Say no to dams-yes to "smart" electrical grids.

Right now there is a frenzy of dam building going on worldwide to generate electricity even though multiple studies easily accessed on the internet show that many countries would be better served to upgrade old and inefficient electrical transmission lines with "Smart Grids" and more efficient energy technology applied to heating and cooling sytems for homes and businesses.

In some cases these simple and relatively inexpensive upgrades to transmission lines etc. would reduce and even eliminate the need to build more dams, coal plants, nuclear plants etc. and is significantly less expensive and less environmentally destructive than building dams, nuclear power plants and coal plants.

In some countries these efficiency upgrades can even allow removal of dams and restoration of river ecosystems.

Multiple scientific studies have shown dam building/dam reservoirs to be a major contibuting cause of Malaria worldwide which infects 500,000,000
people per year killing 1 million....90% of these deaths are children.

This increase in malaria is caused by the stagnant water which is created when rivers are dammed....... malaria causing mosquitoes breed and proliferate in this stagnant water infecting people who live on these dammed rivers or move near dam reservoirs for the water resources provided...often these people are sickened by not only malaria but also other parasites/worms which breed in the now stagnant reservoir and river water.

In many areas these dams/reservoir have destroyed/drowned  hundreds of miles of temperate and tropical forests, displaced millions of people and driven untold numbers of animal species to extinction through destruction of river systems.

Also the drowned forest can no longer remove CO2 from the atmosphere and emit massive amounts of the greenhouse gas methane which is 25-75 times more powerful as a earth warming greenhouse gas than CO2.

Right now nearly every nation on earth with significant river systems are planning further dam building.....often these dams are unneccesary because transmission line upgrades and other efficiency/conservation measures would eliminate electricity shortages and the need to construct dams.

The environmental destruction and negative human health impacts caused by dams and dam reservoirs is astronomical and often completely unneccesary.

This petition calls on the nations of the world who are engaged in dam building, the World Bank, the World Commission on Dams and the United Nations to incorporate, promote and encourage efficiency upgrades to electrical transmission lines as an alternative to further dam building.

Also to incorporate other conservation methods such as making buildings, air conditioners and furnaces more energy efficient as well as investing in alternative energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal and even natural gas fired power plants as an alternative to building dams.

Although damming of one or two tributaries of a major river sytem in developing countries may be neccessary, to an extent, for the sake of modernization, full-span damming of major river systems themselves should be avoided in favor of "diversion" or "run-of-river" dams as a last resort when alternatives are not available or until alternative power generation becomes possible.

The era of dam building needs to end and the resources are now out there to do it .....so let's get it done and stop destroying the earth and our irreplaceable river/water resources.

For further information on this subject go to: http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/action

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2119

We the undersigned agree with the sentiments of this author.