Chicago recently built a bunch of solar to directly power all city government buildings, so researching that and politely taking your town or city into doing that plus battery storage might be worth a try just from a cost point of view.

Similar initiatives have worked at a municipal level for things like fleet electrification and heat pumps, though this is all stuff that was a much easier sell if you got the program moving last year.

Other people mentioned congress, but while important to keep the pressure up for 2026 in the near term focus especially on talking with your state legislature and especially city council members.

Look up YIMBYism, show up to your public meetings, be polite and ideally bring some friends, remember that even in large cities major projects are routinely rewritten or expanded at the behest of the one or two people who showed up to every meeting with a clear, this is what I want out of the project and this is the easy way to do it.

Join your local left leaning orgs like DSA and mutual aid groups, even local progressive dem orgs. Even if they have some shit takes, which they inevitably will, remember that in the end doing good in the next few weeks and months is worth infinitely more than everyone agreeing on theory for what happens in the hypothetical world beyond late stage capitalism or how a few dozen people from Pittsburg are going to bring about an end to imperialism.

Talk about the importance of growning your towns bike lanes into a cohesive and safe network people would trust their twelve year old kid to get from home to school to visiting you at your workplace on, strike up conversations and network with the people who also raise good questions and requests at public meetings, and most importantly listen to what the people that have been working on advocating for these these things for decades, they have more experience, political capital in town, and may be convinced to help with your thing like municipal electrification.

This has been a long time coming, and most of the decent ones chose to resign rather than split the party. I remember for instance years ago when the far right really started winning elections in Idaho, a lot of the lifelong conservatives chose to resign in quiet protest rather than fight them or try and work with them.

It’s basicly the same thing you’re seeing in the federal government now, a lot of the people would rather resign than deal with him, and as such he gets to fill the roles with his loyalists without a fight.

So the impact of Chinese climate policy is also vastly overestimated because the Chinese are a small minority of earths people?

Kinda sorta? The carbon still goes into the atmosphere and there’s such demand for used cooking oil to run vehicles that there have been cases of new cooking oil being mixed into used because it was more valuable for vehicles than cooking, but if it was definitely going to get burned in a waste incinerator than better than nothing.

Climate wise, electrification (either for bikes, cars, buses, or trains) remains the only option and is something everyone is going to have to do eventually, but economic wise the higher upfront costs limits access.

I mean I can think of plenty of conflicts the RCAF could get involved in over the next few decades that might involve neighboring semi-neutral countries or ships, but of course Canada definitely has its own air search radars.

As for flying out of the bush, there is nothing unique to an airport runway that a fighter jet needs that cannot be met by an appropriately swept road and the right support vehicles. As an example see basically every single takeoff and landing the Ukrainians have done in the last three years. Gripen is especially good at it with the goal of being able to use very short mountain roads and which is worth considering if your airforce is built around it, but it’s hardly unique.

Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez are pretty comparable in scale and scope the environment, though Chernobyl certainly had a lot more human casualties.

That being said I’m not sure public opinion actually has had that much of an impact. If they wanted to, the same companies who keep building new oil pipelines no matter how many protesters need to be beaten into submission by cops could absolutely have pushed through adding on some more reactors to existing plants. The problem is that while profitable, nuclear is not as profitable as heavily government subsidized oil and gas much less solar, and so no one but some of the public really wants to put a lot of money into it.

Nuclear was the correct answer, when climate change entered the scientific community in the 50s, it was the correct answer when it allowed France to nearly hit net zero for energy in the 70s, and it was the correct answer when the UN agreed we were all going to die unless we stopped burning all fossil fuels in the 90s.

The problem is that ever since the 2010s it’s been outpaced by improvements in wind and especially solar. Not coincidentally this is about the time that oil and gas companies stoped campaigning against Nuclear and suddenly started insisting that it was the only possible alternative.

It makes sense to keep what we have running and do some refurbishments, but in a world where the primary limit on the amount of solar and wind we can build is funding its high cost alone means going nuclear means far less clean energy, to say nothing of the decades more CO2 output from the coal and gas plants running in the years it would take to build such plants compared to the months it takes for a new solar or wind farm.

Radar transmitters and receivers don’t have to be one in the same, and indeed often aren’t in a military context. Your stealth plane is not sending out radar pulses except when it’s on its own in an extreme emergency, but rather is listening to the radar echos from your AWACS and ground air defense trucks. By contrast if the enemy has a stealth plane, those active radars have to get much, much closer to the front lines and often will be in easy range of anti-radar missiles before their accompanying SAM batteries can even see the enemy, much less shoot it down to protect their air-search radar.

These are all part of the reason why when the F-22 first started coming to joint exercises it was considered seal clubbing for them to use it, and why subsequently everyone with the resources to do so,(and some like Russia who didn’t), began pooring absurd amounts of money into trying to produce their own stealth fighters.

