This was in the paper today.

Billions of dollars to destroy the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, which supplies water to the Bay Area, including me. I can walk to the aqueduct from where I live. Destroy the dam, which supplies 400 MW of renewable, clean, non-CO2 power to California and other places.

For what? Scenery.

Mother Nature doesn't give a rat's ass if the valley is filled with water or not. The lake is as scenic as the valley, just in a different way. Yosemite was full of water in prehistoric times.

I could see arguing to not build a new dam in a place like that now. The money could be better spent elsewhere.

But to take an existing, working system, already paid for, that the local ecology has long adapted to and has been supplying essential water and power to millions of people, and wreck it for some vision of what the valley should look like, simply because that's what it looked like when somebody first saw it, is insane.

This controversy makes an excellent touchstone for the type of environmentalist that is not worried about actual damage to the environment, but considers all human works to be a defilement on the Earth.