Dead in the Water, or A Path Forward?

Glance quickly at the public response to the Simpson Plan and you would conclude that not much has changed. The business stakeholders reject the plan; the salmon advocates reject the plan. Dead in the water.

A second reading, however, might stir a sense that there is movement. Salmon advocates now fault the Lower Snake River dams for delaying the smolts’ arrival at the Pacific, jeopardizing their viability in the ocean. Not so long ago all the talk was about how the turbines chewed up smolt on their way down the river. Credit the Corps for adjusting operations – increased spill – and design changes to divert smolt. The Corps’ claim of ninety-six percent survival is no longer ridiculed but grudgingly accepted. (The cumulative survival over the four dams is eighty-eight percent.) Attention now is on the slack water pools behind the dams. Smolt transit the pools slower with greater exposure to predators and arrive later at Bonneville weakened from the journey. Even the real issue of water temperature in the pools is muted because of the Corps’ draw of cooler water from the Dworshak to regulate temperatures.

What about the business stakeholders? Here, too, there is movement. We first heard political outcry about how eastern Washington’s very culture is at stake when the Plan was announced. The Coalition letter, in contrast to the political rhetoric, reads like a research paper. First discussed are Smolt-to-Adult Returns (SAR) across dammed and undammed rivers along the coast. The point is that all rivers are experiencing declining salmon recovery. Next is how residential and commercial power rates will escalate if BPA loses the Lower Snake dams. Here the research quality suffers. There is no discussion of other renewable energy sources and there is no backup for the numbers presented. The stakeholders’ final point is that the carbon footprint of rail and trucks is greater than that for barges. The point is well made but where is the outrage over the increased cost burden on Palouse grain growers?

Arguments on each side have morphed even while tone remains sharp. There is convergence, moreover, in the recognition that ocean conditions and, yes, climate change probably dwarf the significance of the dams. Way back in our first meeting on the dams John McKern referenced the “big blob” in the ocean. We did not know then quite what to do with it, but the warmer waters of the North Pacific and their acidification now join the business stakeholders and the salmon advocates.

As research shifts to the ocean, the dams become less important to eventual salmon recovery. The dams remain the center of dispute precisely because they are the center of dispute. Breaching the dams is the only tool remaining to us to affect species survival. Even so, breaching may not be enough. Dam removal becomes a necessary but not sufficient condition to restore runs. We will still argue over whether dam removal is indeed necessary but few will argue that removing the dams will assure salmon recovery.  

The argument about whether dam removal is necessary may not be answerable but cutting the cost of breaching the dams can make the choice easier. If there is no real cost to breaching the dams, we should be able to sidetrack the argument about whether the dams really are the problem.

This is what the Simpson Plan does. It uses a lot of money – we can pretend that it is someone else’s – to make sure we have secure power supply, affordable grain transport, uninterrupted irrigation, and compensation for stranded river assets.

Ex ante mitigation is what the Simpson Plan is about. And it does it exceptionally well. The Simpson Plan does everything the Ag and Rural Caucus has asked. In addition to ex ante mitigation dollars, it provides time, ten years, to make sure it is working. And, very importantly, it protects the Columbia Basin Project.

The Simpson Plan has the seeds of A Path Forward. That is no guarantee that it is not also Dead in the Water, but if it is, the region is damned to an endless round of litigation with no protection from the charge that we destroyed the salmon run.

Don