User:Keeperofthemoose/sandbox

To Do List
Edit/fully rewrite roller mill

Global Overview
The modern history of hydropower begins in the 1900s, with large dams built not simply to power neighboring mills or factories but provide extensive electricity for increasingly distant groups of people. Competition drove much of the global hydroelectric craze: Europe competed amongst itself to electrify first, and the United States’ hydroelectric plants in Niagara Falls and the Sierra Nevada inspired bigger and bolder creations across the globe. American and USSR financers and hydropower experts also spread the gospel of dams and hydroelectricity across the globe during the Cold War, contributing to projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and the Aswan High Dam. Feeding desire for large scale electrification with water inherently required large dams across powerful rivers, which impacted public and private interests downstream and in flood zones. Inevitably smaller communities and marginalized groups suffered. They were unable to successfully resist companies flooding them out of their homes or blocking traditional salmon passages. The stagnant water created by hydroelectric dams provides breeding ground for pests and pathogens, leading to local epidemics. However, in some cases, a mutual need for hydropower could lead to cooperation between otherwise adversarial nations. Hydropower technology and attitude began to shift in the second half of the 20th century. While countries had largely abandoned their small hydropower systems by the 1930s, the smaller hydropower plants began to make a comeback in the 1970s, boosted by government subsidies and a push for more independent energy producers. Some politicians who once advocated for large hydropower projects in the first half of the 20th century began to speak out against them, and citizen groups organizing against dam projects increased. In the 1980s and 90s the international anti-dam movement had made finding government or private investors for new large hydropower projects incredibly difficult, and given rise to NGOs devoted to fighting dams. Additionally, while the cost of other energy sources fell, the cost of building new hydroelectric dams increased 4% annually between 1965 and 1990, due both to the increasing costs of construction and to the decrease in high quality building sites. In the 1990s, only 18% of the world’s electricity came from hydropower. Tidal power production also emerged in the 1960s as a burgeoning alternative hydropower system, though still has not taken hold as a strong energy contender.

United States
Especially at the start of the American hydropower experiment, engineers and politicians began major hydroelectricity projects to solve a problem of ‘wasted potential’ rather than to power a population that needed the electricity. When the Niagara Falls Power Company began looking into damming Niagara, the first major hydroelectric project in the United States, in the 1890s they struggled to transport electricity from the falls far enough away to actually reach enough people and justify installation. The project succeeded in large part due to Nikola Tesla’s invention of the alternating current motor. On the other side of the country, San Francisco engineers, the Sierra Club, and the federal government fought over acceptable use of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Despite ostensible protection within a national park, city engineers successfully won the rights to both water and power in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1913. After their victory they delivered Hetch Hetchy hydropower and water to San Francisco a decade later and at twice the promised cost, selling power to PG&E which resold to San Francisco residents at a profit.

The American West, with its mountain rivers and lack of coal, turned to hydropower early and often, especially along the Columbia River and its tributaries. The Bureau of Reclamation built the Hoover Dam in 1931, symbolically linking the job creation and economic growth priorities of the New Deal. The federal government quickly followed Hoover with the Shasta Dam and Grand Coulee Dam. Power demand in Oregon did not justify damming the Columbia until WWI revealed the weaknesses of a coal-based energy economy. The federal government then began prioritizing interconnected power—and lots of it. Electricity from all three dams poured into war production during WWII. After the war, the Grand Coulee Dam and accompanying hydroelectric projects electrified almost all of the rural Columbia Basin, but failed to improve the lives of those living and farming there the way its boosters had promised and also damaged the river ecosystem and migrating salmon populations. In the 1940s as well, the federal government took advantage of the sheer amount of unused power and flowing water from the Grand Coulee to build a nuclear site placed on the banks of the Columbia. The nuclear site leaked radioactive matter into the river, contaminating the entire area.

Post-WWII Americans, especially engineers from the Tennessee Valley Authority, refocused from simply building domestic dams to promoting hydropower abroad. While domestic dam building continued well into the 1970s, with the Reclamation Bureau and Army Corps of Engineers building more than 150 new dams across the American West, organized opposition to hydroelectric dams sparked up in the 1950s and 60s based on environmental concerns. Environmental movements successfully shut down proposed hydropower dams in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon, and gained more hydropower-fighting tools with 1970s environmental legislation. As nuclear and fossil fuels grew in the 70s and 80s and environmental activists push for river restoration, hydropower gradually faded in American importance.

