The Belo Monte Dam of Brazil

With the global energy crisis manifesting itself in wars based on false pretense throughout Arabia, it's easy to forget that innocent and dead Arabs as exposed by helicopter mass murdering gunships and Bradly Manning, are not the only victims. The dead of Pakistan murdered by cowardly drone planes and the "human rights" excuses to invade Libya may also be a distraction of sorts to those plugged into monopolized mass media, but the indigenous tribes of the forests of Brazil where the Xingú river, a tributary of the Amazon in the state of Pará, is to be flooded for a dam and hydro electric power - are very much victims of global "progress" as well.

Climate change is a reality and though hydro electric power is indeed "green" power - what all is involved in the creation of a huge hydro electric dam is largely ignored, but there is much human misery involved, and the facts prove that though the hydro electric power itself is less damaging to the environment than burning fossil fuels are in an emissions sense; no one seems to take into account the damage done by flooding forests, displacing peoples from their homes, and the loss of huge amounts of trees.

The Belo Monte Dam project is a global disaster that can not be recovered from. Once the dam is built - the damage will be done, and there can be no recovery from it. The facts are that the "go green" ideal in regards to hydro electric dams has already cause more of a problem for the environment than burning fossil fuels of late. The problem with hydro electric dams is that when a river is damned and an area flooded - the rotting vegetation from the flooded forests creates massive amounts of greenhouse gasses.

The Tucurui dam, built by the Brazilian electric company is to blame for approximately one sixth of Brazil's greenhouse gasses since the time that it was built. It's unclear how much longer it's rotting vegetation will produce greenhouse gasses - but the fact that the trees are gone in the first place is rather significant, and very under looked.

But even the Tucurui dam isn't the only major Brazilian hydro electric dam that's already been proven as an environmental disaster and a total green energy failure. In a study to be published in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Fearnside estimates that in 1990 the greenhouse effect of emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Pará, Brazil, was more than three-and-a-half times what would have been produced by generating the same amount of electricity from oil.

The Tucurui dam, besides being an environmental disaster in it's own right; was also a disgrace to the Natives of Brazil. Forty Thousand Natives were pushed out of their ancestral lands and deeper into poverty and despair with it's construction.

The Belo Monte Dam will affect twenty four different Native Brazilian tribes; and will have a direct impact on the Paquiçamba reserve of the Juruna indigenous people, and in total an estimated 12,000 people will be forced to relocate and farmlands and fish stocks will be greatly reduced.

The real effects of flooding five hundred square kilometers for a dam that no one is convinced would even be an efficient provider of "green" electricity are far more complicated than "merely" the displacement of indigenous Native tribes from their ancestral lands. Dirt poor slave wage laborers would have to be brought to Northern Brazil by the thousands, and where do you suppose they would go when the dam was finished? Many of them wouldn't go anywhere, and the poverty and social strife in the area with displaced Natives would surely increase far beyond what it is now. How would these thousands of laborers sustain themselves in their non native land where they'd built a dam? It's speculated that many of them would get into cattle ranching - which quite naturally, leads to more deforestation.

The purported claims of even the uses of the hydro electric power to be generated by the proposed Belo Monte dam project is itself another issue of grave concerns for everyone - the plans already stated by the government of Brazil concerning what the power would be used for are an outrage. The power is not for the people, but for industries - mostly dirty industries like mining, which of course - only leads to huge amounts of environmental pollution, and more deforestation in the area where the world's largest rain forrest are.

The government of Brazil says the project will cost more than US$10 billion, but industry analysts say that due to the difficulties in building a project of this size in the Amazon, its cost could easily exceed US$16 billion. While the project will have an installed capacity of 11,233 MW, the dam would be highly inefficient, generating as little as 1000 MW during the 3-4 month low water season. There is nothing of proven value to be had from the building of this dam, but rather, there are many ways in which it's more than mere speculation that the dam will be an environmental and political disaster that's only uses will be for more of the same - deforestation where we need the forests the most.. Perhaps no one sees the forests for the trees.

Finally, there are hundreds of entire species of victims of the planned Belo Monte dam project, and none of them have a voice at all in the matter. No one knows how many species of fish that are totally unique to the area that will be totally wiped out from the drying out of and flooding of various places with the Belo Monte dam. The arrogance and greed of persons supporting this project is more than anyone or any organization has ever before imagined.

Has any human project ever before destroyed and made extinct two hundred (or more) species of anything all at once? Where is Al Gore, that supposed savior of the Polar Bears? Perhaps Al Gore isn't concerned about species of anything at all, and never was - as the Belo Monte hydro electricity can always be called "green energy" or even worse - "clean energy" - despite the high levels of methane gas and CO2 from rotting vegetation.

The Belo Monte dam must not be built.