Leadership Quote by Cathy McMorris

“Depends” is doing the heavy lifting here: it frames hydropower not as a policy choice but as regional life support. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a longtime Washington Republican, is speaking from inside a political ecosystem where dams are both infrastructure and identity. In the Pacific Northwest, cheap electricity from the Columbia River system underwrites everything from aluminum smelting’s legacy to today’s data centers, plus the everyday promise that the lights stay on during cold snaps. Calling it “inexpensive renewable energy” compresses a complicated history into an unassailable brand.

The intent is defensive as much as celebratory. The line functions as a preemptive rebuttal to environmental and tribal campaigns to remove or significantly modify dams for salmon recovery and river restoration. By labeling dam power “renewable,” it borrows climate-era moral authority; by emphasizing “inexpensive,” it warns that alternatives would raise rates, threaten jobs, and destabilize a regional advantage. It’s a neat two-key chord: climate virtue and pocketbook anxiety.

The subtext is that some costs don’t count. Hydropower’s carbon profile is favorable, but dams carry ecological and cultural debts: blocked fish passage, altered sediment and water temperature, inundated lands, and treaty-rights conflicts. The quote doesn’t deny those harms; it strategically sidelines them by widening the frame to “the Pacific Northwest,” a collective “our” that implies shared ownership and shared sacrifice.

Context matters: as grid reliability and decarbonization dominate energy politics, hydropower becomes a politically convenient bridge technology. The line is less about dams in the abstract than about keeping a bargaining chip on the table when anyone proposes changing the river.