Reactions are coming in strong following the Biden Administration’s announcement of the formation of the Columbia River Taskforce, aimed at exploring options to breach the four lower Snake River Dams in Washington state.
Congressman Dan Newhouse has voiced significant concerns about the task force’s composition and skepticism about their intentions.
“On the face of it, makes it, to me, very suspicious as to what the ultimate desired conclusion is,” Newhouse states. “They’ve made it very clear that the dams need to go away, and they are, like I said, working towards achieving that goal.”
Regarding alternative energy sources, Newhouse highlighted concerns about power replacement.
“To replace the power would take a tremendous amount of wind or solar or whatever is acceptable. You know, they don’t want natural gas, and they don’t want hydro-power, but the bottom line is we need more sources of power. We don’t need to be taking sources away,” he adds.
Newhouse says that if the dams were gone, the number of trucks and train cars that would be needed to replace the river barges would be a tremendous impact on the environment, and the irrigation for crops that the dams enable would also be gone.
