Sunday Review

New York Times

Thayer Scudder, the world’s leading authority on the impact of dams on poor people, has changed his mind about dams.

A frequent consultant on large dam projects, Mr. Scudder held out hope through most of his 58-year career that the poverty relief delivered by a properly constructed and managed dam would outweigh the social and environmental damage it caused. Now, at age 84, he has concluded that large dams not only aren’t worth their cost, but that many currently under construction “will have disastrous environmental and socio-economic consequences,” as he wrote in a recent email.

Mr. Scudder, an emeritus anthropology professor at the California Institute of Technology, describes his disillusionment with dams as gradual. He was a dam proponent when he began his first research project in 1956, documenting the impact of forced resettlement on 57,000 Tonga people in the Gwembe Valley of present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe. Construction of the Kariba Dam, which relied on what was then the largest loan in the World Bank’s history, required the Tonga to move from their ancestral homes along the Zambezi River to infertile land downstream. Mr. Scudder has been tracking their disintegration ever since.

Once cohesive and self-sufficient, the Tonga are troubled by intermittent hunger, rampant alcoholism and astronomical unemployment. Desperate for income, some have resorted to illegal drug cultivation and smuggling, elephant poaching, pimping and prostitution. Villagers still lack electricity.

Mr. Scudder’s most recent stint as a consultant, on the Nam Theun 2 Dam in Laos, delivered his final disappointment. He and two fellow advisers supported the project because it required the dam’s funders to carry out programs that would leave people displaced by the dam in better shape than before the project started. But the dam was finished in 2010, and the programs’ goals remain unmet. Meanwhile, the dam’s three owners are considering turning over all responsibilities to the Laotian government — “too soon,” Mr. Scudder said in an interview. “The government wants to build 60 dams over the next 20 or 30 years, and at the moment it doesn’t have the capacity to deal with environmental and social impacts for any single one of them.

“Nam Theun 2 confirmed my longstanding suspicion that the task of building a large dam is just too complex and too damaging to priceless natural resources,” he said. He now thinks his most significant accomplishment was not improving a dam, but stopping one: He led a 1992 study that helped prevent construction of a dam that would have harmed Botswana’s Okavango Delta, one of the world’s last great wetlands.

Part of what moved Mr. Scudder to go public with his revised assessment was the corroboration he found in a stunning Oxford University study published in March in Energy Policy. The study, by Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn, draws upon cost statistics for 245 large dams built between 1934 and 2007. Without even taking into account social and environmental impacts, which are almost invariably negative and frequently vast, the study finds that “the actual construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return.”

The study’s authors — three management scholars and a statistician — say planners are systematically biased toward excessive optimism, which dam promoters exploit with deception or blatant corruption. The study finds that actual dam expenses on average were nearly double pre-building estimates, and several times greater than overruns of other kinds of infrastructure construction, including roads, railroads, bridges and tunnels. On average, dam construction took 8.6 years, 44 percent longer than predicted — so much time, the authors say, that large dams are “ineffective in resolving urgent energy crises.”

DAMS typically consume large chunks of developing countries’ financial resources, as dam planners underestimate the impact of inflation and currency depreciation. Many of the funds that support large dams arrive as loans to the host countries, and must eventually be paid off in hard currency. But most dam revenue comes from electricity sales in local currencies. When local currencies fall against the dollar, as often happens, the burden of those loans grows.

One reason this dynamic has been overlooked is that earlier studies evaluated dams’ economic performance by considering whether international lenders like the World Bank recovered their loans — and in most cases, they did. But the economic impact on host countries was often debilitating. Dam projects are so huge that beginning in the 1980s, dam overruns became major components of debt crises in Turkey, Brazil, Mexico and the former Yugoslavia. “For many countries, the national economy is so fragile that the debt from just one mega-dam can completely negatively affect the national economy,” Mr. Flyvbjerg, the study’s lead investigator, told me.

To underline its point, the study singles out the massive Diamer-Bhasha Dam, now under construction in Pakistan across the Indus River. It is projected to cost $12.7 billion (in 2008 dollars) and finish construction by 2021. But the study suggests that it won’t be completed until 2027, by which time it could cost $35 billion (again, in 2008 dollars) — a quarter of Pakistan’s gross domestic product that year.

Using the study’s criteria, most of the world’s planned mega-dams would be deemed cost-ineffective. That’s unquestionably true of the gargantuan Inga complex of eight dams intended to span the Congo River — its first two projects have produced huge cost overruns — and Brazil’s purported $14 billion Belo Monte Dam, which will replace a swath of Amazonian rain forest with the world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam.

Instead of building enormous, one-of-a-kind edifices like large dams, the study’s authors recommend “agile energy alternatives” like wind, solar and mini-hydropower facilities. “We’re stuck in a 1950s mode where everything was done in a very bespoke, manual way,” Mr. Ansar said over the phone. “We need things that are more easily standardized, things that fit inside a container and can be easily transported.”

All this runs directly contrary to the current international dam-building boom. Chinese, Brazilian and Indian construction companies are building hundreds of dams around the world, and the World Bank announced a year ago that it was reviving a moribund strategy to fund mega-dams. The biggest ones look so seductive, so dazzling, that it has taken us generations to notice: They’re brute-force, Industrial Age artifacts that rarely deliver what they promise.

 ———————————————-

Photos by Ólafur Már Sigurðsson

Tourism, it need hardly be pointed out, is big business in Iceland, an industry which in the years following the crash has ballooned, with more than double the country’s population visiting last year. But while making it into the New York Times would normally be good news for Iceland’s economy, a recent entry about Iceland’s highlands on the publication’s “52 Places to Visit in 2014” list was less than ideal from a publicity standpoint.

The paragraph-long blurb did mention the area’s unique landscape, but its key takeaway was that the “famously raw natural beauty” of the highlands—and more specifically, the Þjórsárver wetlands located in the interior—may not be enjoyable by anyone, let alone tourists, for much longer. As reads the article’s subtitle: “Natural wonders are in danger. Go see them before it’s too late.”

The suggested threat facing the integrity of Þjórsárver? Not impending volcanic eruptions or natural deterioration. Rather, the article stated that the Icelandic government recently “announced plans to revoke those protections” which had been safeguarding the wetlands, and additionally, that “a law intending to further repeal conservation efforts has been put forward.”

The “52 Places” article was widely quoted within the Icelandic media. Within days of its publication, the Ministry for the Environment and Natural Resources issued a brief statement in Icelandic bearing the title “Incorrect Reporting by the New York Times.” It claimed that the New York Times article was “full of misrepresentations” and was “paradoxical and wrong.” The author of the article, contributing travel writer Danielle Pergament, was not contacted in regard to any “misrepresentations,” and neither was the New York Times—although the latter was invited to send a reporter to an open Environment and Communications Committee meeting on Þjórsárver a few days after the article’s publication.

So what exactly caused all the kerfuffle? Did The New York Times get it all wrong?

A Contentious History

Before we address the “incorrect reporting” alleged by the Ministry of the Environment, it will be useful to step back and explain a little of the context surrounding the Þjórsárver Wetlands and the battles which have been waged over this area since the 1960s.

Located in Iceland’s interior, the Þjórsárver wetlands stretch 120 square kilometres from the Hofsjökull glacier in the northern highlands to surrounding volcanic deserts and are characterized by remarkable biodiversity. A description on the World Wildlife Fund website points not only to the variance of the landscape itself—“tundra meadows intersected with numerous glacial and spring-fed streams, a large number of pools, ponds, lakes and marshes, and rare permafrost mounds”—but also to the area’s unique plant and birdlife, including one of the largest breeding colonies of Pink-footed Geese in the world.

Þjórsárver is fed by Iceland’s longest river, Þjórsá, which also sources much of the country’s electricity. Since the early 1960s, Landsvirkjun, the National Power Company of Iceland, has proposed several plans for creating a reservoir on Þjórsá that would facilitate increased energy production and enlarge energy reserves. Such reserves would not only be useful for existing industries, such as aluminium smelting, but—following the proposed creation of a submarine cable to Europe—could also be sold as part of foreign energy contracts as early as 2020.

Through the years, Landsvirkjun’s proposals have been met with frequent opposition, which in 1981 led to a nature preserve being created in the Þjórsárver wetlands. However, a provision was made within these protections, allowing Landsvirkjun to create a future reservoir, provided that the company could prove that the wetlands would not be irrevocably harmed, and that the Environment Agency of Iceland approved the reservoir plans.

By the late ‘90s, there was another flurry of activity: in 1997, the Iceland Nature Conservation Association (INCA) was founded with the “primary objective” of “establish[ing] a national park in the highlands.” Two years later, the government began work on an extensive “Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Energy Resources.” Divided into two phases that spanned from 1999 -2010, the Master Plan was intended to evaluate close to 60 hydro and geothermal development options, assessing them for environmental impact, employment and regional development possibilities, efficiency, and profitability.

Over the course of the Master Plan’s two phases, it was decided that the nature preserve established in the Þjórsárver Wetlands was to be expanded and designated as a “protected area.” The new boundaries were to be signed into regulation based on the Nature Conservation Act in June 2013 (the resolution was passed by parliament that year according to the Master Plan), until the Minister of the Environment, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, elected to postpone making them official in order to consider a new reservoir proposal from Landsvirkjun.

Based on this new proposal, Sigurður Ingi has drawn up new boundaries for the protected area, which would expand the original nature reservoir, but cover less area than the original boundaries created by the Environment Agency of Iceland. The new suggested boundaries do not extend as far down the Þjórsá river, and therefore would allow Landsvirkjun to build their Norðlingalda Reservoir. Conservationists who oppose this point out that the three-tiered Dynkur waterfall will be destroyed if Landsvirkjun’s reservoir plans go through.

Parsing Facts

This brings us back the alleged “misrepresentations” in the New York Times write-up. Best to go through the Ministry of the Environment’s statement and address their qualms one by one:

“The article in question is full of misrepresentations about Þjórsárver preserve and the government’s intentions regarding its protection and utilisation. For instance, it states that Þjórsárver covers 40% of Iceland, while in fact, it only covers .5% of the country today.”

The first version of the article, since corrected, read as though the Þjórsárver wetlands constituted 40% of Iceland. In reality, it is the highlands that constitute 40% of Iceland’s landmass, and Þjórsárver is only part of this area. Following a call from Árni Finnsson, the chair of INCA who was quoted in the piece, this error was corrected.

“There are no plans to lift the protections currently in place. On the contrary, the Environment and Natural Resources Minister aims to expand the protected area and if that plan goes through, it’ll be an expansion of about 1,500 square kilometers, or about 1.5 % of the total area of Iceland.”

It is true that Minister of the Environment Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson has not suggested that the current protections—namely, the preserve that was established in the ‘80s—be altered. Nevertheless, it is also misleading to suggest that he personally “aims to expand the protected area,” as the expansion plans were basically mandated by the findings of the Master Plan. Moreover, he elected not to approve the Environment Agency’s expanded boundaries, but rather to propose new boundaries which would create a smaller protected area than was intended.

So no, Sigurður Ingi is not cutting back on “current protections,” but that’s only because he refused to approve the protections that were supposed to be in place already.

“Therefore, it is clear that there will be a substantial expansion of the protected area under discussion. The New York Times asserting that protections on Þjórsárver will be lifted in order to enable hydroelectric power development is both paradoxical and wrong.”

What we’re seeing the Ministry of the Environment do here is a neat little bit of semantic parsing. The NYT article states that after spending decades protecting the wetlands, “the government announced plans to revoke protections, allowing for the construction of hydropower plants.” This is a carefully qualified statement, and might accurately refer to any of several ministerial initiatives, from Sigurður Ingi’s redrawing of the Þjórsárver protected area boundaries, to his recent proposal to repeal the law on nature conservation (60/2013). This law was approved by Alþingi and was set to go into effect on April 1, 2014. It included specific protections for natural phenomena, such as lava formations and wetlands. In November, Sigurður Ingi introduced a bill to repeal the nature conservation law, although this has yet to be voted on by parliament.

So, no, the New York Times article was not “paradoxical and wrong.” It was, unfortunately, quite correct.

A Land Beyond

Although debates over Þjórsárver and development proposals in the Icelandic highlands have been well covered and discussed in detail by the Icelandic media, conservation issues around this area have not, thus far, made many headlines internationally. So it is noteworthy that an outlet such as The New York Times chose to highlight these issues on a more prominent stage, especially given that Iceland’s breathtaking landscapes are often a driving force supporting its tourism industry. As Árni Finnsson wonders, “Who goes to Iceland to see power plants and power lines?”

While an over-saturation of tourists in fragile natural environments can pose its own, very real, threat to nature reserves and natural sites like Þjórsárver, tourism can still have a positive influence on conservation issues, such as, Árni recalls, when a greater interest in whale watching led to more effective challenges to Icelandic whaling. “It takes many millions to recover a loss of reputation,” says Árni Finnsson, speaking about Iceland’s image as a country whose nature is its biggest selling point. “It’s a huge resource, but it is so easy to destroy it.”

It was, in fact, specifically the threat of development that made this particular site stand out to Danielle Pergament. “I think people—over here [in the US] anyway—are well aware of the natural beauty in Iceland. But not many people know that the wetlands are under threat, that there is a chance that the famous landscape may be developed. I was shocked to learn about it myself. That is why I wanted to write about it.”

The question remains, however, if the attention drawn to Þjórsárver’s tenuous position will actually generate much new support. After all, in declining to publicly “correct” the New York Times, the Ministry effectively contained the debate to an Icelandic-speaking audience here in Iceland. And anyway, even if thousands of tourists become suddenly impassioned by the cause of the Icelandic wetlands, the area may remain inaccessible to many of them. “The Þjórsárver wetlands are like an El Dorado, a land beyond,” says Árni Finnsson. “They aren’t really suitable for tourism, or not for many tourists, at least. Maybe a few very keen, very well-trained hikers.”

At the end of the day, then, if the choice is made to protect Þjórsárver, it will have to be for less tangible reasons than the possible dollars generated by tourists, or international pressure. It has to come from within.

But first, let’s get the facts straight.

Originally published in Grapevine.is Feb. 10.

Read more:

Minister Of Environment Would Support Sacrificing Waterfalls For Reservoir

Proceeding With Caution (Svandís Svavarsdóttir, member of the Left Green Party, on the balance beween the nature’s value for the energy industry or tourism and its categorial value)

Peaceful Environmental Protest Following Arrest

Bjork will play a concert in protest at the Icelandic government’s proposed changes to conservation laws.

