In the intense, ongoing debate about the Amaila Falls Hydro Electric Project I confess to finding myself mystified. I have tried to be as objective as possible by leaving aside the partisan political vitriol injected into every national debate and confining myself to the technical and financial arguments. And so it is one day I read the case for the project and am satisfied that it will take us to the promised land of cheap, reliable, abundant energy for all. Only to read the next day the case against and become convinced that, no, the project will lead us into national bankruptcy and by no means solve our 50-year-old electricity supply problem.
And so my poor, nonplussed mind twists itself into ever more confusing arguments with itself and can find no conclusion. In cancelling, will we miss out or are we dodging a bullet? In advance, can we really know? Might there simply be too many unknown unknowns?
So what is the sensible way forward? Perhaps one should start with the two conclusions that seemed to be agreed by everyone – that a hydroelectric project, probably at Amaila Falls since the road there is being built anyway, is the answer to our energy supply needs in the future and, secondly, that GPL as the vehicle to use and transmit the new power has to be made to run better.
Cannot concessions on all sides accumulate around these two points of agreement and a national consensus emerge quickly to formulate an Amaila Falls Hydro Electric Project Mark II with public, international institutional and private investments?
To think such a thing is probably politically naïve and it may be impossible to put this Humpty Dumpty together again any time soon or we may all simply be too weary and fed up with the whole thing to even try. But I can’t help feeling that we must as a nation get this done now.
What worries me in all this is something I read recently in an article entitled The Gift of Doubt by the always thought-provoking Malcolm Gladwell in which he points out that often enough being deluged with too much “knowledge” is a bad thing and that ignorance may very well be a pre-condition for making progress.
In his article Gladwell relates the following story:
“In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunneling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.
“James Hayward, one of New England’s leading railroad engineers, estimated that penetrating the Hoosac would cost, at most, a very manageable two million dollars.
The president of Amherst College, an accomplished geologist, said that the mountain was composed of soft rock and that tunneling would be fairly easy once the engineers had breached the surface. “The Hoosac… is believed to be the only barrier between Boston and the Pacific,” the project’s promoter, Alvah Crocker, declared.
“Everyone was wrong. Digging through the Hoosac turned out to be a nightmare. The project cost more than ten times the budgeted estimate. If the people involved had known the true nature of the challenges they faced, they would never have funded the Troy-Greenfield railroad.
But, had they not, the factories of northwestern Massachusetts wouldn’t have been able to ship their goods so easily to the expanding West, the cost of freight would have remained stubbornly high, and the state of Massachusetts would have been immeasurably poorer.”
Gladwell has a quote by the philosopher/economist Albert Hirschman who made a point of calling attention to “follies” like the Troy-Greenfield tunnel which turn out to bear bountiful fruit:
“While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede – in fact we find it intolerable to imagine – that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning… Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.”
Sometimes we can baffle ourselves into disastrous inaction through too many complex, conflicting calculations and competing technical arguments.
Sometimes it may be we just know something in our national gut – in this case that hydroelectric power is the way to go – and therefore simply must find a way to get it done now even if doubts and fears beset us on all sides.
