Electricity news abounds in the Northwest these days. The still cash-strapped Enron Corporation is looking to sell the profitable Portland General Electric, two of the largest bidders for which are the city of Portland and the state of Oregon. More recently, billionaire Warren Buffett has made a move to buy out PacifiCorp. And on Thursday, as Felicity Barringer reports for The New York Times, a federal judge in Portland delivered a ruling that could have serious ramifications for the region's power supply.

A federal judge in Oregon ruled Thursday that the Bush administration had arbitrarily limited and skewed its analysis of the harm that 14 federal dams cause to endangered Columbia and Snake River salmon and steelhead.

As a result, Judge James A. Redden of Federal District Court ruled, the administration had shirked its duty to ensure that government actions were not likely to jeopardize the survival of the species.

The ruling came in a challenge by environmentalists, fishing groups and Indian tribes to the administration's determination that the harm the hydropower dams were posing to the young salmon and steelhead could be remedied over the next 10 years by $6 billion in improvements to the dams, including spillways designed to get the fish through safely.

While this ruling is just a preliminary step in the adjudication process -- the 9th Circuit and the Supreme Court could choose to trump Redden's decision -- it nevertheless raises a number of important issues for the Northwest.

I am an environmentalist. But on the issue of breaching dams in the Northwest, I find myself diverging from the liberal orthodoxy. Although the lives of the salmon are extremely important -- and the regulations by the Bush administration clearly do not do enough to protect the species -- the environmental consequences of breaching dams in the region would be significantly more disastrous than keeping the dams in place.

Should Oregon, Washington et. al. turn to nuclear power? Coal? Oil? The region needs electricity, and clean hydroelectric power -- though it has its major drawbacks -- is undoubtedly better than the aforementioned alternatives. Should more solar and wind power plants be built? Absolutely. But can the region run on solar and wind power alone? Questionable.

If a number of dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers were breached, the Trojan nuclear power plant thirty miles or so north of Portland would almost certainly be reopened to meet demand. The biproducts of such a plant would be extremely harmful to the environment, and the specter of a meltdown is simply too much for the region to handle if it is not necessary. Indeed, it's not. So before the die-hard environmentalists call for the destruction of dams throughout the great Northwest, I urge caution and, above all, a little bit of common sense.