The Icelandic singer tops the bill at the event, which will take place on March 18 at the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, Iceland. Artists appearing include Lykke Li, Patti Smith, Mammút (pictured below), Highlands, Of Monsters And Men, Samaris and Retro Stefson.

The concert is organised in conjunction with the Iceland Nature Conservation Association (INCA), Landvernd, the Icelandic Environment Association and director Darren Aronofsky, whose film Noah was shot on location in Iceland in 2012 and will premiere at Sambíóin Egilshöll Cinema on the same afternoon.

Collectively operating under the name Stopp!, the group aims to encourage the Icelandic authorities to protect Iceland’s natural environment and impose controls on the damming of glacial rivers and harnessing of geothermal energy, in light of new legislation, reports RUV.

This project was introduced at a press conference at Harpa on the 3^rd of March 2014. Björk and Darren Aronofsky participated in the press conference.

The artists will donate their time and the net income will go to INCA and Landvernd.

The following statement lists the group’s demands:

Stop – Guard the Garden!

All over the world too much of priceless nature has been sacrificed for development, often falsely labeled as sustainable. Rain forests have been cut, waterfalls dammed, land eroded, lakes and oceans polluted, earth’s climate altered and the oceans are now rapidly getting more and more acidic.

In Iceland, the Karahnjukar Power Plant has become the symbol for the destruction which threatens human existence on this earth.

It is our duty to protect Icelandic nature and leave it to future generations, undamaged. The Icelandic highlands, Europe’s largest remaining wilderness – where nature is still largely untouched by man, is not just a refuge and treasure which we inherited and will inherit. The highlands belong to the world as a whole. Nowhere else can we find another Lake Myvatn, Thjorsarver Wetlands, Sprengisandur, Skaftafell or Lake Langisjor.

We demand that Thjorsarver Wetlands, the wilderness west of Thjorsa River and the waterfalls downstream will be protected for all future to come. We strongly protest plans by the Minister for the Environment and Resources to change the demarcation line for the extended nature reserve in the Thjorsarver Wetlands. By doing so, the minister creates a space for a new dam at the outskirts of the area. The way in which the minister interprets the law in order to justify that all nature and/or potential power plants are at stake in each and every new phase of the Master Plan for Conservation and Utilization of Nature Areas is an attack on Icelandic nature and not likely to stand in a court of law. [We have engaged a law firm and we are threatening lawsuit if the Minister goes ahead with his plan]

We now have a unique opportunity to turn the highlands into a national park by bill of law to be adopted by the parliament. Thereby the highlands as a whole will be subject to one administrative unit and clearly defined geographically. Thus all plans for power lines, road construction and/or other man made structures which will fragment valuable landscapes of the highlands will belong to history.

We strongly caution against any plans to construct a geothermal power plant at or near Lake Myvatn. The Bjarnarflag Power Plant is not worth the risk. Lake Myvatn is absolutely unique in this world. Hence, we have a great responsibility for its protection.

We demand that the nature of Reykjanes Peninsula will be protected by establishing a volcanic national park and that all power lines will be put underground.

We find it urgent that the government will secure funds for conservation by hiring land wardens and will protect valuable nature areas against the ever growing pressure of mass tourism.

In particular we protest against the attack on nature conservationists, where unprecedented (sic. S.I. editor) and brutal conduct by the police as well as charges pressed against those who want to protect the Galgahraun Lava, was cruel and unnecessary. We remind that the right of the public to protest nature damage everywhere, worldwide, is a basic premise for the success of securing future human existence on this earth.

We demand that the proposed bill of law repealing the new nature protection laws be withdrawn and that the new laws should take effect, as stipulated, on April 1.

By Julia Vol

Links:
http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/Minister-Of-Environment-Wont-Sign-O…
http://heartoficeland.org/
http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/Environmental-Minister-To-Change-Pr…
http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/Minister-Of-Environment-Would-Suppo…
http://thepalebluedot.me/2013/10/21/passion-for-lava/
http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/Ministers-Dad-And-Uncles-Profit-Fro…
http://visir.is/myndband-af-handtoku-omars-ragnarssonar/article/20131310…
http://grapevine.is/News/ReadArticle/Charges-Filed-Against-Galgahraun-Pr…
http://grapevine.is/Author/ReadArticle/27-Increase-In-Tourism-This-Year
http://grapevine.is/Author/ReadArticle/Travellers-Take-Their-Toll-On-Tou…
http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/Hotels-Motels-Holiday-Inns
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/10/travel/2014-places-to-go.html
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/19/iceland-fin-whale-hun…
http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/City-Hall-Wants-Answers-On-Whale-Wa…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/08/icelandic-whale-beer-…
http://grapevine.is/Features/ReadArticle/A-Look-In-The–Rearview-Mirror-

First published in Grapevine. Based on a 2010 article entitled “Í landi hinna klikkuðu karlmanna.” (“In the Land of the Mad Men”). Translated in part by Haukur S. Magnússon.

After the election, we see the old parties of economic mass destruction are coming back to power. Giving enormous promises of easy money to be wrestled from evil vulture funds, debt relief and tax reduction, The Progressive Party doubled in size after a few years of hardship. There is a jolly good feeling between the two young new leaders of a brave new Iceland, and when a radio host called them up and offered to play them a request, they asked for Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys.’ I Googled the lyrics, not quite remembering the lines, and got a nice chill down my back:

Wild boys fallen far from glory
Reckless and so hungered
On the razors edge you trail
Because there’s murder by the roadside
In a sore afraid new world

They tried to break us,
Looks like they’ll try again

Sounds quite grim. This, coupled with the new government’s announcement that it would be effectively dismantling the Ministry for the Environment and Natural Resources and that there will be no Minister for the Environment, gave me a strange flashback feeling. I decided to revisit the state of mind that we used to call normal in 2006. When the economic policy, the energy policy, the expansion of our towns, the mortgages on our homes—almost all aspects of our daily life had become totally mad. This is not my own diagnosis; if you search the homepage of the IMF for the phrase “Collective Madness,” you’ll find this:

“’Iceland, in the decade and a half leading up to the crisis, was an example of collective madness,’ said Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, a remark that elicited spontaneous applause from the more than 300 participants, many of them Icelandic policymakers, academics, and members of the public.”

In our daily lives, we usually sense what is normal and what is over the top. Sometimes the discourse will blind us; PR and propaganda can create a kind of newspeak. It can be a good exercise to try to talk about things in a foreign language, to view them in a new light. As an Icelander, you could for instance try to tell someone from another country that Iceland’s government sold one state bank and received payment in the form of a loan from another state bank—and vice versa. That the state banks were thereby handed to men that were closely connected to the then-reigning political parties. The manager of one of the parties became head of one of the banks’ board of directors, while the other party’s former Minister of Trade belonged to the group that was given the other bank. That man had access to every bit of inside information about the bank’s standing.

In the meantime, this former Minister of Trade became Central Bank Manager. He went to the US and made Alcoa an offer that the company could not refuse. He had thus set in motion the largest-scale construction project in Icelandic history, greatly increasing economic activity in Iceland—a grand boon for the bank he just finished selling to himself.

If you tell this story in a foreign language, people shake their heads. They gape in disbelief. They use words like “corruption” and “mafia.” They exclaim, full of disbelief and even disappointment, “no, not in Scandinavia!”

THE ACCEPTED INSANITY

It is insane to expand a banking system by tenfold in eight years. We know that now. It isn’t technically possible to grow all the knowledge and experience needed to build up and manage such a contraption in such a short time. Not even by shoving an entire generation through business school. It is impossible.

But the megalomania was not just confined to the banking sector. Energy production in Iceland was doubled from 2002–2007, when the huge Kárahnjúkar dam was built in the eastern part of the highlands—to serve one single Alcoa smelting plant. The energy it produces, about 650MW annually, is enough to power a city of one million people. Doubling the energy production in a developed country over a five-year period is not only unheard of, but it would also be considered ridiculous in all of our neighbouring nations. Most industrialised states increase their energy production by around 2–3% annually. Doubling it would be unthinkable. It has been proven again and again that gargantuan investments generally destroy more than they create.

In Iceland, however, the goal was to double the nation’s energy production AGAIN by building aluminium smelters in Helguvík, Húsavík and enlarging the Straumsvík smelter by more than threefold. The period of insanity was to be succeeded by a total and complete madness. This was to be funded by 4–5 billion dollar 100% loans to Icelandic energy companies from foreign banks. Nearly 20,000 dollars for every single Icelander—every loan directly connected to aluminium prices and secret energy prices. The media reported this as your everyday act of government job-creation. It was regarded extremist to ask critical questions. Many regarded it unthinkable for the survival of the nation NOT to do this.

Now we know that we did not only sacrifice our nature for the economy, we sacrificed nature and the economy. Again, we do not have to seek out the websites of activists or environmental groups for this information. We just go to the IMF reports:

“Executive Directors observed that the Icelandic economy is at a difficult turning point. The long economic expansion, initiated by aluminium sector investments, sustained by a boom in private consumption, and fuelled by ready access to external financing, contributed to a build-up of macroeconomic imbalances and financial vulnerabilities.”

COCAINE IN THE HOT WATER?

The madness made itself clear in the business of geothermal energy, making itself known in the form of financial troubles and enormous debt of the energy companies. The geothermal field had enjoyed an even and stable development since it got started in the early twentieth century. During the great depression, the City of Reykjavík created the world’s largest geothermal heating system by pumping hot ground water into the homes in the city. Later they started producing a small amount of electricity by harnessing steam through turbines. But one day it seemed as if someone drilled into a cocaine vein. Out of the twenty high temperature geothermal areas in Iceland, plans suddenly emerged to harness sixteen right away, all for the sake of the aluminium industry. The energy companies applied for permits to do research drilling in most of the remaining ones. In an instant, the field went from a very slow, conservative development to becoming a geothermal wild west.

In the south, a major development of all the geothermal areas from the Reykjanes Peninsula to Þingvellir was planned—a chain of power plants in pristine and delicate areas—to serve a Century Aluminium smelter in Helguvík. But the geothermal plants would not have sufficed—the remaining power would be squeezed from hydro electricity in the Þjórsá river—potentially threatening the greatest stock of North Atlantic Salmon in Iceland—and up in the highlands—threatening the Pink-footed Geese of Þjórsárver.

So what was referred to as “moderate development” when the parties of The Wild Boys were last in charge of our energy sector? Their plans went like this: A new Alcoa smelter in the east, a new Alcoa smelter in Húsavík, a new Rio Tinto Straumsvík smelter beside the old one, an expansion of the Century smelter in Hvalfjörður and a new Century smelter in Helguvík. Amounting to a total of 1.4 million tons of aluminium. Each one of them needing energy that could serve one million people in their daily lives. Each one of them demanding sacrifice of great natural wonders, wild rivers and pristine geothermal areas.

How did they fare? The Alcoa Smelter in the East has been built, with the destruction of two glacial rivers, Lagarfljót and 50 km2 of highland beauty. The expansion of the Rio Tinto smelter was stopped and the Húsavík smelter did not go through, however, a skeleton of the Helguvík smelter is currently rising—with no power in sight.

The Alcoa smelter in the north would have required all the harnessable power in the northern part of Iceland, only excluding Jökulsá á Fjöllum. Close to Mývatn, we have the Krafla geothermal area. After a long and often struggling forty-year development period, the available power from the area reached about 60 MW. Now, the goal was suddenly to quadruple the area’s energy production—expanding it by 150 MW in just a few years, and harnessing the beautiful Þeistareykir area to its utmost capacity—up to 200 MW. They also had their eyes set on Bjarnarflag and Gjástykki, delicate areas that should be regarded as national heritage sites. All this was to serve a new Alcoa factory they wanted to build close to Húsavík, the famous whale watching and fishing village in North Iceland. Having done all that, however, the energy production would still not reach the 600 MW that Alcoa really needed—the harnessing of two more glacial rivers would have been necessary: Skjálfandafljót with the waterfall Aldeyjarfoss and the glacial rivers running from Hofsjökull.

The interesting thing is not how crazy this seems in hindsight, how extreme, how mad this reality was — but that outsiders did not see this plan as collective madness. The scheme was praised in international media as being a progressive plan for “clean” energy, and we still have members of parliament that regret that this did not happen. And the fact that our labour unions and politicians have referred to this when they say that “nothing is happening” in terms of business and job creation in Iceland. Or that they refer to this when they say “we have still only harnessed X% of our energy.” They are talking about this as a normal feasible future state of Iceland.

Why are people so crazy? Is it or was it a good idea to indebt the nation by a total of 5 billion dollars to place two Alcoa smelting plants in the same constituency? To surround the Faxaflói bay, where 70% of Iceland’s population resides, with three smelters? The answer is simple: The mad men still think so. One of the new Independence Party MPs, Brynjar Níelsson, has no regrets for the death of the river Lagarfljót in service of Alcoa. He said it was apparent that protectionists loved a few fish more than they did people.

But you can still ask like a fool: Did Iceland really have enough accumulated knowledge and manpower to multiply all our energy companies in the space of ten years? Was there never a doubt in the geologist’s mind when he found himself in a magical place such as the Torfajökull area above Landmannalaugar, Kerlingarfjöll or the steam areas around Reykjavík? Did they really want to do drill, pipe and harness EVERYTHING, right away? And do it all for the sake of a single industry—the aluminium industry. Did it have to be the role of a marginalised group of a few activists to use their spare time to criticise this?

OF “REYKJAVÍK” KNOWLEDGE

I was once at a meeting in Húsavík, where I screened my film, ‘Dreamland.’ At that meeting, the local geothermal plant manager claimed he could easily harness 1,000 MW out of geothermal areas north of Mývatn. I asked if it wasn’t correct that scientists are concerned about overexploitation of the country’s geothermal areas. The scientists’ criticisms were quickly blown off the table as “Reykjavík knowledge,” and in that instant every alarm bell went off.

Now we understand that power is not as plenty as the hype promised, and now most Icelanders understand that energy production on the banks of Lake Mývatn in Bjarnarflag might just jeopardise the ecosystem in that wonderful lake. But you wonder if the people developing our most delicate areas possess good enough judgement to work close to natural wonders. It seems like they are ready to take the risk, to see what happens.

