Brazil's new dam unleashes flood of anger and hope

Sheena Rossiter in Bloomberg: After 36 years, countless petitions and protests, and several supreme-court cases brought by environmentalists and indigenous populations, Brazil's giant Belo Monte hydroelectric dam has finally received the go-ahead from the federal government. Construction is expected to begin later this year on the Amazon Basin project -- but not without a fight.

The complex, which will be built along the banks of the Xingu River in Para state, will be the third-largest hydroelectric dam in the world. A facility that could generate more than 11,000 megawatts of energy would seem to be a fine idea for a country whose gross domestic product grew 7.5 percent last year, right? Not quite. The $16 billion project will require flooding almost 200 square miles (516 square kilometers) of the Amazon region -- displacing thousands of people, and potentially ruining the environment.

Even so, the Brazilian government feels pretty good about the dam, and is confident of its due diligence. Here's how Energy and Mining Minister Edison Lobao put it: "No dam in the world has been preceded by so much care and so many studies. There are 35 years of studies around Belo Monte. There have been 30 public hearings held about the construction of Belo Monte. About the indigenous communities, there are 11 in the area. No indigenous reservation will be flooded by Belo Monte. No indigenous person will have to leave where they are today."

...Environmentalists aren't buying it. "I feel puzzled to hear that all of the conditions were met,” said Marcelo Salazar, a team coordinator at the environmental group Instituto Socioambiental. "People who live there know that the city does not have the conditions to receive a project of this size."...

A Greenpeace protest against the Belo Monte dam, shot by Roosewelt Pinheiro/Agência Brasil, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Brazil license