If you count the total costs, remove government subsidies and exemptions from ecological laws, there are few more expensive ways to generate energy than oil and coal today.

Turbines, solar, wave, tidal, and geothermal are all insanely cheaper today when you count the whole cost, not just the price at the meter. Have been for decades. My solar system paid for itself in about 8 years.

"ARE coming"

Such nonsense.
Biden did not approve, nor is he helping build this pipeline. He chose to not sanction one Swiss company helping build the last 90 miles, but is still sanctioning Russian companies involved, and is likely to block it's certification and insurance (by banning any insurer from using international or US banking) without guarantees the Ukrainian pipeline won't be abandoned.
He decided not making Germany go dark was a better plan, not alienating a long term ally and strategic partner that we are trying to repair our severely damaged relationship with.
He also decided putting Russia in bed with the Chinese, their other option for selling their gas, was not a smart move.
He is clear, he is against this pipeline and is still sanctioning many Russian companies involved in it's construction.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/18/politics/us-nord-stream-decision/index.html

Those grapes must be really sour today @bobknight33, they've got your yummy tears flowing like a firehose....keep em coming. So yummy, you guys.

Edit: I'm curious why America SHOULD hold veto power over international projects approved by all involved countries on other continents. Should we stop pipelines because Putin says so? He could stop hacking them and just tell us to quit. It seems ridiculous that we are telling Germany they can't have more natural gas, and telling Russia they can't sell it.
For clarification, I'm against it for ecological reasons, yes gas produces less CO2 than coal and oil, but produces way more methane which is >25 times more destructive per molecule in the short term. 11 billion could have built any number of wave/tidal generation facilities that run 24/7 without a new source of greenhouse gases.

Depends on your definition of "need", and your definition of "stopping" climate change.

Because I'm convinced enough natural feedback loops are in effect that there's no chance at all of stopping further climate change, and only a slight chance of slowing the rate of change and only if humanity fundamentally changes first, I find the question flawed.

I find it odd that tidal energy (different from hydro) is never considered in these debates. It's simple, relatively cheap, easy to maintain, and best of all predictable and consistent. All you need is a shoreline with a relatively large tide swing, a small inlet, and a tidal flat.

At best, nuclear is a stop gap measure that trades one planetary poison for another.....largely because we aren't responsible with it....building on shores in earthquake zones for convenience, banning fuel recycling, having no long term waste plan and handling waste insanely (Japan, I'm looking at you and your plans to dump Fukushima irradiated water into the ocean)....It's far from "green" the way we do it.

Safest...of those we discussed, maybe. It's certainly not safer than well designed solar, wind, micro hydro, wave/tidal, etc.

Some in Fukushima have seriously elevated risk for cancers, but no one died of radiation poisoning that I've heard of (but many still can't go home). Not true in Chernobyl. I've not seen claims of thousands dead since the very early days, but a short investigation shows estimates vary widely, from 4000-60000 early deaths from radiation related cancers, and even the lowest estimates are unacceptable. Direct radiation related deaths seem to be around 100 there.

It does seem that today the evacuations cause more deaths, likely because of safety measures required after Chernobyl and the fact that most are only exposed for extremely short times because they evacuated and are not allowed to return until exposure levels are low.

There are real, honest health concerns involved, including indirect impact caused by evacuations or shelter in place stress. That said, there's plenty of exaggerated fear mongering too.

Lol.

Trumps are being named and taking it in the ass in the courts.

Donny ate everything burgers during the Mueller testimony that implicated him in multiple high crimes and misdemeanors yesterday.

Republicans predict that Dems will [lose] by [a] landslide in 2020....a repeat of that red tidal wave that they believe took out the Democratic party last year.

FTFY

How could you lose? With stellar candidates like Danielle Stella (felony thief, proud Q conspiracy fan, confessed drunk driver, alleged ptsd sufferer who can't be in public without blacking out and stealing, not to mention felonious fugitive) taking on the rights biggest target, Illhan Omar, clearly the Dems have no chance.

@newtboy
@ChaosEngine

It seems I'm an outlier in my opinion then. I don't agree that one second after I said "no" that constitutes rape anymore than my wife grinding into me a few more times when I tell her something similar because I'm seeing cracks in the damn that are going to cause a tidal wave.

To be clearer, I'm laying out a definition argument. I don't feel rape should be defined that way. You can't interlock two sweaty bodies and reasonably expect to constantly have a hand hovering over an ejector seat button.

I'm uncertain about what exactly rape should be defined as, but, in spite of me feeling that what happened to me was an outcome I explicitly didn't want; at some point during the initial physical union of the male and female genitalia, permissions about what is suddenly okay or not okay with that intimate contact becomes EXTREMELY difficult to define. When two people seem to be working in tandem at that point, I assert that permission is intertwined and, as a result, confusing. (hence our debate)

It's because of that confusion that I'm so hesitant to assign blame for a miscalculation of affection/passion.
@newtboy I think this is where the question of intent plays a role.