I found an interview with the aforementioned plant manager from 2002. At that time, he had drilled a big hole for 170 million ISK because a Russian company potentially wanted to build an aluminium oxide factory and a giant aluminium plant in Húsavík.

If one sets aside minor ethical facts, such as the Russian aluminium industry being run by the mafia at that time, one is still left to ponder the fact that almost no industry in the world produces as much and as toxic waste as aluminium oxide production (or alumina, as it is called). Those that followed the horrible events when a red slush toxic lake in Hungary broke should know what comes with an alumina refinery. But this local hard-working man had spent more than one and a half million dollars looking into the feasibility of such a plant in Húsavík. Things have been so good here that people think they are untouchable.

Even though the companies engage in malevolent practices in other countries, they would never do that here. Sure.

THE HOLY LOCAL

It seems that for some reason the most unbelievable hogwash gets promulgated without any critical thought. We enter a boom after boom and never learn from mistakes. We can look further back in history to see how madness is mixed up with ambition, how extreme and unrealistic views of the future are presented and taken seriously.

In an edition of Morgunblaðið from March 1987, one can read a prediction of the impending evolution of local fur farming until 1996. At that time, thirty fur farms were operated in Iceland. Morgunblaðið cites a report that predicts Iceland will foster 600 mink farms by 1996. They assume a twenty-fold growth in ten years, as if nothing were more natural. A month later, this optimistic story ran: “The mink stock will double this year.” Only three years later, in April of 1990, we find this dramatic headline in a copy of Morgunblaðið: “Fur farming: The industry is on its last legs. Many farmers on the edge of despair.”

In this country everything is considered normal if a “local” wants it. Nothing in Iceland is as crazy as the holy local is when he wants a smelter or an oil refinery, no matter how large or out of proportion. He has the sacred right to that, especially if he uses “job creation” as an argument. Numbers that would be considered sizeable in large nation’s economic statistics, energy resources and infrastructure that are earmarked by the world’s superpowers as being “strategically important” are subject to “the will of the locals.” The nation’s energy resources and nature are in the hands of a smattering of district councils that have no staff and no expertise while the majority of Icelanders that reside in the capital area seem by default “local” to nowhere.

So, the locals of the east destroyed their highlands, the locals of the south want to dam the wonders of the Skaftá area, the lower part of the Þjórsá river and the locals of the southwest are ready to harness almost every single geothermal area. And this seems to be a global problem—rural communities losing their youth and talents to the cities of the world are willing to sell off their forests, their mountains, their rivers and valleys for some hope of development and a future.

It is strange to see that one of the major driving forces behind this development resides within our labour leaders, who have been demanding extreme leverage and risk on behalf of public energy companies. If there should be a hesitation in the risk taking, the responsible parties are “dragging their feet.” The labour unions’ “stability agreement” with the former government entails that “every obstacle be removed” that somehow hinders the proposed Helguvík aluminium plant. It is exactly this kind of thinking that lead to almost 200 foreign workers being left disabled and unemployable as a result of working on building the Kárahnjúkar dam. Conditions of workers were severely compromised to make the dam construction process cheap enough. Every obstacle was removed to provide Alcoa with energy prices that save them 200 million USD annually. That amounts to the combined yearly wages of more than 10,000 teachers.

The noble cause of creating jobs becomes quite grim if it involves harming the work capacity of so many. The PR people talk about a ‘multiplication effect’ of every job in a smelter—but wouldn’t it be polite to subtract the disabled workers? People will go so far to satisfy their prince charming that they behave like the ugly stepsister in the fairy tale, cutting their toes off to fit the glass shoe.

HOUSE OF CARDS

The Helguvík aluminium smelter close to Keflavík Airport is a symbol of how poorly run Iceland can be; the Helguvík aluminium smelter is already being built, even though nobody knows where we can scramble together its required 600 MW of energy. The Helguvík smelter is a symbol of how weak the nation’s administration can be, of how shattered professionalism and long-term thinking can become, and how the media all but encourages unlawful activities in their headlines, if job creation is at stake. They started to build the smelter without access to power sources, and without the necessary power lines planned or agreed upon by landowners.

Why start building, then? Because in 2006, the Wild Boys were in power, showing their ambition and “competence” by signing long term sales agreements for cheap energy before the energy sites had been researched, planned or developed. Now Reykjavík Energy and HS Orka are bound by agreements that neither company wants to fulfil due to foreseeable losses from selling the energy below its production costs.

The sharks were very aware that they were taking advantage of a country with mad politicians in a rare period in our history. When they were willing to sell almost everything, anything, anywhere to anyone. In a remarkable investor report called: “Harnessing unlimited power and profit from the world’s most progressive energy program,” an analyst made this great comment:

“It works out great for Iceland, too. It is very cheap for Iceland to deliver power to Century. The Icelandic power companies will make extraordinary profits on that power if aluminium prices stay strong. And if aluminium prices weaken, Iceland is not biting the hand that feeds it.”

This is how politicians build an elaborate house of cards that combine risk, debt and commitment that collapses if only one of the cards falls. Thus, the hands of future city governments have been tied and an insane construction binge in important areas has been commenced, all to benefit one company that’s lacking most of the needed permits.

Could anyone recount the details of the Century Aluminium Helguvík Smelter project at an international conference without being booed off the stage as a fraud? At an aluminium conference, however, such a man would actually bring more lust than an exotic dancer.

Despite being in the hands of extreme capitalists, the labour movement has not called for professionalism or long-term thinking in energy affairs. It simply demands that “every obstacle be removed.” Get the trucks rolling immediately.

In 2006 we were in the middle of a revolution, but the Wild Boys did not call themselves “The Aluminium Revolutionary Front”—they defined themselves as the norm, even though their scale was insane. If they were criticised, they started thinking of themselves as persecuted. Warlords are always persecuted moderates when they’re merely conquering neighbouring nations in the name of peace.

THE CORE OF THE PROBLEM

Throughout the years, polls have shown that a large part of Icelandic males aged 40–70 have been in favour of the collective insanity seen in the energy policy of 2006. The biggest problem seems to be with male voters of The Independence Party, where a vast majority has even considered the most extreme energy policy as the sole basis for the continued survival of Icelanders. That explains the great emotional attachment they have to dams and smelters. To secure their survival, the majority of them wants to cut back on our environmental regulations, and they have no standards whatsoever on the ethical background of the corporations coming to Iceland.

Therein lies Iceland’s most serious political ill. If everything were normal, our males would be conservative, moderate, aversive to risk, frugal, orderly and even a bit boring. This is an important group of people in every society. It contains a lot of average household fathers; it contains pillars of society, company directors, influentials, MPs and even journalists and editors. These are men that have the power to define what is normal and what is abnormal and/or excessive.

OF RESPONSIBLE PUNKS AND SURREALISTS

It is harmful for communities when a critical mass of their important males starts adhering to revolutionary and completely reckless ideas, adopting a blind belief in them. This group is not fit for governing anything while the situation lasts, and it is therefore no coincidence that the city of Reykjavík is now governed by the punkers and surrealists of the Best Party. A moderate mixture of surrealism and punk rock is a down to Earth, conservative and responsible policy when compared to the delusions and anarchy of the crazed men. They have proved very moderate and responsible, and have now moved the policy of Reykjavík Energy, Reykjavík’s energy company, into a more sustainable and modest direction. And the Left Green Social Democrat government did the same with Landsvirkjun, the national energy company.

Those that are worst off in this group of mad men share a mutual admiration for Einar Benediktsson (1863-1945). The Icelandic National Myth is perhaps best embodied in the figure Einar Ben, our poet of progress. His most recent biography gives a good picture of the kind of man he was and the impulses that motivated his actions:

What drives Einar Benediktsson on to undertake this long journey […] is his unshakeable belief in his own abilities to be of use to his impoverished fatherland in countries abroad. His dream is to furnish the money that will transform Iceland into a modern country, with towns, factories, railways, roads, harbours and large-scale farms. He carries nothing with him except his belief in himself…

Einar Benediktsson had great dreams for the future of Iceland, replete with hydroelectric dams, factories and railways. While his generation on both sides of the Atlantic saw their dreams become a reality, and sometimes a nightmare, Einar was to be disappointed in all his great hopes and ambitions. Henry Ford was born a year before Einar Benediktsson, and Sam Eyde, the founder of Norway’s Norsk Hydro was born three years after him. But Iceland failed to industrialize in the way Einar envisaged. Whether Iceland was fortunate or unfortunate to have missed out on the Industrial Revolution is something we can argue over. But the failure of Einar’s dreams left an unfilled space in the Icelandic soul. Iceland’s wealth came from fishing, but Einar’s ideas still hovered in the air, leaving a sense of a task left unfulfilled—the unfinished Icelandic dream. The Americans could move on from Ford to Gates. The Icelanders were still lacking a Ford.

One of the first bubbles in Iceland happened when businesspeople travelled the country buying rights to harness waterfalls in the beginning of the 20th century. Einar Ben had the Norwegian engineer Sætersemoen draw up a row of power plants spanning the entirety of Þjórsá. The drawings of the proposed power plants look magnificent and enticing and would without doubt be considered among Iceland’s most beautiful buildings had they been constructed. But how realistic were the plans? They had planned for harnessing Þjórsá to produce 600–800 MW—in 1918, nota bene. This does not include the rest of the water rights these men had secured for themselves, including Dettifoss and Gullfoss. In comparison one could note that today, one hundred years later, the City of Reykjavík uses 200 MW—on Christmas Eve, with every electric appliance running at full steam.

What did Einar plan on doing with all this energy in 1918? Aluminium production was barely on the horizon as a feasible industry, and televisions and freezers were but distant dreams. What were they planning to do with all the power? Produce fertiliser? The Gufunes fertiliser plant used around 20 MW when it was running at its peak. Who was to use all the energy and pay for the series of power plants? The answer is likely simple: No one. No one in the world could have found use for this energy.

Of course Einar could easily have harnessed a small stream to light up a small village, maybe even a cowshed or two. But there is no glory in that. The act would not appease the deranged men’s need for conquest and magnitude. There’s much more spunk, gusto and vigour in lining all of Þjórsá with power plants, even if the energy produced is way beyond what the nation can use one hundred years later. To this day, a lot of people think that Iceland’s government at that time was backwards, afraid of foreigners and somehow prevented the founding of a great and profitable company and “foreign investment.” But it’s enough to look at the numbers to see that the whole thing was a sham.

It’s so weird to think that, ever since, a certain group of Icelandic males have harboured a strange sort of national grief. It’s as if Einar’s unrealistic ideas have been haunting later generations of Icelanders. Not as fantasy, but as real, attainable goals or lost opportunities: “The dreams of our turn of the century poets have finally come true.” Remarked former PM Geir Haarde as he signed a deal with Alcoa in 2002. Yes, finally, the nation was dragged into a century old illusion.

THE MAD MEN VS. THE WISE GIRLS

The mob seems tolerate nothing worse than young, educated women who that use words like “professional” or “process.” Even if aluminium production in Iceland has been tripled over the last ten years, a lot of the crazy guys think that Iceland’s economic problems stem first and foremost from a lack of aluminium smelters.

Supporters of a new Century Aluminium smelter in Helguvík spent millions in advertisements campaigning against departing Minister for the Environment Svandís Svavarsdóttir, who delayed the building process with demands of a sober overview of the energy demand and environmental impact. The blogosphere went wild when Left-Green MP Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir spoke up against deep-sea oil drilling in Icelandic waters. One sensed a lynch mob in the making as former-Minister for the Environment Þórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir met with locals in Húsavík advocating for a full environmental impact assessment for a new Alcoa smelter—the audience was only lacking the pitchforks. The decline of The Independence Party is very evident in the fact that Katrín Fjeldsted lost her seat in parliament. She is a well-educated, intelligent and logical doctor and the only party MP who questioned the insanity. Every obstacle shall be pushed out of the way.

Icelanders harvest 1% of the world’s fish. We receive more tourists per capita than most nations. Iceland has harnessed five times the amount of energy that the nation needs to function, and we currently operate three aluminium smelters. But we have ALREADY harnessed five times more energy than our neighbouring countries. We are already an energy superpower—if everything were normal, such an investment should yield a fair bit of profit to the nation, if we don’t blow the proceeds and resources in another round of debt. But the discourse is so crazy. People act as if “NOTHING IS PERMITTED” when the energy production is already five times more than the nation can consume. Of the energy we produce, 90% already goes to smelters.

We already have everything a modern society needs. We just need to tend to what we have already built, to reap some profit from the power plants we have already constructed and take better care of what we’re currently fishing. People get insecure when interest groups moan: “Who will support us in the future?!?” as if Iceland is a country without foundations. The fear that is purposely spread is resulting in Iceland acting like a man that demands radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery to fix his headache. The truth is that the treatment will never cure him—but it might kill him. He will in the best-case scenario grow addicted to the drugs.

THEY TRIED TO BREAK US…

We are a small community and we need peace and room to work. That Björk should need to take time off work to fight the insanity is just a small example of the disturbance that thousands of Icelanders suffer every day because of this crazy nonsense. Living here will become unbearable if something like the reckless policy from 2006 goes full speed again. It is maddening that we cannot seem to leave our most beautiful areas alone. We are a small community where co-dependency is the norm and people are polite.

The new leaders are young and nice guys; Sigmundur Davíð loves old buildings and has good ideas for city planning. But behind them is a crowd of mad men, “fallen far from glory, reckless and so hungered.” Were four years from power enough to sober up the mentality in terms of the energy policy? What will come out of the “rethinking” of the Energy Master Plan? Will we be strapped up into another rollercoaster, just to take another ride of boom and bust? “They tried to break us. Will they try again?”

The remarks can generally be split into two groups based on senders and views: firstly, individuals and environmentalist associations who above all protest the afore-mentioned plans for the Reykjanes peninsula; secondly, companies and institutions with vested interests in the further heavy industrialization of Iceland who demand that the Master Plan’s second phase goes unaltered through parliament — that is, as it was before the parliamentary resolution was presented, in which the planned Þjórsá dams and other hydro power plants are included in the exploitation category.

One of the remarks sent in differs from the others as it evaluates energy production and nature conservation in a larger, long-term context. That remark, written by Helga Katrín Tryggvadóttir, MA in development studies, is published here below, translated from Icelandic by Saving Iceland.

