Goel | The United States is massacring endangered salmon

On May 9, the Bill Lane Center for the American West hosted the 2025 State of the West Symposium, bringing in former Washington Governor Jay Inslee ’73, a number of panelists on natural resources from the Pacific Northwest, and First Nations and Native American representatives from across the Columbia Basin. The subject at hand was the multilateral effort for salmon restoration in the Columbia River and its tributaries. I am grateful these conversations are brought to spaces outside my home region, yet I am disappointed in how the elephant in the room was only lightly touched.

Growing up in Washington, I worked on this particular issue of salmon recovery and conservation in the Columbia River Basin for years, alongside many stakeholders who had worked on it for decades. Here’s why the only way to recover Columbia River salmon is to remove the four federal dams on the lower Snake River and why you should care.

The Columbia River, fed by tributaries starting from as far as Nevada and Alberta, was historically one of the largest salmon runs in North America. One of the larger tributaries, the Snake River, begins in Wyoming and winds through Idaho before joining the Columbia in southeastern Washington. In Idaho, the Snake River has long been home to some of the most fertile spawning grounds for salmon on the continent.

Over the past 50 years, the spring-summer Chinook Salmon run along the Columbia River-Snake River system has been decimated. As a result, the many species that depend on them for food, including the critically endangered Southern Resident orcas — an icon of Seattle and Northwest Tribes for thousands of years — have been decimated in turn.

60% of Washington’s electricity is hydropower. There are eight dams that Snake River salmon must pass before reaching the Pacific Ocean, where they spend their adult lives before returning 900 miles upstream to spawn. Four of these dams on the lower Snake River have contributed to a 90% reduction in spring/summer-run Snake River salmon. More than an ecological issue, it’s also a major affront to tribal rights, violating the 1855 Treaty of Walla Walla’s guaranteed fishing rights to Columbia Basin tribes.

Proponents claim that the Snake River dams are exceptionally safe for salmon, with one having up to 95-96% successful fish passage rates. 0.96^4 = 0.85, so even generalizing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ best-case data for the ‘safest’ dam, at least 15% of the salmon are dead from one-way dam passage even before reaching the Columbia River. More importantly, salmon mortality must be examined beyond mere dam passage. One to two degrees of warming can be fatal to juvenile salmon, and the creation of warm, slow-moving reservoirs between the dams greatly exacerbates the existing warming impacts of climate change. Further, the slow-moving water requires juveniles to expend energy swimming downstream rather than letting the river carry them, making them more vulnerable to predation and to missing the critical biological window of time when they must reach the ocean.

Smolt-to-adult return rates of Snake River salmon are far below those of salmon from other tributaries that don’t pass through Snake River dams, at a level far below the sustainable rate. If the dams are not taken down by either federal executive action (unlikely) or a Congressional vote, these salmon may soon go extinct, hammering the final nail in the coffin of the Southern Resident orcas and other species across the Pacific Northwest.

Though the science has been clear for decades that lower Snake River dam (LSRD) removal is necessary for salmon recovery, there are a number of reasons they remain in place today. First, the energy produced by the dams is sold by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), entrenched in legacy hydropower and political pressure for consistency rather than shifting to new clean energy sources. Second, there is much political fear-mongering that the dams will be taken down without adequate infrastructure replacement, such as the lie that hydropower would be replaced by fossil fuels instead of the wind/solar already being looked at, or that farmers will be left to fend for themselves when proposed dam replacement packages include costs for groundwater wells and other new irrigation infrastructure to replace the existing reservoirs’ agricultural uses. 

Third, the dams today provide infrastructure for barging 10% of the nation’s wheat and barley exports from Idaho to Portland, from where it is shipped to overseas markets. However, barging volumes have consistently declined in recent decades, and there is existing riverside rail infrastructure from before the dams were built in the 1970s that can be retrofitted and modernized to support the necessary volume of agricultural exports. For now, it is enough to see that barging can be feasibly replaced; if we are to preserve Northwest salmon, we must accept that the environmental tradeoffs of current infrastructure are unacceptable, and thus open the door to more productive discussions on the best mix of barging alternatives, rather than arguing over whether endangered species are important enough to shift this short-lived regional status quo.

Fourth, and most importantly, there is political gridlock. Even though total removal and replacement costs would cost consumers less than one dollar per month, few members in Congress are willing to make the stand for a one-time $20-30 billion replacement package – when, to put that in perspective, around $19 billion has already been thrown at failed salmon recovery efforts while not confronting the primary threat the LSRDs pose. Combined with aging dam maintenance costs over the next 10 years, the one-time replacement package will ultimately save taxpayer money, but no Congressperson wants to be called a wanton spender. TL;DR, they prioritize short-term reputation over long-term constituent benefit.

This issue impacts all Americans. Taking down the LSRDs would set a much-needed precedent in climate, that not all renewable energy is necessarily ‘clean’ energy. Advancing a sustainable future means collective advancement rather than selective improvement; we cannot accept trade-offs like the fate of a keystone species. In total, Columbia River Basin dams produce approximately 14,000 MW of electricity every year, and the Snake River dams produce an cumulative average of only 1,000 MW. Replacing these four half-century-old dams with clean energy in the form of wind and solar is very feasible, and would provide truly clean energy, cheaper for taxpayers than dam maintenance over the coming decades, while preserving keystone wildlife. Though these dams and the decision to remove them is in Congressional and Executive hands, replacement infrastructure will come from Washington state’s consistently pro-clean-energy legislature. All the infrastructure the dams provide, including electricity, irrigation services and barging capabilities for inland farmers, can be replaced with clean, affordable alternatives.

The Snake River dams pose a question of what we are willing to give up for electricity. In truth, the premise is false. We can have clean energy and rich biodiversity, and all the benefits that come with both, and it starts with this oft-overlooked corner of Washington state. If you care about clean energy, you should care about removing the Snake River dams and replacing them with alternative, ecosystem-safe infrastructure; the studies have been done, the replacements have been proposed and all that’s left is political friction.

Wherever you’re from in the US, I urge you to tell your Congressional representatives on both sides of the aisle to move fast and break things, four particular things, to save Northwest salmon and orca, protect tribal rights and stand up for truly clean energy. Powerful people listen to Stanford students; use it well!

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