Hydroelectricity of North America
News •
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St. Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee, Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about 20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress, although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favored localities have confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports, where immigrant labor was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant. In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products, iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel, copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles. Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras, and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration. In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C., Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends, in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
Trade of North America
North American trade patterns offer noteworthy contrasts. Canada, with a small population but with immense resources and high productivity, has a low home consumption and depends on foreign trade more than any other developed country on the continent. The United States, on the other hand, with a vast internal market and the highest per capita consumption of goods in the world, depends mainly on internal trade, although external trade has risen considerably since World War II and now accounts for about one-fourth of its total trade. Mexico and Central America, by contrast, still have large areas where people live at a subsistence level and produce little more than goods for local trade. Production of certain metals, oil, and tropical crops, however, has expanded rapidly for sale in foreign markets.
In 1992 Canada, Mexico, and the United States entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a controversial trade pact that gradually eliminated most tariffs and other trade barriers on products and services passing between the three countries. The pact effectively created a free-trade bloc among the three largest countries of North America.
The Canadian segment
Canada’s internal trade is dominated by the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Together they account for a large portion of the country’s manufactured goods, which they have historically shipped across Canada in exchange for fish, lumber, and fruit from British Columbia, wheat and meat from the Prairie Provinces, and pulpwood, iron ore, and fish from the Atlantic provinces. Much of Canada’s trade abroad consists of raw or semiprocessed materials—including pulp, paper, lumber, iron ore, nickel, lead and zinc, and uranium—along with red meat sent to Britain, the United States, and Japan and wheat exported to the United States, Indonesia, Iraq, and Japan. Some oil and natural gas, as well as vegetable oils, processed fruits and vegetables, and snack foods, are sold to the United States.
Until World War II, Canada traded mainly with Britain; during that time, the United States still produced a surplus of most of the things Canada raised and thus was not a major customer. Canada, in fact, bought far more from the United States than it sold to it. By the late 20th century, however, the United States had become short of metals, wood, pulp and paper, power, and water and was importing these items from its neighbor on an increasing scale. It has thus replaced Britain as Canada’s chief market. The European Union and Japan also are important customers for Canada’s metals, wood products, and wheat.
The United States segment
Internal trade in the United States is enormous, often surpassing that among sovereign states on other continents. It was long dominated by New England’s need for fuel, cotton and wool, leather, wood products, and metals; by the mid-Atlantic states’ demand for coal, oil, natural gas, iron ore and other metals, and food products; by the Pittsburgh region’s need for iron, copper, oil, and gas; by the lower Great Lakes–Lake Michigan area’s need for coal, oil, gas, iron, pulp and paper, and wood; and by the Los Angeles–San Francisco region’s demand for steel, aluminum, cellulose products, oil, and chemicals.
Traditionally, most of the other areas of the United States have traded their raw materials or semifinished goods to these major manufacturing regions, though of course there are local industrial centres of importance. Trade is concentrated in servicing, or in being served, by such large metropolitan centres as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia. These cities also handle a great deal of American foreign trade. Southeastern ports send out cotton, tobacco, and wood products, among other commodities, and the mid-Atlantic coast ports send out wheat, corn, meat, and a wide range of manufactured products.
Since the development of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the major cities along the Great Lakes have been directly exporting the steel products, cars, airplanes, agricultural machinery, cereals, and meat for which the northern Midwest is famous. New Orleans continues as an exporter of cotton, corn, and other agricultural products from the vast Mississippi hinterland, although oil and grain now are more important, while trade from Houston’s busy port is based on oil and chemical products. Los Angeles dominates the West Coast with its sales of computer and electronic products, transportation equipment, aircraft, ships, motion pictures, and chemicals. Seattle is important for its trade in computer and electronic products, fish and forest products, and aircraft. American imports include a wide variety of products: tropical fruits, woods, fibres, and vegetable extracts, mainly from Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia; oil from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, and Colombia; tin from Peru, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Malaysia; wool principally from New Zealand and Australia; and a wide range of motor vehicles, machines, textiles, instruments, and books from Japan and western Europe.
American trade has a worldwide distribution and impact: of its export total, about one-third goes to western Europe; roughly another one-third goes to Mexico and Canada; and more than one-fifth goes to Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. . Of almost equal importance has been the widespread influence of American foreign aid: while initially this helped American trade by being tied to the use of domestically manufactured equipment, it has become much freer and enables countries to develop their own agriculture or industry in the most satisfactory way.
The Mexican and the Central American segments
The Latin American portion of the continent includes some highly sophisticated regions, along with many as yet undeveloped areas. In Mexico’s internal trade the capital region predominates, producing most of the country’s manufactures, which are then distributed through regional cities. Mexico City consumes much of the domestically used oil piped up from the coast, the metals of the Cordilleran mines, the cotton of the irrigated central and western basins, and hemp from Yucatán. Petroleum exports became a steadily growing part of Mexico’s external trade following the discovery of vast oil reserves in the Bay of Campeche in 1972. Within a decade, petroleum sales represented by far the greatest portion of Mexican export earnings. The oil exports have given Mexico higher income, but they also have placed the country in danger of becoming overly dependent on a commodity that is subject to market fluctuations. In an effort to avoid the consequences of such dependence, the government has attempted to diversify the country’s export economy. This effort has involved expanding Mexico’s industrial base, increasing the export of manufactured goods, and augmenting the export of agricultural goods and metals.
Imports consist predominantly of manufactured goods and of parts and materials needed for Mexican industries. Machinery, vehicles, and consumer goods are the chief items. The United States has the greatest share of Mexico’s foreign trade, providing the greatest portion of the imports and exports. Since 1960, however, more of Mexico’s trade has been oriented toward Latin America. Mexico is also trying to send more winter fruits and vegetables, textiles, and leather goods to Canada.
Central America has developed a limited amount of trade. By far the greatest exports are tropical fruits, coffee, sugar, fibres, and minerals (especially from the Caribbean), which are sent to the United States in exchange for American manufactured goods. Increasingly, virtually the whole of North America is being integrated in its economic development with the growth of the United States.