I find myself inclined to make a few remarks regarding the Industries Committee’s discussion about the Energy Master Plan. My remarks do not concern particular natural areas but rather the comprehensive ideas regarding the scope and nature of the protection and exploitation of natural areas. Since the making of the Energy Master Plan begun, much has changed for the better as researches and knowledge on energy production and nature conservation continuously advance. The social pattern as well as opinions on nature conservation have also changed rapidly since the first draft for an Energy Master Plan was published, and the emphasis on nature conservation constantly increases. With this in mind it is necessary to take into account that during the next years, this emphasis on nature conservation is likely to increase even further. Therefore it is important for the Industries Committee to remember that keeping natural areas in pending does not prevent future utilization, whereas areas exploited today cannot be protected tomorrow.

Unsustainable Utilization

The many negative impacts of geothermal and hydro power plants have not been discussed thoroughly enough in Iceland. This can probably be explained by the the fact that these are renewable energy sources and thereby, people tend to view them as positive options for energy production. Thus we often hear that it is better to operate energy intensive industries here, using renewable energy sources, rather than in countries where the same industries are powered by electricity produced by coals and oil. However, when these issues are looked at it more accurately, we have to be aware of the fact that despite hydro and geothermal power’s renewability, their current utilization in Iceland is by no means sustainable.

Using the hydraulic head of glacial rivers, hydro power plants require reservoirs which deplete vegetated land, the reservoirs get filled with mud and by time the area becomes an eroded land. When it comes to geothermal areas, exploited for energy production, the seizure of fluid is much greater than the inflow into the geothermal reservoir and therefore the geothermal power dries up by time. At that point the area has to rest for a time still unknown in the geothermal sciences. Thus it is clear that although we are dealing with renewable energy sources, they do not at all allow for infinite energy production, and additionally the power plants themselves entail environmental destruction. It is clear that the utilization of these resources has to be executed very carefully, and preferably, all further utilization plans should be put on hold until it is possible to learn from the experience of the plants built in the very recent past.

CO2 Emission

A lot of emphasis has been put on the idea that Iceland possesses huge amounts of “green energy,” meaning that this energy does not burn fossil fuels. Thereby it is assumed that no CO2 emission takes place. This is, however, far from the truth: in 2008 the CO2 emission from geothermal plants in Iceland amounted to 185 thousand tons, which is 6% of the country’s total CO2 emission¹. Hydro dams also add to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere: big reservoirs cause the drowning of vegetated land, wherein rotting vegetation emits methane gas, increasing global warming. It is estimated that about 7% of carbon emitted by humans come from such constructions². The sediment of glacial rivers affects the ocean’s ecosystems and nourishes algae vegetation by the seashore. Marine organisms play an important part in extracting carbon from the atmosphere; it is estimated that such vegetation extracts about 15 times more of CO2 than a woodland of the same size³. Annually, the ocean is believed to extract 11 billion tons of CO2 emitted by men⁴. By damming glacial rivers, entailing disturbance of their sediment and of algae vegetation, Icelanders are not only threatening the fish stocks around the country, and thus the country’s fishing industry, but also further contributing to global warming in a way which is more dangerous than deforestation, though the latter has undergone much harsher criticism worldwide than the destruction of oceanic ecosystems.

Geothermal Power Plants

In the Energy Master Plan’s second phase, possible geothermal power plants are listed in 20 out of the 25 highest seats of exploitation. If the planned hydro dams, Hvamms- and Holtavirkjun, in river Þjórsá will be kept in pending — which I rejoice as a resident of the Skeiða- og Gnúpverjahreppur region — geothermal power plants will occupy 22 out of the 25 seats. Due to the fact that so little is known about the long-term impacts of geothermal power plants, this ordering is a matter of concern. Before further construction takes place, it is necessary to wait until more experience is gained from the already operating geothermal power plants. Many of the problems connected to these plants are still unsolved, for instance the dangerous material in the plants’ run-of water as well as their polluting emissions. This has to be taken into consideration, especially near the capital area of Reykjavík where sulphur pollution is already very high⁵.

It also has to be taken into account that geothermal energy production is not sustainable, as an geothermal area’s heat supply eventually dries up. Their usage allows for 50 years of production, which of course is a very limited amount of time. If the plan is to use such energy for industrial development it has to be kept in mind that 50 years pass very quickly, meaning that the jobs at stake are no long-term jobs. At the same time, such a short-term utilization encroaches on future generations’ right to utilize the geothermal energy sources, not to mention their right to utilize these areas by protecting them for outdoor activities and creation of knowledge, as Iceland’s geothermal areas are unique on a global scale. For the last weeks, we have witnessed how the already exploited geothermal areas, or those where test-drilling has taken place, have not at all been utilized in a way that goes together with tourism and outdoor activities, as the areas’ appearance and environment have been damaged on a large scale⁶.

Economical Arguments

When it comes to economical arguments, people often tend to call for short-term employment solutions, stating that it is important to construct as many possible power plants in the shortest time in order to create as many jobs as possible. The fact, however, is that a construction-driven economy will always lead to instability, and such instability is indeed the Icelandic economy’s largest bale. Above all, Iceland’s economy needs stability and a future vision that sees further than 10 years into the future. For a stable future economy to be built, it has to happen in a sustainable way, whereas continuous aggressive exploitation of the country’s natural resources will simply lead to an era of regular economic collapses. By putting such strong emphasis on the aggressive exploitation of hydro and geothermal resources, with the appendant construction bubbles, a situation of unemployment will be sustained, broken up by occasional and differently short-lived boom periods in between.

References:

1. Birna Sigrún Hallsdóttir, Kristín Harðardóttir, Jón Guðmundsson og Arnór Snorrason. 2009. National Inventory Report Iceland 2009 Submitted under the United Nations Framework Convention no Climate Change. Umhverfisstofnun.

2. Náttúruverndarsamtök Íslands ofl. 2011. Umsögn um drög að tillögu til þingsályktunar um áætlun um vernd og orkunýtingu landsvæða. (Download pdf. here.)

3.  Worldwatch Institute. 2011. Oceans Absorb Less Carbon Dioxide as Marine Systems Change.

4. The Guardian. 2009. Sea Absorbing Less CO2, Scientists Discover. 12. janúar 2009.

5. Náttúruverndarsamtök Íslands ofl. 2011. Umsögn um drög að tillögu til þingsályktunar um áætlun um vernd og orkunýtingu landsvæða.

6. Ómar Ragnarsson. 2012. Já, það varð svona og það verður svona. Morgunblaðið. 2012. Borteigar . „Verður þetta allt svona ?“ 5. maí 2012.

See also:

International Rivers. Problem With Big Dams.

International Union for Conservation of Nature. 2009. Ocean Carbon Central for Climate Change.

These news echo the many warnings made by the opponents of the cluster of five dams at Kárahnjúkar and nearby Eyjabakkar, who repeatedly stated that the project’s alleged profitability was nothing but an illusion, but were systematically silenced by Iceland’s authorities.

Now, as these facts finally become established in the media—this time straight from the horse’s mouth—similarly bad news has arrived regarding another big Icelandic energy company. Reykjavík Energy has failed to make a profit from their 2007 and 2008 investments, effectively making them lose money. At the same time, new research shows that the environmental impacts of the Kárahnjúkar dams are exactly as vast and serious as environmentalists and scientists feared.

And yet, more dams, geothermal power-plants and aluminium smelters are on the drawing table—presented as the only viable way out of the current economic crisis.

Dividend: Close to Zero

During the last half century, Landsvirkjun has paid its owner—the Icelandic nation—only 7,8 billion Icelandic Krónur (66 million USD at present value) as dividend, which according to Hörður Arnarson is way too low and in fact almost equivalent to zero. While it would be fair to expect around eleven percent dividend from the company’s own equity, it has been at an average of two percent since Landsvirkjun was founded. The income from the Kárahnjúkar plant has been about 6 percent of its book value, which again is too low, as according to normal standards the income should be 9 percent of the book value.

At present, Landvirkjun’s total earnings have been 73 million US dollars at most, whereas it should be closer to 180 million USD, considering the owner’s 1,6 billion USD equity. It was made clear by Arnarson that the price of energy purchased by large-scale energy consumers plays a major role herein—a price that obviously has been far below any rational logic and standards.

Same Old, Same Old

In 2003, British newspaper The Guardian published “Power Driven”, Susan De Muth’s exclusive report about the Kárahnjúkar power plant, which at that point was already under construction. Among many critiques made in the article, De Muth questioned Kárahnjúkar’s allegeded profitability. She wrote:

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson, a risk specialist, prepared a recent independent economic report on Karahnjukar for the Icelandic Nature Conservation Association. “Landsvirkjun’s figures do not comprise adequate cost and risk analysis,” he says, “nor realistic contingencies for overruns.” Had the state not guaranteed the loans for the project, Siglaugsson adds, it would never have attracted private finance. “Karahnjukar will never make a profit, and the Icelandic taxpayer may well end up subsidising Alcoa.”

Siglaugsson is just one of many who critically analysed the economics of the Kárahnjúkar project, concluding that its contribution to Iceland’s economy would be about none—or in fact negative. But just as many geologists who cautioned against the risks of locating the dams in a highly geologically seismic area were dismissed by Valgerður Sverrisdóttir, then Minister of Industry, as “politically motivated and not to be listened to”, so were the skeptical economists.

De Muth’s article caused a real stir in Iceland, manifest for instance in the fact that Landsvirkjun and Iceland’s Embassy in London contacted The Guardian in a complaint about “so much space […] used for promoting factual errors and misconceptions of the project and Icelandic society as a whole.” Friðrik Sophusson, Landsvirkjun’s director at that time—who in the article is quoted calling all of Kárahnjúkar’s opponents “romantics”—actually offered The Guardian to send another journalist over to Iceland in order to do “a proper report on issues in Iceland”, this time with his “assistance.” ALCOA also sent a barrage of objections to the Guardian. All the facts presented in the article were double checked by the Guardian’s legal team and confirmed to be accurate.

This volatile response from the authorities and corporates only strengthened the article’s points on the Icelandic tradition of suppressing criticism. This was confirmed in a letter to The Guardian by Icelandic environmentalist and commentator Lára Hanna Einarsdóttir, who suggested that “an Icelandic journalist would have lost [his or her] job if he or she had been so outspoken.”

The Coming Recession

And no wonder, as the article pinpointed serious flaws in the whole rhetoric surrounding the plans to heavily industrialize Iceland, plans that would be nothing without the construction of a series of mega hydro dams and geothermal power plants. Whereas these plans were presented as a path to an increased economical prosperity, De Muth quoted aforementioned economist Siglaugsson, who voiced his fear “that a boom during the construction period, with attendant high interest rates, will be followed by a recession.”

And as time told, this was indeed what happened. In an article published in the early days of Iceland’s current financial crisis, Jaap Krater, ecological economist and spokesperson of Saving Iceland, gave it a thorough explanation:

These mega-projects in a small economy have been compared to a ‘heroin addiction’. Short-term ‘shots’ lead to a long-term collapse. The choice is between a short-term infuse or long-term sustainable economic development. The ‘shot’ of Fjardaal [Alcoa’s aluminium smelter in Iceland, powered by the Kárahnjúkar power plant] overheated the Icelandic economy.

Recognizing the dangers of overheating the economy—a point also made clear in Charles Ferguson’s recent documentary, Inside Job—leaves us with two options. As Krater pointed out:

There has been a lot of critique on the proposed plans to develop Iceland’s unique energy resources. Those in favour of it have generally argued that it is good for the economy. Anyone who gives it a moment of thought can conclude that that is a myth. Supposed economic benefits from new power plants and industrial plants need to be assessed and discussed critically and realistically. Iceland is coming down from a high. Will it have another shot, or go cold turkey?

Another Shot, Please

This spring, Landsvirkjun stated that if the company was to start its operations from scratch the aluminium industry would be its prime costumer. This particular paradox—as the aluminium industry is already its biggest energy purchaser—was just one of Landsvirkjun’s many. Another one is their suggestion that Icelanders should “settle upon” plans to build 14 new power plants in the next 15 years. And the third one is the company’s plans to sell more energy to aluminium companies—costumers who, in Landsvirkjun’s own words, do not pay a fair amount for what they get.

But Arnarson has said that the future looks better, referring for instance to the fact that the price for Kárahnjúkar’s energy is directly connected to world-wide aluminium prices, which Arnarson says are getting higher. Herein is the fourth paradox, as linking energy prices with aluminium prices has so far been disastrous for Iceland’s economy—most recently acknowledged in an official report regarding the profitability of selling energy to heavy industry. According to the report, commissioned by the Ministry of Finance and published last Friday, December 2nd, the total profitability has been an average 5% from 1990 until today, which is far below the profitability of other industries in Iceland, and much lower than the profitability of similar industries in Iceland’s neighbouring countries. The year 1990 is crucial here, as since then, Landsvirkjun’s energy prices to heavy industry have been directly linked to global aluminium prices.

It is worth quoting Jaap Krater again here, where he explains the dangers of interlinking these two prices, and describes how increased aluminium supply will lower the price of aluminium and decrease revenue for Iceland:

One might think that a few hundred thousand tons of aluminium more or less will not impact the global market. The reality is that it is not the sum of production that determines the price but rather the friction between supply and demand. A small amount of difference can have a significant effect in terms of pricing.

High Costs, Low Production

On top of this, recent calculations revealed in newspaper Fréttablaðið, show that Kárahnjúkar is Landsvirkjun’s proportionally most expensive construction. When the production of each of the company’s power plants is compared with the production of Landsvirkjun’s property as a whole, as a proportion of their construction costs, it becomes clear that Kárahnjúkar—with its 2.3 billion USD initial cost—is the most economically unviable plant.

Another Energy Company in Crisis

At the same time that Icelanders face Landsvirkjun’s confession to it’s virtually zero profitability, a damning report on another big energy company, Reykjavík Energy (OR), has been made public. It was originally published at the beginning of this year but wasn’t supposed to enter the public sphere, which it indeed didn’t until in late November. Reykjavík Energy’s biggest shareholder is the city of Reykjavík, meaning the inhabitants of Reykjavík.

As already documented thoroughly, the company—which operates several geothermal power plants, including Hellisheiðarvirkjun, largely built to fuel Century Aluminum’s production—is in pretty deep water. But the newly leaked report proves that it has sunk even deeper than generally considered. The report is a literal condemnation of the company, its board and its highest ranking managers, who get a grade F for their job. A good part of Reykjavík Energy’s investments from 2007 and 2008 are now considered as lost money.

