Comment by glenstein
5 hours ago
More good news: after years of fighting, Brookfield Renewable agreed to sell four dams on the Kennebec River which will let Atlantic Salmon go back up river to their spawning territory. This just happened in 2025 and could be a bigger breakthrough than the massive alewife restoration that the article mentions.
My understanding is that the first few victories on this were very very hard but it seems to have created a precedent and a growing example emulated across the country.
https://themainemonitor.org/dams-sale-salmon-return-kennebec...
Bittersweet. Because the reason all those dams are able to be sold is because the textile industry and paper industry that used to rely on them has all moved to Asia and Canada, decades ago, and now these mill towns are depressed drug dens
We also shouldn't really be removing hydropower at this point in time from a net zero/global warming perspective. It is orders of magnitude less environmentally harmful than generating electricity with fossil fuels, and one of two carbon-neutral sources of significant amounts of baseload power at scale along with fission nuclear.