• Drusas@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    I would point out that hydropower may be renewable but isn’t necessarily environmentally friendly. Especially if you live somewhere with salmon.

            • Sonori@beehaw.org
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              10 months ago

              Well, I believe about half of all species of salmon will be extinct inside the next thirty years owing to temperature increases, so, as someone who likes fishing in my local river, I’ll happily take some dead salmon now for better solar power storage if it helps the odds of keeping about half of them alive. We lose vast amounts of salmon either way, but this way we only lose salmon and a few other types of fish and not, you know, a good chunk of all marine life like we do if we keep on our current rate of transition.

              • Drusas@kbin.social
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                10 months ago

                It sounds like you underestimate how important salmon is to a good chunk of all marine life. Particularly orcas.

                • Sonori@beehaw.org
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                  10 months ago

                  It sounds like you underestimate just how temputure dependent many types of salmon are and just how short of a time they have left to live in a 2C+ world. Many of their spawning locations are also in areas that are seeing the highest relative temperature change.

                  aThe point was that climate change is going to kill more salmon and vastly more other types of marine life than a handful of dams, but thouse few dams could have a significant effect on the amount of carbon emitted by the second largest polluter on earth by providing the nighttime energy that is currently done with dozens of brand new natural gas plants. With the way solar in particular is scaling up, dispatchable energy storage is going to be the primary limiting factor on how hot things get, and therefore how many species of salmon are going extinct in our lifetime.