The report also reveals that when energy contracts between OR and Norðurál (Century Aluminum) were made, for the latter’s planned fantasy-of-a-smelter in Helguvík, Reykjavík Energy’s directors completely ignored the very visible economic collapse confronting them.

Recently it has been reported that Reykjavík Energy owes 200 billion Icelandic ISK in foreign currency, which is two thirds of all foreign debts owed by Icelandic companies, whose income is not in foreign currency.

What we see here are two of Iceland’s largest energy companies, both of them public property, both having spent hugely excessive amounts of money—or more precisely, collected gigantic debts—struggling to continue to build power plants in order to feed the highly energy intensive aluminium industry with dirt cheap and allegedly “green” energy. As a result, they have ended up without profit and in a deep pool of debt.

And who is to pay for their gambling risks? As Thorsteinn Siglaugsson stated in 2003: the Icelandic taxpayer.

“No Impacts” Become Huge Impacts

To make bad news even worse, the irreversibly destructive ecological impacts of the Kárahnjúkar dams have, in the last months, become more and more visible. To quote “Power Driven” once again (as simply one of a good number of warnings on the dams’ environmental impacts):

The hydro-project will also divert Jokulsa a Dal at the main dam, hurtling the river through tunnels into the slow-moving Jokulsa i Fljotsdal, which feeds Iceland’s longest lake, Lagarfljot. The calm, silver surface of this tourist attraction will become muddy, turbulent and unnavigable.

This was written in 2003. Today, this is what is happening: because of the river’s glacial turbidity Lagarfljót has changed colour, which according to Guðni Guðbergsson, ichthyologist at the Institute of Freshwater Fisheries (IFF), means that light doesn’t reach as deep into the water as before (see photos aside and below). Photosynthesis, which is the fundamental basis for organic production, decreases due to limited light, its domino effects being the constant reduction of food for the fish. IFF’s researches show that near Egilsstaðir, where visibility in Lagarfljót was 60 cm before the dams were built, it is now only 17 cm. They also show that there are not only less fish in the river, but that the fish are much smaller than before.

In addition to this, residents by Lagarfljót have faced serious land erosion due to the river’s increased water content and strength.

This effect was warned of in an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the project by the Iceland National Planning Agency (INPA), purposely ignored and overruled by Siv Friðleifsdóttir, then Minister of Environment. Landsvirkjun had complained to the Ministry of the Environment, and the EIA ended up on Friðleifsdóttir’s table, who nevertheless issued a permit for the construction, stating that the dams would have no significant impact on Lagarfljót.

In response of the news on Lagarfljót’s current condition, Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Minister of the Environment, said during parliamentary discussion last September, that her Ministry’s over-all administration regarding the Kárahnjúkar decision-process will be examined in detail. She should demand a similar investigation into the decision making of the Ministry of Industry, whose Minister, Valgerður Sverissdóttir has, along with Landsvirkjun’s Friðrik Sophusson, openly admitted while joking on film with the US ambassador in Iceland, how they enjoyed “bending all the rules, just for Alcoa.”

All the Old Dogs

Despite all of this, Iceland’s energy companies, hand in hand with the aluminium industry, some of the biggest labour unions and industry-related associations—not to mention a majority of parliamentarians, including those of government-member social-democratic Samfylkingin—are still in heavy industry mode, campaigning for the construction of more dams, geothermal power plants and aluminium smelters. Ironically, but still deadly serious, smelter projects such as Century Alumium’s Helguvík, which is at a standstill, unable to guarantee both necessary energy and financing, continue to be presented as profitable solutions to the current crisis.

Met with little resistance in parliament, most of these plans are still considered to be on the drawing table, though most of them seem to be on hold when looked at closely. The latter is mostly thanks to grassroots activists, bloggers and commentators who have systematically reminded the public of the reality, while the bulk of journalists seem to be unable to stick to facts—being extraordinarily co-dependent with those in favour of further heavy-industrialization.

Under the banner of “solving the crisis”, “creating jobs”, and most recently “getting the wheels of work to spin again”, the heavy industry-favoured parties seem to simply refuse to listen to hard facts, even their very own. This attitude is probably best summed up in the recent words of Valgerður Sverrisdóttir, responsible as Minister of Industry, for the building of the dams at Kárahnjúkar, who in response to the news about the power plant’s close-to-zero profitability, said that she wouldn’t want to imagine how the current financial situation would be, if the dams hadn’t been built.

It is said that an old dog will not learn new tricks. And to be honest, ‘old dogs’ pretty accurately describes those making decisions on Iceland’s energy and industry affairs. In order to learn from mistakes and prevent even bigger catastrophes, it wouldn’t be unfair to ask for a new generation—would it?
_____________________________________________________

More photos of Lagarfljót’s turbid condition

These photos are from 2008, which suggests that the current condition is even worse.

International Rivers and Friends of the Earth International have teamed up to create a state-of-the-art Google Earth 3-D tour and video narrated by Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey, winner of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award. The production was launched on the first day of the COP 17 climate meeting in Durban. The video and tour allow viewers to explore why dams are not the right answer to climate change, by learning about topics such as reservoir emissions, dam safety, and adaptation while visiting real case studies in Africa, the Himalayas and the Amazon.

One of the association’s primary criticisms is directed towards the fact that a particular committee, nominated to sort the areas in question into three different categories: protection, hold and utilization – did not include a single representative from environmentalist organizations. Whereas representatives from the energy and tourism industries, as well as the ministries of environment and industry, had seats on the committee. The viewpoint of nature conservation has thus no spokesperson in the working progress, states a press release from INCA.

On the website of the Framework Programme (translated as the ‘Icelandic Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Energy Resources’) it is stated that “Iceland has been blessed with extensive resources of renewable hydro and geothermal energy” , of which “only a portion […] has as yet been harnessed”. The further development of energy production in Iceland, according to the website, “will be a challenging task, as user interests, other than those concerned solely with energy, will have to be taken into account.” And it continues:

Policy decisions on land use can have a significant, profound, and prolonged impact on nature, regional development, tourism and outdoor activities, employment, and on society at large. Carefully thought-out decision making will minimise the risk of mistakes and shortsighted undertakings, and enhance co-operation among all partners affected by the decisions taken.

This process was initiated by the Government of Iceland in 1999, with the aim of developing a Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Energy Resources. The process has been formulated on a scientific and impartial basis – not dominated by narrow and biased interests – and is open to democratic public involvement and scrutiny.

By eliminating the environmentalist perspective from the above-mentioned committee, the framework programme is obviously not an example of “co-operation among all partners affected by the decisions taken.” Likewise, the manifested aim to “minimise the risk of mistakes and short sighted undertakings” is clearly not being practised.

The Icelandic Nature Conservation Association points out the fact that though the current government has now operated for two years it still remains a mystery what kind of a “settlement” the government wants to seek in harmony with the Framework Programme’s results. Like Saving Iceland has pointed out, Landsvirkjun (Iceland’s National Energy Company), adopting Orwellian Newspeak, plans to force a “national consensus” in favour of  the construction of 14 new power-plants in the next 15 years – mainly to meet the aluminium industry’s demands for increased energy for aluminium smelters in Iceland.

In their statement, INCA also highlights that the energy industry’s representatives in the aforementioned committee still push hard on preventing the enlargement of the RAMSAR listed Þjórsárver wetlands reserve, in order to be able to build the infamous Norðlingaölduveita hydro-utility. The same agents also work hard on getting access to the geothermal areas around the Torfajökull glacier and Kerlingarfjöll mountains, by fighting against these areas being categorized as protected. All of these areas were found highly valuable by a professional group consisting of biologists, botanists, geophysicists, aquatic ecologists, geochemists, archaeologists and geologists, to name a few of them, who were employed to evaluate the impacts of particular exploitation options on landscape, earth formation, vegetation, animal life and archaeological relics. According to these results INCA demands that these areas will immediately be categorized as protected, as well as other areas like river Jökulsá á Fjöllum, the glacial rivers in Skagafjörður and the areas around Skaftá and Tungnaá rivers and Langisjór lake, which were also found highly valuable by the group of professionals.

Since the work on the framework programme started more than a decade ago, energy production in Iceland has more than doubled. Despite the controversy of this development, manifested in an increased public opposition towards heavy industry and large-scale energy production, the plan is still to duplicate the current production – the plans of private and municipal owned energy companies not included.

Incidentally, in spite of promising to do so, the Icelandic government has still not ratified the Aarhus Convention Agreement which according to Kofi A. Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations:

… is by far the most impressive elaboration of principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, which stresses the need for citizen’s participation in environmental issues and for access to information on the environment held by public authorities. As such it is the most ambitious venture in the area of ‘ environmental democracy’ so far undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations.

It seems democracy does not come easy to Icelandic governments.

Map of the Intended Energy Master Plan for Iceland Phase 1 as publicised by the Ministry of Industry in 2003.

Both of the above photos are from the geothermal area around Kerlingarfjöll mountains, south west of Hofsjökull glacier.

Big dams have a serious record of social and environmental destruction, and there are many alternatives. So why are they still being built?

On a hot May day, a peasant farmer named Bounsouk looks out across the vast expanse of water before him, the 450-square-kilometer reservoir behind the new Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos. At the bottom of the reservoir is the land where he once lived, grew rice, grazed buffalo, and collected forest fruits, berries, and medicinal plants and spices. Now there is just water, water everywhere.

“Before the flood I could grow enough rice to feed my family and I had 10 buffalo,” he says. “I like our new houses and I like having electricity in the new village, but we do not have enough land and the soil quality is very poor. Now I can’t grow enough rice to feed my family, and three of my buffalo died because they didn’t have enough food.”

Bounsouk is one of 6,200 indigenous people whose lands were flooded to make way for the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project in this small Southeast Asian country. His story is one that is heard over and over again in the project resettlement area. People are generally happy with their new houses, electricity, and proximity to the road, but are concerned about how they will feed their families in the long term. The poor quality of land and lack of viable income-generating options in this remote area make their prospects bleak.

Big dams have frequently imposed high social and environmental costs and longterm economic tradeoffs, such as lost fisheries and tourism potential and flooded agricultural and forest land. According to the independent World Commission on Dams, most projects have failed to compensate affected people for their losses and adequately mitigate environmental impacts. Local people have rarely had a meaningful say in whether or how a dam is implemented, or received their fair share of project benefits.

But Electricité de France, Nam Theun 2’s developer, together with the Lao government, the World Bank, and other backers, promised that Nam Theun 2 would be different. They called it a “poverty-reduction project.” The company committed to restoring the incomes of affected communities, and the World Bank claimed that the cash-strapped Lao government would use the revenues from Nam Theun 2’s electricity exports to neighboring Thailand solely to benefit the poor. These promises helped seal the deal, bringing in European development agencies, banks, and export credit agencies with hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, loans, and insurance for the US$1.45 billion project, the largest foreign investment ever in Laos.

But while Nam Theun 2’s engineering deadlines have been met, social and environmental programs have stumbled ever since construction started, making life more difficult for Lao villagers. Legal agreements have been violated and social and environmental commitments have been broken. In a manner typical of hydro projects worldwide, promises were made prior to project approval that were later broken by project developers and governments.

Downstream, more than 120,000 people are waiting to see how their lives will be affected when the project starts operation in early 2010. They are likely to suffer the project’s most serious damage, including destruction of fisheries, flooding of riverbank gardens, and water quality problems. Yet the programs to restore livelihoods in this area are badly under-funded and poorly planned.

Rather than being a new model of hydropower development, the experience with Nam Theun 2 to date only reinforces lessons learned from other large hydropower projects around the world. Instead of giving hope for the future, Nam Theun 2 threatens more of the same: broken promises, shattered lives, ruined ecosystems.

Hydro Boom

The dam building industry is greenwashing hydropower with a public relations offensive designed to convince the world that the next generation of dams will provide additional sources of clean energy and help to ease the effects of climate change. In some of the world’s last great free-flowing-river basins, such as the Amazon, the Mekong, the Congo, and the rivers of Patagonia, governments and industry are pushing forward with cascades of massive dams, all under the guise of clean energy.

Following a decade-long lull, a major resurgence in dam construction worldwide is now under way, driven by infusions of new capital from China, Brazil, Thailand, India, and other middle-income countries. In particular, Chinese financial institutions have replaced the World Bank as the largest funder of dam projects globally. Chinese banks and companies are involved in constructing some 216 large dams (“large” means at least 15 meters high, or between 5 and 15 meters and with a reservoir capacity of at least 3 million cubic meters) in 49 different countries, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, many with poor human rights records. A look at the heavy dam-building activity in China, the Amazon basin, and Africa illustrates the risks involved.

China. China is already home to more than 25,000 large dams, about half of the global total. These projects have forced more than 23 million people from their homes and land, and many are still suffering the impacts of displacement and dislocation. Around 30 percent of China’s rivers are severely polluted with sewage, agricultural and mining runoff, and industrial chemicals, and the flows of some (such as the Yellow River) have been so dramatically altered that they no longer reach the sea. Free-flowing rivers with adequate oxygen and natural nutrient balances can remove or reduce the toxicity of river contaminants, but dams compound pollution problems by reducing rivers’ ability to flush out pollutants and because the reservoirs accumulate upstream contaminants and submerge vegetation, which then rots. The water then released can be highly toxic and can have significant ecological and human-health effects downstream.

Despite the poor record of dam construction in China, the Chinese government has ambitious plans to expand hydropower generation, more than doubling capacity to 250,000 megawatts by 2020. Huge hydropower cascades have been proposed and are being constructed in some of China’s most pristine and diverse river basins in the country’s remote southwest.

The Three Gorges Dam, perhaps the world’s most notorious dam, generates electricity equivalent to that of about 25 coal-fired power stations. Yet the tradeoffs involved are enor-

mous. The project has been plagued by corruption, spiraling costs, environmental catastrophes, human rights violations, and resettlement difficulties. To date, more than 1.3 million people have been moved to make way for the dam. Hundreds of thousands of these people have received tiny, barren plots of land or have been sent to urban slums with limited cash compensation and housing. Those resettled in towns around the edge of the Three Gorges reservoir have seen the shore of the reservoir collapse in as many as 91 places, killing scores of people and forcing whole villages to relocate. Protests have been met with repression, including imprisonment and beatings.

