WHEREAS, the Biden administration and groups such as Earthjustice have proposed to breach four of the Lower Snake River Dams. In the 1960s and 70s, the Army Corps of Engineers built four dams on the Lower Snake River to allow barging, control downstream irrigation, and generate electricity. The four dams are the Lower Granite, Little Goose, Lower Monumental, and Ice Harbor. While these dams are situated on the border of Washington and Oregon this would impact Lincoln County. The breaching of these dams would impact Wyoming and Lincoln County in multiple ways. The cost of electricity, the inflation of goods that are shipped through this area, and the inflation of goods that are grown using water from these dams. Once they start breaching dams, they won’t stop. These four will just be the beginning; and,
WHEREAS, removing the lower Snake River Dams would unfairly harm the region’s most vulnerable communities. Even studies from lower Snake River dam opponents show that it would cost more to breach the dams and replace them with other renewables. Community-owned utilities would face the highest rate increases. These increases would be harmful to their disproportionately high numbers of low-income and underserved people; and,
WHEREAS, major technological improvements to the lower Snake River dams have meant that fish passage past the dams is comparable to free-flowing rivers. Peer-reviewed science shows that the fish passage through the currently damned lower Snake and Columbia rivers is as good as the free-flowing Fraser River in Canada; and,
WHEREAS, much of the Northwest’s (and the world’s) food comes from the eastern parts of the region. The lower Snake River dams provide important irrigation and the ability to barge food to downstream ports. The Columbia River is the nation’s number one wheat export gateway and number two for corn and soybean exports, and it accounts for the transport of billions of dollars of exports annually; now, therefore,
BE IT RESOLVED, that the Wyoming Republican Party calls on the Governor of Wyoming, with the support of the Wyoming legislature and our federal delegation in Congress, to exert every effort to protect against any breach of the four lower Snake River dams.
Passed:
Wyoming Republican Party, 19 Apr 2024 WYGOP State Convention
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