Africa
Foreign powers and IGOs have frequently used hydropower projects in Africa as a tool to interfere in the economic development of African countries, such as the World Bank with the Kariba and Akosombo Dams, and the Soviet Union with the Aswan Dam. The Nile River especially has borne the consequences of countries both along the Nile and distant foreign actors using the river to expand their economic power or national force. After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the British worked with Egypt to construct the first Aswan Dam, which they heightened in 1912 and 1934 to try to hold back the Nile floods. Egyptian engineer Adriano Daninos developed a plan for the Aswan High Dam, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority’s multipurpose dam.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in the 1950s, his government decided to undertake the High Dam project, publicizing it as an economic development project. After American refusal to help fund the dam, and anti-British sentiment in Egypt and British interests in neighboring Sudan combined to make the United Kingdom pull out as well, the Soviet Union funded the Aswan High Dam. Between 1977 and 1990 the dam’s turbines generated one third of Egypt’s electricity. The building of the Aswan Dam triggered a dispute between Sudan and Egypt over the sharing of the Nile, especially since the dam flooded part of Sudan and decreased the volume of water available to them. Ethiopia, also located on the Nile, took advantage of the Cold War tensions to request assistance from the United States for their own irrigation and hydropower investments in the 1960s. While progress stalled due to the coup d'état of 1974 and following 17-year-long Ethiopian Civil War Ethiopia began construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2011.

Beyond the Nile, hydroelectric projects cover the rivers and lakes of Africa. The Inga powerplant on the Congo River had been discussed since Belgian colonization in the late 19th century, and was successfully built after independence. Mobutu’s government failed to regularly maintain the plants and their capacity declined until the 1995 formation of the Southern African Power Pool created a multi-national power grid and plant maintenance program. States with an abundance of hydropower, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ghana, frequently sell excess power to neighboring countries. Foreign actors such as Chinese hydropower companies have proposed a significant amount of new hydropower projects in Africa, and already funded and consulted on many others in countries like Mozambique and Ghana.

Small hydropower also played an important role in early 20th century electrification across Africa. In South Africa, small turbines powered gold mines and the first electric railway in the 1890s, and Zimbabwean farmers installed small hydropower stations in the 1930s. While interest faded as national grids improved in the second half of the century, 21st century national governments in countries including South Africa and Mozambique, as well as NGOs serving countries like Zimbabwe, have begun re-exploring small-scale hydropower to diversify power sources and improve rural electrification.

Europe
In the early 20th century, two major factors motivated the expansion of hydropower in Europe: in the northern countries of Norway and Sweden high rainfall and mountains proved exceptional resources for abundant hydropower, and in the south coal shortages pushed governments and utility companies to seek alternative power sources.

Early on, Switzerland dammed the Alpine rivers and the Swiss Rhine, creating, along with Italy and Scandinavia, a Southern Europe hydropower race. In Italy’s Po Valley, the main 20th century transition was not the creation of hydropower but the transition from mechanical to electrical hydropower. 12,000 watermills churned in the Po watershed in the 1890s, but the first commercial hydroelectric plant, completed in 1898, signaled the end of the mechanical reign. These new large plants moved power away from rural mountainous areas to urban centers in the lower plain. Italy prioritized early near-nationwide electrification, almost entirely from hydropower, which powered their rise as a dominant European and imperial force. However, they failed to reach any conclusive standard for determining water rights before WWI.

Modern German hydropower dam construction built off a history of small dams powering mines and mills going back to the 15th century. Some parts of Germany industry even relied more on waterwheels than steam until the 1870s. The German government did not set out building large dams such as the prewar Urft, Mohne, and Eder dams to expand hydropower: they mostly wanted to reduce flooding and improve navigation. However, hydropower quickly emerged as an added bonus for all these dams, especially in the coal-poor south. Bavaria even achieved a statewide power grid by damming the Walchensee in 1924, inspired in part by loss of coal reserves after WWI. Hydropower became a symbol of regional pride and distaste for northern ‘coal barons’, although the north also held strong enthusiasm for hydropower. Dam building rapidly increased after WWII, this time with the express purpose of increasing hydropower. However, conflict accompanied the dam building and spread of hydropower: agrarian interests suffered from decreased irrigation, small mills lost water flow, and different interest groups fought over where dams should be located, controlling who benefited and whose homes they drowned.

C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 Programs
The C-SPAN network's core programming is live coverage of the U.S. House and Senate floors; C-SPAN focused on the United States House of Representatives and C-SPAN2 on the United States Senate.

The political phone-in and interview program Washington Journal, which covers current events, premiered January 4, 1995, and airs mornings on C-SPAN. It hosts guests including elected officials, government administrators, and journalists who answer interviewer and phone-in questions.