The Three Gorges Dam is, unfortunately, the tip of the iceberg. In southwest China, at least 114 dams on eight rivers in the region are being proposed or are under development on major rivers, such as the Lancang (Upper Mekong), the Nu (Upper Salween), and the Jinsha (Upper Yangtze). Many of these projects are among the largest in the world, with correspondingly serious impacts on river ecology, displacement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority people, and concerns about the safety of downstream communities. Several of the projects are in or adjacent to the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage Site, threatening the ecological integrity of one of the most spectacular and biologically rich areas of the world.

Of increasing concern is the potential for dams in Southwest China to trigger earthquakes. Recent evidence has emerged that the devastating 7.9-magnitude Sichuan earthquake of May 2008, which killed an estimated 90,000 people, may have been caused by the Zipingpu Dam. It is well established that large dams can trigger earthquakes through what is called reservoir-induced seismicity. Scientists believe that there are more than 100 instances of reservoirs causing earthquakes around the world. According to geophysical hazards researcher Christian Klose of Columbia University, “The several hundred million tons of water piled behind the Zipingpu Dam put just the wrong stresses on the adjacent Beichuan fault.”

Many of China’s dam projects are being built on international rivers with no evaluation of the potential transboundary impacts. The cascade of eight dams being built on the Lancang River will drastically change the Mekong River’s natural flood/drought cycle and block the transport of sediment, affecting ecosystems and the livelihoods of millions living downstream in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Fluctuations in water levels and reduced fisheries caused by the three dams already completed have been recorded along the Thai-Lao border. Despite this, construction has proceeded without consultation with China’s downstream neighbors and without an assessment of the dams’ likely impacts on the river and its people.

Meanwhile, downstream along the Mekong, the governments of Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia are planning their own cascade of 11 dams on the river’s mainstream, and scores of additional dams on its tributaries. The projects are being proposed by Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Thai developers, with financing presumably from public and private financial institutions in their home countries. The growth of regional capital has fueled the resurgence of these projects, which have been on the drawing board for decades.

Around 60 million people depend on the Mekong River for fish, irrigation, transportation, and water. Known regionally as the “Mother of Waters,” the Mekong supports one of the world’s most diverse fisheries, second only to the Amazon. Those fisheries are a major source of protein for people living in the Mekong basin, and the annual fisheries harvest has a first-sale value of about $2 billion. If built, the dams would severely damage the river’s ecology and block the major fish migrations that ensure regional food security and provide income to millions of people.

The Amazon.  Under the guise of promoting cheap, clean energy, Brazil’s dam builders are planning more than 100 dams in the Amazon. Already two big dams are under construction on the Amazon’s principal tributary, the Madeira, with several others in the licensing process. Brazil’s electricity-sector bureaucrats say these will be kinder, gentler dams with smaller reservoirs, designed to lessen social and environmental impacts. Legislation has been introduced that would fast-track the licensing of new dams in Amazonia and allow projects to circumvent Brazil’s tough environmental laws, under the pretext that they are of “strategic importance” to Brazil’s future.

By flooding large areas of rainforest, opening up new areas to logging, and changing the flow of water, the scores of dams being planned threaten to disturb the fragile water balance of the Amazon and increase the drying of the forest, a process that is already occurring due to climate change and extensive deforestation. New research confirms the critical role the Amazon plays in regulating the climate not only of South America, but also of parts of North America. The transformation of extensive areas of the Amazon into drier savannas would cause havoc with regional weather patterns. Lower precipitation, in turn, would render many of the dams obsolete.

Meanwhile, mocking one of the dams’ justifications, the greenhouse gas emissions could be enormous. Amazonian dams are some of the dirtiest on the planet; the Balbina Dam alone emits 10 times more greenhouse gases (from rotting vegetation in the reservoir) than a coal-fired plant of the same capacity. What’s more, the planned projects would expel more than 100,000 river-bank dwellers from their lands and seriously degrade extensive indigenous lands and protected areas.

The Santo Antonio and Jirau Dams on the Madeira River, currently under construction, have also raised the possibility that individual dams could affect a huge area of the Amazon Basin. Scientists have pointed out that several valuable migratory fish species could suffer near-extinction as a result of the Madeira dams, depleting fisheries and fauna thousands of kilometers up and downstream. The fertility of the Amazon floodplain, important for agriculture and fish reproduction, would also be impaired because a significant portion of the sediments and nutrients carried by the Madeira would be trapped in the reservoirs.

There is no doubt that meeting Brazil’s future energy needs is of crucial importance, but there are alternatives to more dams. A study by WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature showed that Brazil could meet a major part of its future energy needs at lower social, environmental, and economic cost by investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Brazil’s enormous windpower potential is attracting investors, and the country’s potential for generating electricity from biomass, such as sugarcane bagasse, rice husks, and sawmill scraps, has been calculated to exceed the capacity of the massive Itaipu Dam.

Africa.  In Africa, dam construction is also on the rise. Africa is the least-electrified place in the world, with just a fraction of its citizens having access to electricity. Solving this huge problem is made more difficult by widespread poverty and poor governance, and because a large majority of the people live far from the grid, which greatly adds to the cost of bringing electricity to them.

The World Bank and many of the continent’s energy planners are pinning their hopes for African electrification on something as ephemeral as the rain, by pushing for a series of large dams across the continent. World Bank energy specialist Reynold Duncan told an energy conference earlier this year that Africa needs to greatly increase its investments in hydropower. “In Zambia, we have the potential of about 6,000 megawatts, in Angola we have 6,000 megawatts, and about 12,000 megawatts in Mozambique,” he said. “We have a lot of megawatts down here before we even go up to the Congo.”

Duncan said that governments and investors should not hesitate to look at riskier assets such as hydropower, adding that only 5 percent of the continent’s hydro potential had been tapped. But “risky” is right. New African dams are being built with no examination of how climate change will affect them, even though many existing dams are already plagued by drought-caused power shortages.

Climate change is expected to dramatically alter the dynamics of many African rivers, worsening both droughts and floods. In this climate, the proposed frenzy of African dam building could be literally disastrous. Unprecedented flooding will cause more dams to collapse and hasten the rate at which their reservoirs fill with sediment. Meanwhile, worsening droughts will mean dams will fail to meet their power production targets.

Dams are not inexpensive investments: Just developing one of these dams, the Mphanda Nkuwa in Mozambique, is expected to cost at least $2 billion (not including the necessary transmission lines). Yet these huge projects are doing little to bridge the electricity divide in Africa. With the majority of the continent’s population living far from existing electricity grids, what is needed is a major decentralized-power rollout of renewables and small power plants to build local economies from the ground up, not the top down. But that’s not where the money is right now.

Corruption

These examples from three areas of heavy dam-building activity hint at the spectrum of major problems they present. Big dams can contribute to development, but that progress often comes at staggering cost, in displaced and impoverished refugees, ecologically fragmented and damaged rivers, and downstream victims of destroyed fisheries and impounded sediments. Big dams also expand the habitat of waterborne disease vectors such as malaria, dengue fever, schistosomiasis, and liver fluke, and can trigger devastating earthquakes by increasing seismic stresses. Dams frequently fail to deliver their projected benefits and usually wind up costing more than predicted. And although hydropower is touted as a solution to climate change, many dams actually emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases. As Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy has put it, “Big dams are to a nation’s development what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction.”

If dams continue to wreak havoc with people’s lives and ecosystems, and are increasingly risky in a warming world, why do they continue to be built and promoted? And why are they now being hailed as a source of green, renewable energy?

One of the main reasons is vested interests: There are substantial profits to be had, for the hydropower industry, their network of consultants, and host-country bureaucracies, from planning, building, and operating massive infrastructure projects. These attractions often trump the impacts on people and ecosystems and the need to develop sustainable economies in the midst of a growing water and food crisis.

Industry consultants and engineering companies that undertake feasibility studies and environmental impact assessments know that they need to portray a project in a favorable light if they want to get future contracts. In case after case, and without comprehensively assessing the alternatives, they consistently claim that the impacts can be mitigated and that the project in question represents the best option for meeting the country’s needs.

Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) that should anticipate problems have served as a rubber-stamping device rather than a real planning tool. Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reports that construction on many projects in southwest China is under way in violation of key aspects of Chinese law. Many projects lack an EIA and have not been approved by the government. According to Jiang, even basic safety checks have not been performed and government regulators are uninvolved. “EIAs have become a marginalized and decorative process, seen as just a part of the cost of doing business,” says Jiang. “Both the builders and local government know that, to date, an EIA has never managed to halt a dam project.”

Needless to say, corruption also plays a key role. A dam involves a huge upfront investment of resources, making it easy for government officials and politicians to skim some off the top. One of the most egregious examples of corruption involving a dam project is the Yacyretá Dam on the Paraná River, between Argentina and Paraguay. In the 1980s, the cost of this “monument to corruption” (in the words of former Argentine president Carlos Menem) ballooned from an original estimate of $1.6 billion to more than $8 billion. In 2002 and 2003, several of the biggest dam-building companies in the world were convicted of bribing the former director of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority to win contracts on Lesotho’s Katse Dam. Masupha Sole accepted around $2 million in bribes from major dam-building firms such as Acres International of Canada and Lahmeyer International of Germany. In China, corrupt local officials stole millions of dollars intended for people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. At least 349 people have been found guilty of embezzling a total of about 12 percent of the project’s resettlement budget.

The Way Forward

Needless to say, these are not easy problems to address. The most ambitious and systematic attempt to date has been undertaken by the World Commission on Dams (WCD), a multi-stakeholder independent body established by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in 1998. After a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of large dams, the Commission issued its final report, Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making, in 2000.

Briefly, the WCD recommends conducting an open and participatory process to identify the real needs for water and energy services, followed by a careful assessment of all options for meeting those needs, giving social and environmental aspects the same significance as technical, economic, and financial factors. If a new dam is truly needed, outstanding social and environmental issues from existing dams should be addressed, and the benefits from existing projects should be maximized. Public acceptance of all key decisions should be demonstrated and decisions affecting indigenous peoples should be guided by their free, prior, and informed consent. Legally binding agreements should be negotiated with affected people to ensure the implementation of mitigation, resettlement, and development entitlements. Impact assessments should follow European Union and other global EIA standards. By definition, an effective EIA “ensures that environmental consequences of projects are identified and assessed before authorization is given”- something that almost never occurs in today’s world. Dam projects built on international rivers should also evaluate the potential transboundary impacts or cumulative impacts from multi-dam projects in regional watersheds.

The dam industry has rejected the WCD guidelines and in 2007 established its own process, hoping to develop a sustainability protocol that will replace the WCD framework as the most legitimate benchmark for dam projects. But the industry approach is clearly an attempt to circumnavigate the more robust requirements of the WCD while paying lipservice to sustainability.

In fact, the industry’s attempt to repackage hydropower as a green, renewable technology is both misleading and unsupported by the facts, and alternatives are often preferable. In general, the cheapest, cleanest, and fastest solution is to invest in energy efficiency. Up to three-quarters of the electricity used in the United States, for instance, could be saved with efficiency measures that would cost less than the electricity itself. Developing countries, which will account for 80 percent of global energy demand growth up to 2020, could cut that growth by more than half using existing efficiency technologies, according to McKinsey Global Institute. “Technology transfer” programs can be an effective way to help poorer nations avoid having to reinvent the wheel; for example, California’s remarkable energy efficiency program has been sharing knowledge with Chinese energy agencies and government officials to jump-start strong efficiency programs there.

Even with investment in efficiency, however, many developing countries will require new generation sources. Developing countries often have vast, unexploited renewable energy potential, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and modern biomass energy, as well as low-impact, non-dam hydropower. Such technologies are much more suited to meeting the energy needs of the rural poor, as they can be developed where people need the power and do not require the construction of transmission lines. Examples include the installation, supported by Global Environment Facility incentives, of hundreds of thousands of solar home systems in Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, and Uganda.

Large-scale true renewables can also be an attractive and affordable solution to many countries’ energy problems. The cost of windpower in good locations is now comparable to or lower than that of conventional sources. Both solar photovoltaic and concentrating solar power are rapidly coming down in price. A 2008 report from a U.S. National Academy of Engineering panel predicts that solar power will be cost-competitive with conventional energy sources in five years.

As for systemic corruption, it must be openly challenged by governments, funding agencies, and other proponents of dam projects. Regulations must be written to identify, define, and eliminate corruption at all levels of the planning process. And the regulations must be openly supported and enforced by the World Bank, the dam industry, the hydropower companies, and the governments supporting dam construction. The dam industry itself, together with its biggest government allies, such as China, Brazil and India, must take steps toward internal reform. Adopting the WCD guidelines would be a good first step, together with instituting such practices as integrity pacts, anti-corruption legislation, and performance bonds that require developers to comply with commitments.

A vigorous assault on corruption, plus technology transfer and financial assistance: these are the keys to allowing developing countries to leapfrog to a sustainable, twenty-first-century energy regime. The stakes are high, because healthy rivers, like all intact ecosystems, are priceless. The alternative, quite simply, is a persistent legacy of human and environmental destruction.

Aviva Imhof is the campaigns director for International Rivers, an environmental and human rights organization based in Berkeley, California. Guy R. Lanza is a professor of microbiology and director of the Environmental Science Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Spectacle

Environmental issues can oftentimes be very complex. Some issues directly relate to climate change, and some do not. However, it is very important to connect the dots between issues because almost all environmental problems are caused, at their base, by capitalist expansion, commodification and privatization. Corporations have used the climate crisis and growing public concern about environmental issues to their advantage. They have learned to use the rhetoric of environmentalism to justify extremely oppressive projects whose sole purpose is to increase their power and to continue the cycle of production and consumption. Incredibly destructive projects, such as hydrofracture natural gas extraction in Upstate New York, are marketed as clean. This absurd spectacle must be stopped.

In Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, he writes, “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification … The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life … It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.” And now the light of that sun is green. The green spectacle is confronting the climate crisis with hollow solutions presented to us in a pleasant, prefabricated package that can be bought if we can afford them and allow us to pollute in good conscience. In an absurd twist, these corporate false solutions cause the poor, and those who resist these schemes, to be blamed for destroying the planet. “It is not the oil companies who are to blame for climate change, but the poor who do not buy carbon offsets when they travel.” Thus, the climate crisis becomes another way to make money and increase corporate power.

