When there are less herbivores for the snow leopards to eat, there will be less snow leopards. When there is less fertile land downstream for people to farm, there will be less people. It's a natural cycle, and our (homo sapiens) growth will also be our death.
These dams will have a big effect on the downstream Mekong ecology but I can't see how the snow leopard will be affected? They live at much higher altitudes than the Mekong drainage area, seldom appearing below 14,000 feet.
Jan, thanks, I didn't want to point out the obvious. ;-) I'm also not too
sure that eastern end of the Snow Leopard's range really has any left in it
thanks to heavy poaching and no enforcement.
Pretty sure that 5500 m is 'high enough' for those stupid f*#king leopards. Pretty sure that destabilizing food sources by inundating upland valleys will further retard the continued survival of the remaining leopards.
Pretty sure that tossing up our hands and claiming survival of the fittest and accepting 'natural cyclicity' is a gross and lazy oversimplification. But anyway, f*#k those leopards, I think hydropower and a Chrysler for each Chinese is basically great.
Source: Pilkington, John. "Journey to the Source of the Mekong" Geographical: The Magazine of the Royal Geographical Society 76:7 (July 2004): 29. See article for more details.
Those lame-ass snow leopards thinkin' that they get some share of the high country real estate. Lazy f*#kers need to get a jerb. And building dams makes jerbs. [Click to View YouTube Video]
Replicating our country's not-so-sustainable dam-building experiments in their rush for development is hilarious and totally cute. I love it: especially when they build the dams atop fault structures which may then experience induced seismicity associated with concrete and water weight and lubrication. Especially when the dams are built up en echelon whence one failure may induce many. Anyway, f*#k those leopards. Need to get some jerbs.
"How many trillions of tons of Fossil fuels would it take to replace the output of say Grand Coulee, Hoover Dam, the TVA over the last 70 years or so?"
^^ at past and current levels?
A heck of a lot.
However, is there anyone in their right mind think that our past and current consumption rate is sustainable no matter what we use?
Since you are asking somewhat of a rhetorical question might I ask, what would it be like if we hadn't build those dams? Would Vegas exist in all it's "glory". Would people have been more aware of their consumption and thought and acted differently about how they interact with the environment? Would we be further ahead with sustainable energy than we are now?
Sure an awful lot of power is needed to produce all the cute stuff we all buy from China. Never mind that often the people there are forced into producing all that crap for all the consumers of the world. AND never mind about all the people affected downstream (reference the water wars of the past for an insight into the future except on a grander scale, as well as the OP's article).
When does sustainable blends of power usage and production get priorities. When does the environment have a say (?) may just be the point.
The real question (with regards to the OP) is; does wildlife and the environment in and of itself deserve to exist in it's natural state without the interference of humans for no other reason than because it should?
Hydro, solar, nuclear, coal, wind, etc all have an impact, no question.
Humans can figure this sh#t out. They are not as stupid as some ST pundits suggests. They just choose to act that way.
The China Development Bank (CDB) a Chinese govern-
ment bank, is expected to provide the majority of funding
for the Upper Mekong dams. The CDB raises funds interna-
tionally by selling bonds. In the past, US investment banks,
including Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse First Boston,
have helped facilitate sales by underwriting $830 million in
CDB bonds in 1997 and 1999. A third dam, Xiaowan,
began construction in December 2001 and is expected to be
completed in 2012. Impoundment of water during the wet
season for Xiaowan would increase dry season flows by up to
70% as far as 1,000 km downstream in Vientiane, Laos. The
dam would block 35 percent of the silt that nourishes the
fertile floodplains downstream"
Not noted for their environmental stewardship and they are paying the price with the world's worst pollution in some of their cities.
Snow leopards, wolves and himalayan brown bears, while endangered, have stabilized in some of their range....not so in China.
Having participated in a Snow Leopard census in Central Asia I can assure
you that any census figures from there, or any part of Asia, are highly
suspect. Those that know don't talk and those that don't know do talk. I
was outside the house of a reknowned hunter who, I was told, had two skins
drying on his back wall. Because I was in the presence of government types
he politely answered my questions, to a point, but certainly did not proffer
any information. It was all very wink-wink, nod-nod - the way things have
been and will be for a long time to come over there because the governments
don't care and people are gonna do what they gotta do.
This wasn't that guy but you think this guy isn't gonna use his Mosin-Nagant
to protect his sheep and goats?
It gets hard to preach to others, when we won't do things, ourselves.
In Ca, we have a proposal on the table for a tunnel system around the bay delta to shuttle water to SoCal. The current system uses 1/10th of all the power in the State of Calif to pump that water over the Tehachapi Mtns into the LA Basin.
What is harder is to come up with better alternatives. I'm not a big dam fan, but I'm not sure what alternatives you suggest? The obvious alternative, just to let people die from lack of water, and lack of food, has been considered and discarded.
China is a very difficult water situation. Most water is very polluted, with no real way to clean it.
There are inspirational approaches, such as what is happening in Tuscon:
investment in education, birth control, war, something, anything, to reduce the positively exponentiating numbers of people, each and every one of whom requires or desires our ridiculously high standard of living. not every human being can or should be so lucky as we, to have that delicious air conditioning at the expense of blase spots like Glen Canyon.
I responded with an angry diatribe, a vicious fustigation of your eager hopeful mesquite-pod flour and rainwater offer as the counter to the furtherance of mega-dam systems.
But it was too personal, too fraught with my own baggage. My own personal relationship to that place and its development.
You are right, I am just bitching.
I had a rain barrel when I lived in the wet wide treed middle lands of our country. They are illegal in my current locality. Ain't no mesquite flour protagony here.
And those sheep are going to starve. And their predators will eat sh#t.
Progress, though my friend. Progress. Yes, you are totally correct.
With my vow to sow constructive thoughts and ideas, I should also vow to forgo my true outlets, should turn and face the demands that progress places upon a man. I should go trap some bobcats and skin them for money. Better than graduate school, right?
Let us know!