On weekends, C-SPAN2 broadcasts Book TV, programming about non-fiction books, book events, and authors, which first launched in September 1998. Booknotes was originally broadcast from 1989 to 2004, as a one-hour one-on-one interview of a non-fiction author. Repeats of the interviews remain a regular part of the Book TV schedule. Other Book TV programs feature political and historical books and biographies of public figures. These include In Depth, a live, monthly, three-hour interview with a single author, and After Words, an author interview program featuring guest hosts interviewing authors on topics with which both are familiar.

Public Affairs Coverage
C-SPAN's public affairs coverage beyond House and Senate floor debates is wide-ranging. The networks cover U.S. political campaigns, including the Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian presidential nominating conventions, presidential campaign events through a weekly television program, Road to the White House, and at C-SPAN's dedicated politics website, and midterm elections.

Other United States events include congressional hearings, White House press briefings and presidential speeches, and meetings such as Federal Communications Commission hearings, the State of the Union and Pentagon press conferences. The network also broadcasts press conferences and meetings of various news media and nonprofit organizations, including the National Press Club, public policy seminars and the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

C-SPAN also covers lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda and funerals of former presidents and other notable individuals. In 2005, C-SPAN covered Hurricane Katrina through NBC affiliate WDSU in New Orleans, as well as coverage of Hurricane Ike via CBS affiliate KHOU in Houston.

Additionally, C-SPAN simulcasts NASA Space Shuttle mission launches and landings live, using video footage and audio sourced from NASA TV.

International Coverage
C-SPAN broadcasts proceedings of the Parliament of Australia, Parliament of Canada, Parliament of the United Kingdom and other governments, usually when they discuss matters of importance to viewers in the U.S. The networks will also broadcast global news reports when major events occur, such as CBC Television coverage of the September 11 attacks. Since C-SPAN began airing in Canada in 1985, C-SPAN also carries CBC coverage on events like Canadian federal elections, the death and state funeral of Pierre Trudeau, and the 2003 North America blackout. During early 2011, C-SPAN carried broadcasts by Al Jazeera to cover the events in Egypt, Tunisia, and other Arab nations.

With its public affairs programming, C-SPAN intends to offer different viewpoints by allowing time for multiple opinions to be discussed on a given topic. For example, in 2004 C-SPAN intended to televise a speech by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt adjacent to a speech by Holocaust denier David Irving, who had unsuccessfully sued Lipstadt for libel in the United Kingdom four years earlier; C-SPAN was criticized for its use of the word "balance" to describe the plan to cover both Lipstadt and Irving. When Lipstadt ended media access to her speech, C-SPAN canceled coverage of both.

The network strives for neutrality and a lack of bias; in all programming when on-camera hosts are present their role is simply to facilitate and explain proceedings to the viewer. Due to this policy, C-SPAN hosts do not state their names on television.

C-SPAN3
C-SPAN 3 covers public affairs events, congressional hearings and history programming. The weekday programming on C-SPAN3 (from the morning — anywhere from 6 to 8:30 a.m. — to 8 p.m. Eastern Time) features uninterrupted live public affairs events, in particular political events from Washington, D.C. Each weekend since January 8, 2011, the network has broadcast 48 hours of programming dedicated to the history of the United States, under the umbrella title American History TV. The programming covers the history of the U.S. from the founding of the nation through the late 20th century. Programs include American Artifacts, which is dedicated to exploring museums, archives and historical sites, and Lectures in History, featuring major university history professors giving lectures on U.S. history. In 2009, C-SPAN3 aired an eight-installment series of interviews from the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, which featured historian Richard Norton Smith and Vice President Walter Mondale, among other interviewees.

Special programming
C-SPAN has also occasionally produced special episodes and series. In 1989, C-SPAN celebrated its 10th anniversary with a three-hour retrospective on the history of the network. In 1994, Booknotes collaborated with Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer to produce reenactments of the 1858 Lincoln–Douglas debates for the network's 15th anniversary. The Alexis de Tocqueville Tour: Exploring Democracy in America and American Writers: A Journey Through History took viewers on tours of the United States, themed around Alexis de Tocqueville's travels and the works of 40 famous American writers, respectively. The year-long series American Presidents: Life Portraits, produced to commemorate the 20th anniversary of C-SPAN, won a Peabody Award. The network has also produced special feature documentaries on the history of various American institutions and landmarks. In 2005, C-SPAN hosted a 25-hour "call-in marathon" and essay contest, the winner of which was invited to co-host an hour of the broadcast, to commemorate 25 years of taking viewer telephone calls.

