Three Gorges Dam nears completion

Awesome! Huge infrastructure projects are always cool. This one will provide huge amounts of electricity (85 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year - compare that with 4 billion kilowatt-hours that the Hoover dams produces) and significantly reduce or completely eliminate flooding in the Yangtze river plains. There is also a related project in the works to channel some of the Yangtze river water up to Beijing which is in a fairly arid area and yet growing steadily.

I just don't understand how people (especially Westerners) can bitch about this project. Yes, there are some negatives (huge relocations of people, flooding of some historical artifacts), but the positives are so overwhelming that it would be just plain stupid not to do it.

Now that the West is all developed it is a bit too quick to judge other nations trying to develop. You always hear environmentalists cringing when projects like these are proposed. It's complaints like that which make me lose a lot of respect for the environmental movement. "Oh, save a species, or a forest...". Right, that is after we've buldozed over dozens if not hundreds to provide the base on which this environmentalist sits and yells at others not to do the same.

Hypocrisy is one of the worst sins.