In short, the green spectacle is an image of a greener, more natural society, reached by corporate solutions. The green spectacle is created by the undeniable urgency of our climate crisis and capitalism’s need to reinvent itself and present its own solutions to climate change, because it is clear that any real solution would eliminate capitalism. Sadly, many groups that wish to solve climate change are limited in their ability to combat it because they must live within the spectacle and believe the corporate media’s lies. So even people fighting against the system get caught up in its maze, never attacking the root systemic causes of our issues. We must create our own narrative and attack the roots of this ecocidal system. We cannot let corporations trick us into accepting false solutions.

The Lies: Biofuels, Carbon Trading and Privitization

Biofuels are often said to be a possible solution to the climate crisis. However, they are more likely to make the problem worse than better. Not only does it take more energy to produce biofuels than they contain, but biofuels are an expansion of industrial agriculture, which is a major cause of climate change, deforestation, the dispossession of local communities, bio-diversity loss, water and soil degradation, and loss of food sovereignty and security. Additionally, the production of biofuels takes farmland that could be used to feed people and instead uses it to grow ethanol for our cars. Food riots have already broken out in Mexico, where prices rose on corn because of ethanol production. With over 865 million hungry people in this world, it is puzzling why we would be growing food for hungry cars and not hungry people.

Carbon trading, too, is nothing more than a way for the biggest polluters to look like they are doing something about climate change and make a fortune in the process. Governments arbitrarily give out carbon credits, usually to the biggest polluters, and they are traded as a normal commodity. Two of the largest carbon trading schemes that have already been implemented are REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) and CDM (Clean Development Mechanisms). Their joint implementation is a way of privatizing, selling and profiting more from our natural resources.

REDD takes land rights away from local people and puts them in the hands of corporations. In many cases, non-native trees are planted, such as monoculture eucalyptus trees in Brazil, which changes the ecosystem, drying up the land and hurting the plants that local people use to survive.

CDM allows industrialized countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment (such as the Kyoto Protocol) to invest in projects that (in theory) reduce emissions in developing countries, instead of more expensive emission reductions in their own countries. CDM projects, for example, allow companies to privatize rivers to create “clean” hydroelectric dams. Since the dam produces less carbon emissions than a theoretical coal plant that might have been built, the company receives carbon credits, allowing it to pollute more, or sell the credits.

All this privatizing also means more surveillance and displacement. Since the forests now exist for profit, indigenous people who have lived in them for generations are being forced off their land.

One of our most important resources is already being privatized: water. Less than one percent of the world’s freshwater (or 0.007 percent of the world’s water) is accessible and potable. This needs to be shared by the world’s 6.7 billion people, the myriad wildlife and ecosystems, and human agriculture and industries. However, this resource is no longer being treated as a commons. Water is being privatized to create hydroelectric dams that produce “clean energy” for destructive processes such as aluminum smelting. Dams destroy ecosystems by turning them into stagnant cesspools, displace whole communities by forcing them off the land, and release huge amounts of methane from flooded vegetation. Water has even begun to be traded in global stock exchanges. Today, an individual or corporation can invest in water-targeted hedge funds, index funds and exchange traded funds (EFTs), water certificates, shares of water engineering and technology companies, and a host of other newfangled water investments. Privatized water is now a $425 billion industry and is expected to grow to a $1 trillion industry within five years.

Often, the picture painted by mainstream media and water-rights activists is too simple – that of a single corporation (such as Coca-Cola in India or Bechtel in Bolivia) “corporatizing water;” the real story is not just of flamboyant tycoons or individual corporations sucking dry springs and groundwater to the detriment of poor subsistence farmers or slum-dwellers. Water is being privatized by a complex global network of investment banks, private equity firms, public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and multinational corporations that are buying up and controlling water worldwide. Investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse are aggressively buying up water rights all over the world. As climate change shrinks fresh water resources, there will be even more money to be made in private water.

The Result: Militarism and Xenophobia

The New York Times recently wrote that, according to military and intelligence analysts, “the changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics.” These analysts, experts at the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies, say that such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions. The U.S. military recently launched its “war on global warming,” stating that the “military [will] play a key role in tackling climate change, and are developing military strategies to deal with it.” It’s a whole new frontier in the fight for freedom and justice.

In particular, military experts say that the potential scale of catastrophe could trigger revolution and political upheaval. One report states, “When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order and protect the nation’s borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum.” The report advocates bolstering U.S. military bases and key allied governments in unstable regions of the world. Other military officials have said that climate change will increase demands for our military to carry out “relief” and “disaster” assistance missions. Disaster relief will become a military occupation.

Unsurprisingly, the United States defends the short-term interests of its ruling elite by seizing natural energy resources through both privatization and war. However, it must rely on the military-industrial complex, which is increasingly privatized and fragmented. As Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine, disaster capitalism profits greatly from crisis, real or imagined. As the Climate War becomes the dominant organizing principle for the planet, the military-industrial system will seek to profit from both the destruction of war and the rebuilding of damaged systems.

War is big business and a major industry that thrives on crisis. It alone ensures constant crises either by physical force or by political discourses that justify a constant cash flow. The United States and European Union use large numbers of likely climate refugees in their own right-wing propaganda, creating fear against these people, and using that fear as a means to strengthen border security. Since capitalist states have no means of addressing climate change other than making preparations for cracking down on social unrest, Fortress Europe and the United States will strengthen their borders even more, criminalizing and blaming migrants and asylum seekers, saying it is the poor who are truly responsible for climate change.

Every year we see thousands of people flee their countries of origin in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, hoping for a better life. While the majority will move to nearby countries, many will attempt the long and dangerous journey to Europe or the United States. It is impossible to determine exactly how many people are forced to migrate directly because of climate change. What is clear is that the position of wealth and privilege in the Global North is, to a large extent, the result of the exploitation of land, people and resources in two-thirds of the world, the very same processes that have driven industrial capitalism and caused climate change.

The world’s poor did not cause climate change, but they are more vulnerable to its effects because of where and how they live. Whether in agricultural areas or city slums in the Global South, they have fewer options available when things go wrong. Africa and South East Asia, for example, are some of the most geographically vulnerable places on the planet.

Climate change is already being used to give further legitimacy to the concepts of “national preservation” and “homeland security.” For example, Lee Gunn, president of the American Security Project has said, “Here’s how Washington should begin preparing for the consequences associated with climate change: Invest in capabilities within the U.S. government (including the Defense Department) to manage the humanitarian crises – such as a new flow of ‘climate refugees’ – that may accompany climate change and subsequently overwhelm local governments and threaten critical U.S. interests.” Once again, state and capital interests are the top priority, and the wellbeing of people and the environment are not even a consideration. He goes on to say that the United States should “lead the world in developing conflict-resolution mechanisms to mediate between climate change’s winners and losers.” And we all know who the winners will be. India has begun putting these ideas into practice. They are currently building a perimeter fence around their entire border with Bangladesh, a country more at risk than almost any other from the devastating consequences of rising sea levels. The fence has been explicitly talked about as a barrier to migration. If sea levels rise and Bangladeshi people are driven from their homes, they will find themselves trapped inside this cage.

A crucial part of the fight for climate justice is building a radical movement that challenges the use of the threat of climate chaos as an excuse for even more draconian migration controls and national and international security measures.

Conclusion

Capitalism results in the need for continuous war and ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, causing environmental degradation, climate change, social injustice and more war. The solutions to climate change within this system only feed the war machine and strengthen authoritarian regimes of control, while further degrading the rights of indigenous peoples and animals. The powerful have divided and conquered us for too long, and they have many tools to keep us mired in false conflict. But they are all human-made tools. We must build up our hearts, and realize that pacifism does not imply love. Love has emotion, and emotions are not passive and flat-lining. So to topple this system and create horizontal communities, we must fight with this love for ourselves, love for our families, friends and comrades. This is not a passive love – this is an emotional, burning love. True love is radical, and dangerous to this sterile system.

As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “However desperate the situation and circumstances, do not despair. When there is everything to fear, be unafraid. When surrounded by dangers, fear none of them. When without resources, depend on resourcefulness. When surprised, take the enemy itself by surprise.”

From Draumalandið website – Dreamland is a truly epic film about a nation standing at cross-roads. Leading up to the country’s greatest economic crisis, the government started the largest mega project in the history of Iceland, to build the biggest dam in Europe to provide Alcoa cheap electricity for an aluminum smelter in the rugged east fjords of Iceland. The mantra was economic growth. Today Iceland is left holding a huge dept and an uncertain future

Dreamland is a film about exploitation of natural resources and as Icelanders have learned clean energy does not come without consequence. Iceland is a country blessed with an abundance of clean, renewable, hydro-electric and geothermal energy. Clean energy brings in polluting industry and international corporations.

Dreamland tells the story of a nation with abundance of choices gradually becoming caught up in a plan to turn its wilderness and beautiful nature into a massive system of hydro-electric and geothermal power plants with dams and reservoirs, built to power the increasing heavy industry that will soon make Iceland the largest aluminum smelter in the world.

This highly controversial matter goes largely unnoticed by the public until the plans are already in action and the industrial machine has been turned on. Although most Icelanders are against the idea of turning Iceland into the world’s biggest smelter of aluminum the locals where the smelters are meant to be built, celebrate the idea of increasing investment in their region and more jobs. For decades they have been getting desperate, facing depopulation as the young generation finds education and better jobs in the capital.

This multilayered story is also the story of a small nation’s continuing struggle for its independence, and today from multinational companies roaming the world. We try to grasp peoples fear for the future. The insecurity created by the constant news of looming economic slowdown, and uncertain future.

The question remains, how much unspoiled nature should we preserve and what do we sacrifice for clean, renewable energy? Dreamland gradually turns into a disturbing picture of corporate power taking over nature and small communities. It’s the dark side of green energy.

By Miriam Rose

The economic issues currently causing mass demonstrations in Iceland have a less publicised ecological cousin, and one which the IMF has recently identified as part of the economic collapse. In 1995 the Ministry of Industry and Landsvirkjun, the national power company, began to advertise Iceland’s huge hydropower and geothermal energy potential. In a brochure titled “Lowest energy prices!!” they offered the cheapest, most hard working and healthiest labour force in the world, the cleanest air and purest water – as well as the cheapest energy and “a minimum of environmental red tape” to some of the world’s most well known polluting industries and corporations (such as Rio Tinto and Alcoa). This campaigning has led to the development of an ‘Energy Master Plan’ aimed at damming almost all of the major glacial rivers in Iceland, and exploiting all of the geothermal energy, for the power intensive aluminium industry. The loans taken by the Icelandic state to build large scale energy projects, and the minimal payback they have received from the industry, has been a considerable contributing factor to the economic crisis, while at the same time creating a European ecological crisis that is little heard of.

The Largest Wilderness in Europe
I first visited Iceland in 2006 and spent a week with activists from the environmental campaign Saving Iceland, a network of individuals from around Europe and Iceland who decry the fragmentation of Europe’s largest wilderness in favour of heavy industry. From these informed and passionate folk I learned of the 690 MW Kárahnjúkar dam complex being built in the untouched Eastern Central Highlands to power one Alcoa aluminium smelter in a small fishing village called Reydarfjörður. The dams formed the largest hydro-power complex in Europe, and were set to drown 57 km² of beautiful and virtually unstudied wilderness, the most fertile area in the surrounding highlands. Ultimately it would affect 3% of Iceland’s landmass with soil erosion and river silt deprivation. They also explained how materials in the glacial silt transported to the oceans bonds with atmospheric CO₂, sinking carbon. The damming of Iceland’s glacial rivers not only decreases food supply for fish stocks in the North Atlantic, but also negatively impacts oceanic carbon absorption, a significant climatic effect. After taking part in demonstrations at the construction site of the Alcoa smelter (being built by famous Iraq war profiteers Bechtel), I went to see the area for myself.

Travelling alone on foot in this vast and threatening landscape was one of the most incredible and spiritual experiences of my life. I walked along the deep canyon of the crashing glacial river set to be dammed, as ravens soared above me and a sound like falling rocks echoed from distant mountains. I slept in grassy valleys and bathed in a warm waterfall which ran from a nearby hot spring as reindeer galloped in the distance. The midnight sun showed me the way to Snæfell mountain, from the top of which I could see from the Vatnajokull ice cap all the way to the dam construction site; across wetlands, black sand deserts and shadowy mountains. By the next year the dam’s reservoir would stretch across this whole area. I felt small and vulnerable and had a sense of the immense power of nature, and the even greater power of mankind to choose whether to preserve or to irreversibly destroy it.

Since then critiques of the completed Kárahnjúkar project have made it increasingly unpopular with the Icelandic public, who have become sceptical about the secretive nature of energy deals and the damage to nature. As a result, Landsvírkjun and the heavy industry lobby are now focussing on geothermal power which has a more benign reputation. Ultimately, it is proposed that all of the economically feasible hot spring areas in Iceland will be exploited for industrial use, including a number of sites located in Iceland’s central highlands, the beautiful heart of Iceland’s undisturbed wilderness. Landsvirkjun, without any irony, has termed Iceland ‘the Kuwait of the North’.

The following section challenges some of the myths about ‘green’ geothermal energy.

Renewable
Geothermal energy is created when boreholes are drilled into hot subsurface rock areas or aquifers, and turbines are powered by the emitted steam. They only have a sustainable production level if the surface discharge of heat is balanced by heat and fluid recharge within the reservoir (as occurs at undisturbed hot springs), but this is generally not sufficient for exploiting economically. The Geyser hot springs at Calistoga, USA experienced a 150% decrease in production over ten years, due to rapid exploitation to meet economic requirements, and there have been many similar cases. Geothermal boreholes in Iceland are usually modelled for only 30 years of productionⁱ.

Carbon-neutral
The concentration of carbon dioxide present in geothermal steam is a reflection of the chemical make up of the underground reservoir and is distinct to each area. The 400 MW of boreholes planned for another Alcoa smelter in the north of Iceland will release 1300 tonnes CO₂ per MWⁱⁱ. An average gas powered plant would produce only slightly more, 1595 tonne per MWⁱⁱⁱ. The total of 520,000 tonnes CO₂ for these fields alone is almost as much as what is produced by all of road transport in Iceland^iv.

