Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire $9 Billion Spent On Salmon Recovery In Oregon Has Produced "Few Discernable Results"

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/9...gon-has-produced-few-discernable-results


Today in "your tax dollars at work" news, the state of Oregon has found out that $9 billion it has doled out to help its salmon population (yes, the fish) has failed to produce any discernable results.

And to think, that's perfectly good money we could have sent to Ukraine!

A new report from NBC affiliate KGW8 this week noted that "hundreds" of projects the Columbia River Basin has undertaken - including "habitat restoration to bounty programs on other fish that prey on salmon" - have all failed to produce results.

The revelation came from a Oregon State University co-authored by Bill Jaeger, an applied economics professor at the university. His research was recently published in the journal PLOS One.

His study looked at 50 years of salmon return data from the lowest dam on the Columbia River. The study found that before the dams went up, 16 million salmonids returned to the basin each year. By the 2010s, that number had fallen to 1.5 million.

“For a long time, there have been questions about the effectiveness of a wide range of activities taken to try to restore salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin. We do not find evidence of an increase in wild fish,” Jaeger said.

The salmon are facing pressure from “hydro, habitat, harvest and hatcheries,” he added, noting there have been "steep declines" in coho, chinook, sockeye and steelhead populations because dams block fish from swimming upriver.

“Many of those species listed since the 1990s under the Endangered Species Act are ones for which the numbers have declined and continue to be of great concern,” Jaeger added.

He railed on the egregious spending's lack of impact: “Cost effectiveness was a term that was occasionally used in a report but was never really undertaken as a serious methodology for determining where to spend money. The operations and the administration of these projects could have done a lot more to do serious cost-effective analysis to determine which of these activities seems to be generating more bang for the buck.”

He concluded: “I'm not sure how useful it is to talk about whether the money was wasted or not. That's behind us. I think what one can do, and what one should do, is look at this evidence and ask 'what should we be doing differently going forward?'”

Surprise,surprise, I'm totally shocked, shocked................... government projects not producing results. Quick we must spend another billion or two studying this.

You ain't seen nothin' yet. Wait until they are done removing the power gen dams on the Klamath River. Advertised as the way to restore Salmon runs...millions and millions being spent. Nobody has answered what is going to happen when there is no ice cold water off the bottom of the lakes to be released when summer water temps start killing smolt. Nobody has answered what is going to happen to a hundred miles of clean gravel streambed for spawning when a 70 year accumulation of silt enters the river.
One thing is very clear without an education...I don't care how salmon friendly you make the river...if there are no wild fish coming upstream to breed...you ain't gonna restore the runs.

It sounds like to me being a neophyte in all things salmon, that is you all don't kill the seals at the mouth of the river, not a single salmon is going to go anywhere into fresh water. Factor in the Indians who have no restrictions and there you have the problems of why there are no salmon in the river.

kwg

Having worked for years on salmonid restoration (in NorCal and Columbia/Snake basins) , the two things you mention (seals and Indian harvest) are pretty low on the totem pole as to the cause of the decline in salmonid populations.

Do they have some effect.............of course. But they are readily visible and easily quantifiable and folks think it would be easy to just solve those issues and the numbers of salmonids would rise again. Nope, not happenin'.

Not 1 word in there about sea lions. I've read that they eat 40,000 lb of fish PER DAY. How can that not affect the fish runs? Our idiots in congress passed the Marine Mammal Act just like they did the wild horse act. They didn't read what they voted on or do any research into what happens after their goals are met. The sea lions and horses keep on reproducing and the law doesn't allow for population control.

And the double indemnity for the farmers: water will be much more limited when this cluster f__gg happens.

From what I read, there is a lot going on. Killing all sea lions would be a good start. Rubber from tires don't seem to help cohos when washed into the rivers from what I hear.

Returning wild runs to former glory probably isn't going to happen. Keep up hatchery programs.

Not much escapes satellite observations in the North Pacific nowadays. All the signatories to the International fishing treaties cheat of course...but the Russians, Koreans don't even try to hide it. The number 436,000 metric tonnes was thrown around a couple years ago. It's overfishing by a wide margin. Kamchatka is the Bermuda triangle in a salmon's life...many go in, few come out.

You can tear out all the damns you want, spend all the Billions too untill you get the nets outta the rivers raking the fish off there spawning beds it will never change.
Then start reducing the sea lions, reduce the commercial fishing and stop the illegal raping of other country's boats

If they want to really be honest about salmon counts, they would us charts of how salmon returns held fairly steady until passage of the marine mammals act.

Those cute little furry sea lions eat far more salmon than man ever caught.

Or the state of Alaska pumping hundreds and hundreds of millions of chums and pinks into the ocean....... critters gotta eat, too.

I didn’t know marines had mammaries.

Today's Marines mostly have screw-ons...

This is a very uncomfortable conundrum for the sustainable energy zealots. The dams generate electricity with miniscule carbon footprints. Do the crazies leave the climate-friendly dams in place, or do they bring back the salmon?

Well??????

Sherm 61 You totally get it! Best post on the thread. I was a boat dealer in OR for 30 years.

Don't hold your breath. Oregon categorizes hydro-power as "dirty".

If you want ZERO carbon, go nuclear. But that fall on deaf ears.

BMT

Actually there are no boats dragging salmon off their spawning beds. By the time salmon start to spawn they are too dark to eat. Unless you are talking dogs and pinks where the processors make lots of money on ripe roe.

You list a lot of issues but there are so many more in so many places, ways, and killing salmon at so many different stages. Last number I heard for the Columbia dams was over 10% of smolts are killed at each dam.

But the real elephant in the room is the proverbial elephant being inspected by blind men. No one man gets the real picture because everyone is looking at different parts. Divide and conquer... this is truly where we are.

Have you watched the tribes drift nets down the rivers in March and April when the big native steelhead are in the rivers, I have first hand. I grew up on the Skagit River in the 70's untill 1992 fishing that river for steelhead and salmon and saw what it was before the tribal netting and after. The dams were on that river when it was the #1 River in the world for Steelhead BEFORE tribal netting started then it went down hill fast in 10 years.
By the mid to late 80's you could see a big difference in the Steelhead and Salmon runs returning.
Today on the Skagit a white guy can't even fish when the tribes are in the river netting.

It seems to me that if you want to restore fisheries anywhere in this country, you need to thin out the indians.