Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill sponsored by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Congressman Dan Newhouse that would protect the Four Lower Snake River dams from destruction. Some environmental groups are supporting efforts to destroy the dams.

Last month, we highlighted errors in a study from the NW Energy Coalition, which claimed we could easily replace the electricity from the dams with little cost. Today, they sent out a fundraising e-mail highlighting their flawed study and repeating some of the errors. There are three noteworthy points about the sentence mentioning their study.

First, it contradicts statements they made elsewhere. Responding to our critique, the spokesman for the NW Energy Coalition told the Lewiston Tribune they had not taken “a position on dam breaching, other than to say it should be analyzed.” In this e-mail, however, they clearly argue the region should “embrace” removing the dams. They also tweeted that they are working on “replacing energy from the lower Snake River dams.”

Second, they say the electricity can be replaced with “little or no increase in greenhouse gas emissions.” In fact, they admit the most likely scenario from their study would add the equivalent of 70,000 cars worth of CO2 emissions every year while only replacing 86 percent of the electricity.

Additionally, they claim the dams “threaten salmon and orcas with extinction.” The greens made a similar claim in 1999. The Sierra Club and other groups took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, claiming that if the dams were not removed, “wild Snake River spring chinook salmon…will be extinct by 2017.” In 2018, however, runs are larger than in 1999. Indeed, NOAA Fisheries noted just last year that the dams, “are very close to achieving, or have already achieved, the juvenile dam passage survival objective of 96 percent for yearling Chinook salmon and steelhead migrants…”

Peter Kareiva, who headed research on the impact of the Snake River Dams at the National Marine Fisheries Service between 1999 and 2002, is stark in his assessment of such hyperbolic claims. This year he wrote, “it has become clear that salmon conservation is being used as a ‘means to an end’ (dam removal) as opposed to an ‘end’ of its own accord.”

The final irony is the conflict between the first and second sentences in the paragraph I’ve highlighted from their e-mail. Although they admit having a difficult time developing renewable energy in Montana, their study on the Snake River Dams, which they mention in the following sentence, assumes a massive increase in wind energy from Montana.

The House legislation now moves to the Senate for consideration. Let’s hope the Senators look closely at the salmon and energy science of the dams rather than relying on biased and faulty analysis.