Not if done right.
There are ways to do it without excessive waste, safely with zero possibility of meltdown or radioactive release, but getting new processes approved beyond experimental plants is nearly impossible.

Also, ironically, it's anti nuclear activists that got America to store rather than re-refine our waste, which adds exponentially to the costs and dangers. Reenrichment on site removes all the dangers of transportation and storage of waste, and means up to 90% less mining for the same amount of fuel....but we don't.

Don't get me wrong....I'm far more in favor of solar, wind, wave, and tidal generation, but I think nuclear power has it's place, and already exists. I just think it's dumb to be doing it as wastefully and dangerously as possible.

I'm cautiously hopeful that society operates as something of a wave, be it sine or tidal, but one that is ever shifting towards positive progress. We're at this moment at the negative side or low tide, but will see things swing back towards the positive and good in short order. For the moment I have to believe that, because the alternative is just depressing.

I believe tidal forces from the moon pulling on the earth cause a significant amount of heating too.

I remember seeing some of this while snorkeling in the Caribbean on my honeymoon, and have explored tidal pools on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada. Underwater is a completely different and sometimes eerie world.

There is a similar phenomenon in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Around dusk every day in the springtime, a 'tidal wave' of fog flowing eastward from the coast would hit the western foothills of the peninsula, and arc gracefully over the 280 freeway like a massive, slow-motion crash of water. From 20 miles away it looks like a tidal wave, capable of wiping out all of silicon valley, is just frozen in place at the edge of civilization. Up close, it's like surfing your car through the barrel of an enormous wave.
It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life, and it happens almost daily there.

I used to be a pretty strong "doubter", if not a denier. I made a gradual shift away from that, but one strong instance of shift was when Neil Degrasse Tyson presented it as a (relatively) simple physics problem in his new Cosmos series. Before we started burning fossil fuels, x% of the sun's energy was reflected back into space. Now, with a higher concentration of CO2, x is a smaller number. That energy has to go somewhere, and at least some of that is going to be heat energy.

Still, I don't think that anything on the level of "average individual citizen/household of an industrial country" is really where anything needs to happen. Yes, collectively, normal people in their daily lives contribute to Climate Change. But the vast majority of us, even as a collective single unit, contribute less than industrial / government / infrastructure sources.

Fossil fuels have been a great source of energy that has massively contributed to global advances in the past century. BUT, although we didn't know it in the beginning, they have this associated cost/downside. Fossil fuels also have a weakness in that they are not by any means inexhaustible, and costs rise as that becomes more and more obvious. In turn, that tends to favor the status quo in terms of the hierarchy of industrial nations versus developing or 3rd world countries -- we've already got the money and infrastructure in place to use fossil fuels, developing countries can't afford the costs.

All of this makes me think that 2 things need to happen:
A) Governments need to encourage the development of energy sources etc. that move us away from using fossil fuels. Tax breaks to Tesla Motors, tax incentives to buyers of solar cells for their homes, etc. etc.
B) If scientists/pundits/whoever really want people to stop using fossil fuels (or just cut down), they need to develop realistic alternatives. I'll bring up Tesla Motors again for deserving huge kudos in this area. Americans (and in general citizens of developed countries) have certain expectations about how a car should perform. Electric cars have traditionally been greatly inferior to a car burning fossil fuels in terms of living up to those expectations, but Tesla threw all that out the window and made a car that car people actually like to drive. It isn't just "vaguely functional if you really want to brag about how green you are", it is actually competitive with or superior to a gas-engine car for most users/consumers (some caveats for people who need to drive long distances in a single day).

We need to get more companies / inventors / whoever developing superior, functional alternatives to fossil fuel technologies. We need governments to encourage and enable those developments, NOT to cave to lobbyist pressure from big oil etc. and do the opposite. Prices will start high (like Tesla), but if you really are making a superior product, economy of scale will eventually kick in and normalize that out.

Outside of the consumer level, the same thing goes for actual power production. Even if we did nothing (which I would certainly not advocate), eventually scarcity and increased difficulty in obtaining fossil fuels (kinda sad that the past 2 decades of pointless wars 95% driven by oil haven't taught us this lesson yet, but there it is) will make the more "green" alternatives (solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, whatever) more economically practical. That tipping point will be when we see the real change begin.

Those tidal turbines are all well and good, right up to the point they start making sushi out of whales, then they'll be scrapped.

Always thought the Bay of Fundy would be a good place for ship building. Save a lot of energy flooding and evacuating the drydocks.

so... praying for a tidal wave then?

Also known as Tidal Locking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking