Dam and Earthquake Watch

Mega dams, say Chinese scholars, can only be built when those who suffer are not the beneficiaries and those who benefit are not the sufferers. To the insurance industry this disconnect is known as “moral hazard” -- when risk takers don’t bear the cost of their decisions (indeed, they profit from them) they are more inclined to make risky decisions. To economists it is known as “externalizing costs.” Whatever you call it, mega dams would not be built if the dam builders had to pay the real cost.

Big dams are expensive and rarely deliver the promised benefits. Their costs are routinely underestimated and externalized onto ratepayers, taxpayers, and those who are displaced. With insulation from the real costs of dams, proponents can extravagantly predict the benefits. And they do. Promised electricity output becomes unreliable because of vagaries in river flows, life-saving flood control needs are sacrificed to electricity production, shiplocks become crippling bottlenecks, irrigation canals saturate and salinate the land they are meant to enrich.

The environmental costs are never fully calculated, but always felt: lost fish stocks have impoverished millions of their main protein source, reservoirs have become toxic cesspools and seismic activity has increased. The grassroots economic losses too are never fully accounted for as the millions of citizens whose farms, businesses, homes, and temples are flooded are forced to absorb the losses and join the ranks of the impoverished.

Mega dams can only be justified with unsubstantiated engineering and compromised economics, by denigrating the cultural values of the people affected, by discounting current economic activity in the ecosystems to be destroyed, by treating the environment as dispensable, by making unscientific and uneconomic choices, and by carelessly assigning risks to others who would not assume those risks themselves.

They also need monopoly power. Because of their large scale, technical and organizational complexity, and experimental nature, large dams suffer from cost overruns requiring bailouts and subsidies and protection from competing sources of power. So too do they demand prices that cover their costs, any cost. Consumers and taxpayers are ill-served in the process.

The drawbacks of mega dams, said Britain’s Economist magazine, have become more apparent over time, and “the purported benefits have turned out to be exaggerated.” "Taxpayers who eventually foot the bill, should look on dam-building with suspicion," says the Economist "as always, things look better when some costs are left out."

From the Canadian Arctic to the Amazonian rainforest to the vast flood plains of Asia, millions of people are challenging the dam-builders' creed with massive demonstrations, scientific critiques, and legal challenges.

Since 1980, Probe International has worked with them to document the real costs of mega dams. Over the years, our biggest campaigns have been on the Amazonian hydro dams, the Narmada dams in India, and the largest of them all, the Three Gorges dam in China. But we have records of virtually all of the big and controversial dams built over the past 30 years and those in the works. We invite you to do a search on this site for the dams you are particularly interested in, or to contact us at info@probeinternational.org

 Three Gorges Probe

 Launched in 1998, Three Gorges Probe is a bilingual website and electronic news service that provides uncensored coverage of the Three Gorges dam -- the world's biggest dam. Three Gorges Probe has broken major stories on the endemic corruption, human-rights abuses and technical flaws associated with the dam, and produced a detailed energy analysis showing the economic inefficiency of Three Gorges power.
Visit the Three Gorges Probe Campaign Page
 

Fortis Belize

The Macal river valley, one of Central America’s few remaining wildlife sanctuaries, was flooded by a Canadian power company in 2005, despite a five-year long international campaign and legal battle to save it. When Newfoundland-based Fortis brought the Chalillo dam online, people living along the Macal river immediately witnessed the predicted decline in water quality: swimmers and bathers received skin irritation and toxins from the dam had made fish from the river inedible. To this day, Probe International continues to stay on the front line of the local struggle for environmental justice.
Visit the Fortis Belize Campaign Page
 

 Chilean Patagonia

 Chile's environmentally fragile and unique Patagonia region is one of the world's last areas of wilderness to have remained largely untouched by the ravaging development of modern industry. Because of a proposed plan to build five large hydroelectric dams on Patagonian rivers that would also require building the world's longest power transmission corridor to connect the dams to Chile's power markets in the north, the region's delicate ecology is facing a very serious threat.
Visit the Chilean Patagonia Campaign Page

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