It is striking to me that the only locals you seem to care about in your set of responses here are the white locals? Your hypothetical contrast between "remote activists" who want to remove the dams and the "local stalwarts" totally ignores the people who have been most impacted and lost the most through the existence of these dams.

The tribes that relied on the salmon in the klamath watershed lost their jobs, subsistence food, and cultural heritage for nearly a hundred years, and this factors precisely nil in your analysis.

You are right, I didn't cover them in my analysis. That was not the dynamic I chose to focus on.

To be clear, Im not even necessarily opposed to dam removal. My intent was to explore the dynamic where large numbers of remote people make decisions despite having little skin in the game. This dynamic also has a long history of negatively impacting native Americans too.