Minimal environmental impact
Geothermal power accounts for 79% of Iceland’s H₂S and SO₂ emissions^v. In 2008, sulphur pollution from the Hellisheiði power station, 30 km away, was reported to be turning lamposts and jewelry in Reykjavík black, as a record number of objections was filed to two more large geothermal plants in the same area, which would have produced more sulphur and carbon emissions than the planned smelter they were supposed to power, and plans were put on hold.
Geothermal areas such as Hellisheiði are globally rare, very beautiful and scientifically interesting. Icelandic geothermal areas are characterised by colourful striking landscapes, hot springs, lavas and glaciers, and are biologically and geologically endemic to the country. Irreversible disturbance to these wild areas for power plants includes roads, powerlines, heavy lorries and loud drilling equipment.

Wishful green thinking?
In the desperate search for plausible alternatives to our fossil fuel economy, a number of well known British greens have been advocating a ‘European Grid’ energy future, in which Icelandic large scale hydro and geothermal power, and Saharan solar, are transferred by underwater cable to Britain and Europe^vi. It is quite understandable that such schemes look appealing, but it is also essential to have a realistic analysis of the impacts caused by these so-called sustainable technologies before we accept them as a panacea to our fossil fuel sickness.

The technological or pragmatic environmentalism in favour of super grids comes down to a proposal to sacrifice unique ecological areas for the greater good of living a resource-intensive life style ‘sustainably’. In contrast, for anyone who identifies with a natural area, it is easy to understand why it has a value of its own. This value can be seen as far greater than that of any of our possessions; it is in a sense, invaluable.

What can perhaps be concluded from this Icelandic green energy case study is that application of a technology that has been thought of as renewable, climate-friendly and low-impact, on the large scale that is associated with fossil fuels, makes it a lot like the technology it was supposed to replace. It has certainly been argued that technological systems tend to reproduce themselves independent of the specific technologies^{vii viii}. Simply applying a different technology to address issues that are not entirely technological, is not addressing the problem of our consumptive lifestyles. But it can irrevocably end the existence of a place that is not like any other.

References:

i E.g. VGK (2005), Environmental Impact Assesment for Helisheidarvirkjun [online]. URL http://www.vgk.is/hs/Skjol/UES/SH_matsskyrsla.pdf [Accessed August 15, 2007].
ii Sigurðardóttir, R. Unpublished. Energy good and green. In: Bæ bæ Ísland (bye bye Iceland), to be published by the University of Akureyri and Akureyri Art Museum.
The data in this study is arrived at by calculation of the figures in site surveys for the Krafla, Bjarnarflag and Þeistareykir geothermal plants.
Sigurðardóttir has experienced threats and harassment by Landsvirkjun, the national power company, since 2000. In that year, she concluded the formal environmental impact assessment for a proposed large dam, Þjórsárver, a Ramsar treaty area, by stating there were significant, irreversible environmental impacts. The national power company did not pay her and refused to publish the report. Since then Sigurðardóttir has been refused all Icelandic government commissions. Since then, practically all EIAs for geothermal and hydro plants and smelters have been commissioned to the companies HRV and VGK, construction engineers rather than ecological consultancies and “the leading project management and consulting engineering companies within the primary aluminum production sector” (HRV. 2008. Primary aluminium production [online]. URL http://www.hrv.is/hrv/Info/PrimaryAluminumProduction/ [Accessed 13-12-2008]).
iii US Govt. Energy Information Administration. 2008. Voluntary reporting of greenhouse gases program. [online]. URL http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/coefficients.html [Accessed 13-12-2008].
iv Ministry of the Environment, Iceland (2006). Iceland’s Fourth National Communication on Climate Change. http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/natc/islnc4.pdf [Accessed August 15, 2007].
v Statistics Iceland. 2007. Emission of sulphur dioxides (SO2) by source 1990-2006 [online]. URL http://www.statice.is/Statistics/Geography-and-environment/Gas-emission [Accessed 12/12/2008]
vi E.g. Monbiot, G. (2008). Build a Europe-wide ‘super grid’ [online]. URL http://e-day.org.uk/solutions/charities/14536/george-monbiot–build-a-europewide-super-grid.thtml [Accessed 13-12-2008].
vii E.g. Mander, J. 1992. In the absence of the sacred. Sierra Club, San Francisco, CA.
viii Krater, J. 2007. Duurzame technologie, een contradictie? Buiten de Orde, zomer 2007.

This morning, big banners were hanged on a building in Copenhagen saying: ,,Aluminium Industry is destroying all major Icelandic rivers!” A big advertisment from Icelandair Airline Company, showing Icelandic rivers, was hanging on this same wall last week.

The construction of the planned new Century aluminium smelter in Helguvík and Alcoa’s smelter in Húsavík, will lead to damming of more glacial rivers and geothermal areas. Today it looks like dams will be built in Þjórsá River, Tungnaá, Skjálfandafljót and Jökulsá á Fjöllum; only for further heavy industry projects.

To supply energy for Alcoa’s 346 thousand tons smelter in Húsavík, a reservoir bigger than the infamous Hálslón in Kárahnjúkar will be needed; 72 km2 (1).

There is no reason for feeding companies like Alcoa with more cheap energy. Alcoa is a arms producer, directly working with the American army, the weapon producer Lockheed Martin and other mean companies (2).

Alcoa is also well known for it’s human right crimes in the company’s factories in Honduras and Guatemala. In Honduras workers often have to urinate and defecate in their clothes because they are not allowed to go to the toilet more than two times a day; women have to take down their pants to prove they are having period; and workers who plan to form unions get fired. These are just few examples (3).

Icelandic nature and society are in danger!

No more Dams! No more Smelters!

Resources:

(1) Jaap Krater, Morgunblaðið, Bakki Impact Assessment Should Include Dams, 22. Ágúst 2008.

(2) Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson, Morgunblaðið, Lygar og Útúrsnúningar, 24. Júní 2008.

(3) National Labor Committee with Community Comunication Honduras (2007). The Walmart-ization of Alcoa. http://www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=447.

The Redlands dam is on Havasu Creek. The creek feeds the Colorado River, which runs through the Grand Canyon.

After the dam burst, people were flown out of the Supai area and then taken on buses to Peach Springs, about 60 miles (96km) south-west of Supai.

“We were basically stuck up the canyon without our rafts,” Cedar Hemmings, who was among those flown out, told the Associated Press.

“We had no supplies, no food and very little water, we lost everything.”

On a 125km stretch of the river’s 2525km length, running from the river?s source at the Gaumukh Glacier to this remote town nestled among the Himalayan foothills, a total of 6 hydroelectric power-plant dams are planned, seeking clearance or are already under construction, despite numerous protests and representations by local citizens. In pursuit of its agenda for economic growth, which depends heavily on the ready availability of energy, the Indian Government pushed planning applications through hastily, in the process destroying what those gathered here describe as the traditional Indian ethos of worshipping nature and living in harmony with it. Pained at the insensitivity of the project stakeholders, 76-year old environmental engineer Dr Agrawal has decided to go on fast from June 13 2008 until he dies, or until a satisfactory agreement is drawn up to cease any work which stems the Bhagirathi?s flow. He has said that he has no wish to outlive the river.

The many objections raised are rooted both in scientific, environmental and legal concerns, as well as those related to faith, culture and sentiment. Of the latter, it is stressed that for Hindus the Ganges is a divine flow, a living entity, a ?mother?, and as such is worshiped: many Indian homes have a bottle of Ganges water for use in rituals, especially that of applying two drops to the forehead both at point of birth and moment of death. These beliefs led to a 1916 mass movement against the then British government which resulted in a written agreement committing that the flow of the Ganges will not be blocked completely. This agreement is mentioned in the Constitution of India, but has not been acknowledged.

At the same time, the feasibility, safety and economic viability of the proposed projects have been called into question, with many feasibility reports being kept confidential, and those accessible to interested parties found to be largely based on insufficient or very short-term data. Geological fault lines are present in the area, presenting enormous risks for those communities not forced immediately to move by the projects in the case of dam failure during an earthquake. Furthermore, past projects in similar areas have seen project costs escalate dramatically, not least due to the severe local geologic conditions.

The long-term environmental impacts are hard to measure, and as a consequence their importance is diminished in the feasibility reports. Drastic changes in water depths, velocities and silt-loads over long periods of time are bound to impact heavily on the distribution and survival of dependent flora and fauna species, especially migratory fish and benthic worms, insects and invertebrates; all critical elements in the food chain. The immediate loss of forests and vegetation in flooded areas puts endangered, endemic and sensitive species at further risk, and farmers too lose out since all their precious, irrigated fields in the region lie at low altitude along the banks of the river.

That these projects are deigned to satisfy a short-sighted need for energy to fuel India’s ‘development’ in the present is finally emphasized by recent studies concluding that the Gaumukh Glacier, whose perennial melting ice constitutes the Bhagirathi’s source, is shrinking at a significant, visible rate: the UN Environment Programme announced in March that as soon as 2030 the glacier, along with other Himalayan glaciers, may no longer exist. This being the case, there is every chance that if Dr Agrawal’s grave plea falls on deaf ears, then by mid century these valleys will be littered with giant, dry monuments to a bygone era, a time when those in power would sacrifice anything and everything in the pursuit of economic growth.

Farid would be dammed and another dam would also be constructed above Leynifoss waterfall, Morgunbladid reports.

The Ministry of Industry granted permission earlier this year for OR to examine this possibility and to see whether the prevention soil eruption and production of hydroelectric power could go together.

Employees of the Soil Conservation Service of Iceland have long considered damming the river to prevent soil eruption in the area since they believe it originates in the dried-up base of Hagavatn lake.

The Icelandic Institute of Natural History, however, believes that if Hagavatn lake is used as a reservoir, soil erosion from its base will increase in late winter and early summer.

Director of the Icelandic Tourist Association Ólafur Örn Haraldsson is against the plans. “A dam and a power plant will destroy one of the most spectacular land formation processes of Langjökull,” he said, adding the area is like an open and easily readable geology book.

Haraldsson said the area is becoming an increasingly popular hiking destination, which has the potential to become as popular as Laugavegur hiking route to Landmannalaugar, south Iceland.

This important and lengthy report from the Washington based Sustainable Energy and Economy Network is highly informative about the operational structure of the aluminum industry and the resulting impacts on human rights and the environment.

• See also: IRN Aluminium toolkit – Foiling the Aluminum Industry: A Toolkit for Communities, Activists, Consumers, and Workers
• Frumvinnsla áls – Lýsing á hinni mengandi og orkufreku framleiðslu álbarra. Þýtt úr “Foiling the Aluminum Industry”

• I. Table of contents
• II. Executive Summary
• III. Aluminum production infrastructure
• IV. Corporate control
• V. Multilateral and bilateral financial institutions’ support
• VI. Human rights
  • 1. Impact of bauxite mining on indigenous peoples
  • Sidebar: The impending death of Mulanje Mountain
  • 2. Aluminum wars (Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, etc.)
  • 3. Workers rights and dirty industry migration
• VII. Environmental health
  • 1. Cancer in beluga whales
  • 2. Impact of emissions on workers and communities
    • a. Coal tar fumes and PAH
    • b. Fluoride
    • c. Red Mud
    • d. Other emissions
  • 3. Global warming
    • a. Perfluorocarbons
    • b. Carbon dioxide
    • c. The industrial lobby
• VIII. Energy
  • 1. Hydro
    • a. Great dams
    • b. The Pacific Northwest power war
  • 2. Coal
  • 3. Gas
  • 4. Geothermal
  • 5. Nuclear
• Appendices
  • I. World bauxite production tables
  • II. World alumina refinery tables
  • III. World aluminum smelter tables
  • IV. Maps and photos

River water contains sediment in suspension and various substances in solution; glacial rivers, especially, carry a large amount of sediment which increases as the atmosphere grows warmer.

Rivers of Life

Glacial rivers carry the sediment out to sea, where it takes on a new and important role in binding the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) with calcium (Ca) and converting it into calcite and other carbonate minerals, immensely important in the ocean ecosystems of the world. Thus glacial rivers reduce pollution on Earth. This effect is greatest in recently formed volcanic territory such as Iceland, and the binding effect increases with rising atmospheric temperature.

Glacial rivers bind this gas which, along with some other gases, causes global warming and threatens the future of life of Earth.

When a glacial river is harnessed to generate electricity, this important function, and the binding of the greenhouse gas CO2, is diminished. What they generate is not GREEN ENERGY, as the advocates of hydro-power plants and heavy industry maintain, but BLACK ENERGY.

Dams and reservoirs hinder the function of glacial sediment in the oceans, and hence hydro-electric power plants that harness glacial rivers are far more harmful than has hitherto been believed.

In addition, it is probable that the reduced volume of sediment and the disruption of the flow of the rivers will affect the population of diatoms and calcareous algae. This could lead to falling catches of fish off Iceland’s coast, fewer jobs in the fishing industry, and lower export revenues.

It would make sense to prohibit the harnessing of any glacial rivers, and other rivers carrying large amounts of sediment, anywhere in the world, for it is in the interests of all Earth dwellers that they should continue to function – just as the preservation of Amazonian rain forest is in all our interests.

When advocates of hydro-electric power and heavy industry boast of the pure power yielded by Icelandic rivers for aluminium production, they are deceiving themselves, and deceiving the people of Iceland. Damage from hydro-power plants in Iceland with their dams and reservoirs has already resulted in destruction of geological diversity as well as the diversity of life, and ecosystems. They are not only destroyers of beautiful life and landscape, they are contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Glacial rivers are the lifeblood of the Earth, and create resources at land and sea in many ways – they are the lifeblood of the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, and of all mankind.

That is how all glacial rivers are already utilised – utilised for life, and for the future.

Gudmundur Páll Ólafsson
Natural scientist
3 January 2006

See also:

The whole article ‘Role of river-suspended material in the global carbon cycle’ is here in pdf

‘Hydropower Disaster for Global Warming’ by Jaap Krater

Hydroelectric Power’s Dirty Secret Revealed – New Scientist

‘Kárahnjúkavirkjun, sýnd veiði en ekki gefin’ eftir Grím Björnsson jarðeðlisfræðing

Virkjanir í jökulám óhagstæðar fyrir loftslagsvernd, eftir Hjörleif Guttormsson
– Enn ein falsrökin fyrir Kárahnjúkavirkjun hrakin

‘Stóra samhengið’ eftir Guðmund Pál Ólafsson náttúrufræðing – Virkjanaæði stjórnvalda stefnir fiskimiðum landsins í voða