Radio broadcasts
In addition to the three television networks, C-SPAN also broadcasts via C-SPAN Radio, which is carried on their owned-and-operated station WCSP-FM (90.1 FM) in the Washington, D.C., area with all three cable network feeds airing via HD Radio subchannels, and nationwide on XM Satellite Radio. Its programming is also livestreamed at c-span.org and is available via apps for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices. C-SPAN Radio has a selective policy regarding its broadcast content, rather than duplicating the television network programming, although it does offer some audio simulcasts of programs such as Washington Journal. Unique programming on the radio station includes oral histories, and some committee meetings and press conferences not shown on television due to programming commitments. The station also compiles the Sunday morning talk shows for a same-day rebroadcast without commercials, in rapid succession.

Online availability
C-SPAN archival video is available through the C-SPAN Video Library, maintained at the Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette, Indiana. Unveiled in August 2007, the C-SPAN Video Library contains all of the network's programming since 1987, totaling more than 160,000 hours at its completion of digitization and public debut in March 2010. Older C-SPAN programming continues to be added to the library, dating back to the beginning of the network in 1979, and some limited earlier footage from the National Archives, such as film clips of Richard Nixon's 1972 trip to China, is available as well. Most of the recordings before 1987 (when the C-SPAN Archive was established) were not saved, except for approximately 10,000 hours of video which are slated to be made available online. , the C-SPAN Video Library held over 271,000 hours of programming, and they have been viewed over 253 million times. Described by media commentators as a major educational service and a valuable resource for researchers of politics and history, the C-SPAN Video Library has also had a major role in media and opposition research in several U.S. political campaigns. It won a Peabody Award in 2010 "for creating an enduring archive of the history of American policymaking, and for providing it as a free, user-friendly public service."

Prior to the initiation of the C-SPAN Video Library, websites such as Metavid and voterwatch.org hosted House and Senate video records, however C-SPAN contested Metavid's usage of C-SPAN copyrighted footage. The result was Metavid's removal of portions of the archive produced with C-SPAN's cameras, while preserving its archive of government-produced content. C-SPAN also engaged in actions to stop parties from making unauthorized uses of its content online, including its video of House and Senate proceedings. Most notably, in May 2006, C-SPAN requested the removal of Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner from YouTube. After concerns by some webloggers, C-SPAN gave permission for Google Video to host the full event. On March 7, 2007, C-SPAN liberalized its copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency and now allows for attributed non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, excluding re-syndication of live video streams. The new policy did not affect the public's right to use the public domain video coverage of the floor proceedings of the U.S. House and Senate.

In 2008, C-SPAN's online political coverage was expanded just prior to the elections, with the introduction of three special pages on the C-SPAN website: the C-SPAN Convention Hubs and C-SPAN Debate Hub, which offered video of major events as well as discussion from weblogs and social media about the major party conventions and candidate debates. C-SPAN brought back the Convention Hub for the 2012 presidential election.

In addition to the programming available in the C-SPAN Video Library, all C-SPAN programming is available as a live feed streamed on its website in Flash Video format.

On July 29, 2014, C-SPAN announced that it would begin restricting access to the live feeds of the main channel, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3 to subscribers of cable or satellite providers later that summer, citing concerns with the slow shift in viewing habits from cable television to the internet due to its reliance on carriage fees from cable and satellite providers. However, it will continue to allow all government meetings, hearings and conferences to be streamed live online and via archived on the C-SPAN Video Library without requiring an authenticated login by a provider; live audio feeds of all three channels are also available for free through the network's mobile app. The decision drew some criticism from public interest and government transparency advocates, citing the fact that C-SPAN was designed as a public service. , C-SPAN has begun advertising on its online videos, with YouTube-style advertisements that can be skipped after 5 seconds.

According to the results of a survey after the 1992 presidential election, 85% of C-SPAN viewers voted in that election. The results of a similar survey in 2013 found that 89% of C-SPAN viewers voted in the 2012 presidential election.

C-SPAN has covered historical events including the Persian Gulf conflict during 1991, the House impeachment vote and Senate trial of President Bill Clinton in 1998 and 1999, and the impeachment proceedings of President Trump in 2019 and 2020.

While C-SPAN does not have video access to the Supreme Court, the network has used the Court's audio recordings accompanied by still photographs of the justices and lawyers to cover the Court in session on significant cases, and has covered individual Supreme Court justices' speaking engagements.