China's dams isolate Asian Elephants.

[NNadir]

The short news item from the current issue of Science, a publication of the AAAS that I'll discuss very briefly, since it speaks for itself is this one: China's dams isolate Asian elephants (Zhihong Wang, Zhengling Li, Yongjing Tang, Chongxue Yao, Yu Liu, Guilian Jiang, Fang Wang, Liang Liang, Wenlan Zhao, Gaofan Zhu, Mingyong Chen*, Science Vol. 367, Issue 6476, pp. 373-374, 2020)

The excerpt:

The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus L.) is designated as a grade-I protected species in China and listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (1). There are only about 300 wild individuals remaining in China (2). Despite the species' recognized vulnerability, China has exacerbated the threats to its survival by failing to consider the cascading effects of dam construction.

The Mekong upstream district (named Lancang River in China) (3), a major Asian elephant habitat (4), is also abundant in water resources and well suited to the construction of hydropower stations (5). Accordingly, China began construction on the Jinghong Hydropower Station in 2003 as part of a renewable energy plan (6). The environmental impact assessment of the project did not comprehensively describe how it would affect Asian elephants, and the station went into operation in 2008 on schedule (7).

Landscape connectivity among habitats and protected areas is crucial for conservation of wildlife, especially endangered flagship species such as Asian elephants, which require a large home range covering a variety of ecosystems (8). After the Jinghong Hydropower Station dam was completed, water levels rose and widened, making the mud banks more wet and slippery on both sides (7). Although Asian elephants could get down the banks to the river and swim across, their flat soles prevented them from climbing back out (9), stranding them in the water. As a result, no elephants have crossed the Mekong in the past decade, and movement routes and gene flow of Asian elephants living on either side of the Mekong have been blocked by the reservoir (7).

Hydroelectricity is the most successful of all forms of so called "renewable energy." Despite all the hoopla about the solar and wind industry which has failed to even make a dent in climate change, wind and solar, after 50 years of wild cheering for them, did not produce in 2018 as much energy as hydroelectric dams. Hydroelectric dams produced 15.11 exajoules of energy in 2018, all the wind, solar, geothermal and tidal systems on the entire planet, combined produced 12.27 exajoules of energy in 2018, this on a planet where human energy demand was 599.34 exajoules.

Here is a table I prepared on energy sources in the world in this century:



Source: 2019 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38] (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

The destruction of prime habitat for Asian elephants to obtain so called "renewable energy" belies the idea that such land and mass intensive energy is "sustainable."

The energy we get from hydroelectric dams is trivial. It's expansion, at the expense of destroying most of the world's major rivers has done nothing to address the rapid growth in the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

So called is not sustainable, not at least for the dwindling habitats and land areas that remain. Once destroyed, these resources cannot be recovered. Turning all of our wild areas into industrial parks for wind turbines, solar farms, and reservoirs is not a good idea. It is, in fact, a crime against the future.

Have a nice weekend.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. In Africa, several countries have joined together to remove all

obstacles to ancient elephant migration routes.

[NNadir]

2. That is very good news. They should export some civilization to the Western (and Eastern) world.NT