New England Clean Energy Connect has gotten a win in the Maine courts, and it may connect power from Quebec to New England. But how clean is that power, really? It’s long past time for a closer look because electricity produced from the mega-reservoir dams, such as Hydro-Quebec builds in the Arctic, is causing our climate to change at greater rates with more damage than fossil fuels.

For decades the Arctic has been warming. We’ve been hearing stories of how the Arctic Ocean is losing more and more ice each year. Buildings are sinking as the permafrost melts and releases methane gas. Evidence is mounting that the warming is caused by the mega dams such as Hydro-Quebec has been building.

There are now dozens of mega dams and hundreds of large dams ringing the Arctic. Consider all those major rivers that have been dammed; the water flooding over vegetation, which rots (giving off methane) and creating shallow, inland seas that are the dams’ reservoirs. When winter comes, that same water (which has been warming all summer) is released to flow through the turbines before flowing northward to the Arctic Ocean – warming the Arctic, melting the permafrost and giving off water vapor (which is also a greenhouse gas) as the warm water meets the colder air.

A closer look is now becoming available through numerous scientific studies, which are proving that hydroelectric power in the Arctic is doing far more to damage our climate than has previously been acknowledged.

Lyn Sudlow
Parsonsfield

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