct.