As China forges ahead with its goal to generate 120,000
megawatts of renewable energy by 2020, they are damming more and more rivers.
According to China, this is a safe strategy that will curb pollution, control
floods, and minimize climate change. Conservationists and scientists across the
globe however, disagree.
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Environmentalists assert that China is, instead, blocking
the free flow of rivers, destroying the ecology, uprooting millions of people, increasing
the chances of earthquakes and ultimately “selling their country’s soul in
their drive for economic growth”.
In their search for renewable electric power,
China’s engineers have been building mega-dams at a rate unmatched in human
history. Many far larger than the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River — which is
221 meters high and capable of generating more than 2,000 megawatts of power —
are being constructed on China’s greatest rivers. Best known is the Three Gorges Dam,
completed in 2008, which stretches a mile-and-a-half across the Yangtze and can
generate ten times the hydropower of the Hoover Dam. Yet the Three Gorges is
only a fraction of China’s current dam program.
The government is now engaged in a new expansion
of dams in great staircases, reservoir upon reservoir — some 130 in all across
China’s Southwest.
Since the 1950s the Chinese have built some 22,000 dams more than 15 meters tall, roughly half the world’s current total. During the
1990s, as economic growth surged and air pollution spurred the need for clean energy;
they turned increasingly to huge mega-dams. Protests from environmentalists
have helped slow some of the building in recent years. But under the 12th Five
Year Plan (2011-2015) the government seems to have cast aside restraint.
Opposition has been suppressed and the dam builders are now free to move
forward.
About 100 dams are in various stages of
construction or planning on the Yangtze and its tributaries. All these rivers
flow off the Tibetan Plateau, a geologically unstable region that averages
4,500 meters (14,800 feet) high. As they flow down through the soft,
sedimentary rock, the rivers carve steep canyons, many deeper than the Grand
Canyon. The risk of earthquakes is high. Probe International, a Canadian NGO, warned in April 2012 that almost half of China’s new dams are in zones of high to
very high seismic risk, and most of the remainder in zones of moderate hazard.
Read more at Yale
environment 360.
Three
Gorges Dam image via Shutterstock.