The real tragedy of Nepal’s flood was climate-driven dams—and the workers they put in the mountain’s path.

By Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon, published by The Epoch Times

For the original version of this commentary, see the publisher’s website here.

The true tragedy of the Nepal Himalayan flood that killed more than 1,000 people (with thousands still missing), was not the mountain event itself but the international development industry’s climate-driven rush to replace fossil fuels with hydropower.

In this Epoch Times commentary, Adams and Solomon detail how more than two dozen dams and construction sites—financed by lenders and climate funds to meet a 28,500-megawatt target by 2035—lined the same steep, geologically unstable gorge already known for avalanches and sudden floods, adding hundreds of millions of tons of loose rock, concrete, tunnels, and camps that the torrent incorporated and then destroyed, knocking out over 900 megawatts of capacity and trapping hundreds inside the works.

They cite a 2009 Indian government review that concluded carbon dioxide was not driving a uniform Himalayan melt-off and that such ice-rock avalanches have occurred before; what was new, they argue, was the density of people and infrastructure placed in the valley by fear of climate change.

Continue reading at the publisher’s website here.

Patricia Adams is executive director of Probe International, a Toronto-based China watchdog. Lawrence Solomon is a founding columnist with FP Comment.