Alcoa article/Kiva

I read an interesting article from the NY Times titled, "An Icelandic Battle of Wildlife vs. Voltage." The world's largest aluminum company is Alcoa. There have been schemes for decades to build dams on three rivers for hydropower, in Iceland. These rivers are "alpine spillways for billions of gallons of glacial melt." In April of 2007, Aloca came on board to propose a $1 billion dollar investment to build a smeltering plant on Iceland's beautiful landscape. Alcoa stated that this would create 2000 construction jobs and 600 to 1000 permanent jobs. Alcoa says that this would be a social engineering experiment to test to see if the area could be repopulated. There are 280,000 residence. While damming 2 of the virgin rivers, Alcoa stated that they would build turbines to generate 700 megawatts of electricity. 80% of Iceland's electricity would be used to make aluminum. The environmentalists were outraged stating that Iceland was selling thier birthright and ruining their tourism image just for a few jobs. The plan was approved by Parliment but was eventually killed by environmentalists who paired with Iceland's State Planning Agency. They said the dams would do too much environmental damage and the economics of the plan were too vague. The agency's decision was again overturned by the environment minister and Alcoa employs 700 people today. They do; however, have a "Ten Million Trees" project that entails all Alcoa companies will collectively plant 10 million trees, all over the world, near the Alcoa sites. This should be completed by the year 2020. They recycle and was named the world's most sustainable company in 2008. The do have an ECO ALCOA plan in place. I Googled "Iceland and Alcoa" clicked on the first icon and then clicked environment. Interesting.