I also question your assertion that they won’t have many air defense systems, as in practice unless you are the USAF fighting a much, much weaker country they have proven pretty survivable and easy to replace. There is also the fact they can be in neighboring allied but not at war countries, which makes them basically invulnerable.

It’s also worth noting that while the Gripen is indeed very good flying out of very short mountain roads and very rough fields, basically any fighter jet is capable of flying off roads and dirt tracks, they just need longer and flatter ones while suffering a bit more maintenance cost while doing so.

Stealth aircraft arn’t invisible, but if you need to get within 50km to even know there is an enemy aircraft there while they can can shoot at you from 500km away you are not going to achieve much beyond slightly depleting the enemy missile supply.

It also means that the enemy now needs advanced radars to be deployed every 100km to even know you’re there, as compared to deploying 1/10 the radars at every 1000km for the same effect. If you want the coverage to know where the enemy is above your country and not just they entered it, that goes up by the square root.

As for cost, the main driving factor is that there are ~160 Gripens flying for 6 countries, and 1100 F-35s flying for 10 countries, plus another thousand or so on order by the US itself. When it comes to extremely intricate and complex development and tooling heavy devices like aircraft, economies of scale matter a lot.

Getting the Gripen E down to ~121m CAD was a remarkable achievement in economic efficiency, no seriously this was incrediblely impressive, that involved significant compromises for cost, nevertheless it doesn’t change that Lockheed Martin can sell a more capible fighter at ~117m CAD just by being able to have an actual assembly line and tons of spare parts.

Ya, if you’re worried about a war with the US, you need French nukes, and fast. A handful of jets really isn’t going to make any difference.

I believe the main reasons Gripen was rejected by the 2022 report was lack of any Stealth capability, rarer among allies, and higher cost. Practically, while the Gripen is a pretty good 4th gen aircraft, non-stealth aircraft really arn’t capible of combating any airforce with stealth aircraft, and so Canada would be pretty much limited to only fighting Russia or smaller regional powers, and no small part of Canada’s NATO focus is on deterrence in Asia, where Gripen can’t really do much.

It’s possible some of them also remember the decades long process of entering the multinational program, spending billions, pulling out because it was to expensive, then spending billions more re-entering when the Canadian air force could not find any aircraft near as capable as the F35 and even those less capable aircraft coat significantly more than the F35.

The end result of this is that Canada has so far spent enough to upgrade nearly the entire military, but not actually gotten anything at all out of it.

Now personally I lean towards joining the Japanese 6th gen project (they’ve also been burned by the Americans) and just accepting that Canada won’t have a combat effective military for another 15 years or so, but I can understand why many Canadians might not want to accept a temporarily (or permanently if it commits to 5th gen) weaker and more expensive RCAF just to spite Putin’s bitch in D.C.

You realize that even with a laws-of-physics-perfect-theoretical camera in order for a fighter jet to be even a single solitary pixel it would need a primary mirror well over twice as wide as the SpaceX “starship”, right?

Like launching a keyhole style satellite would require a Sea Dragon just for one pixel per ten by ten meter square.

I get that space is big and most people really don’t understand scale, but there is a reason that optical spy satellites are well below the ISS in some of the lowest stable orbits for such large satellites, about a hundred and twenty times closer than geostationary to orbit.

Suffice to say no one has come close to trying this, and it would be the wrong solution to the problem as compared to just throwing 100 times the money to the NRO and letting them throw up keyholes like they were cubesats, and that still would only get you limited areas every few minutes.

All of this doesn’t effect any of the other problems, like trying to get this imaging down to data centers, doing image recognition on such a massive data stream in near real time, or that it can be completely eliminated in a half hour with a few old fighter jets and some of the anti-satellite missiles everyone down to India has whole stockpiles of.

I hate to burst the bubble on the Elon Musk school of ‘what use is stealth when everyone has cameras’ way of thinking, but even neglecting that if you are in a conflict where you are using this sort of fighter jet then your satellites have been shot down by the enemy’s air force, satellite imagery and the laws of physics just doesn’t work that way outside of sifi.

The planet Earth is just too damn big for that sort of thing. The NEO can give you a decently high res photo of a place maybe several times a day, and even that means prioritizing using said satellite to look at that one single place on Earth.

More practically you get once or twice a day, with the resolution necessary to pick out a jet being limited to the small area you picked out ahead of time, and of course the enemy knows to within a half and hour or so when that picture is going to be taken.

AI guided TV missiles have been a thing since the 70s, and still remain only really practical for targets that can’t move very much. Little real world things like size of optics, stability of optics, resolution of optics, atmospheric distortion, cloudy days, night, mountains, horizons, etc, have kept this a non-answer to an unsolved physics problem for quite some time.

This isn’t to say that the military isn’t an incredibly good way of making public money disappear or that the US has it monitory priorities in order, but rather there is very much a reason that the Inspectors General report into this very project several months ago came back with Yes, this is the most cost effective solution for the military to achieve its goal of providing credible deterrence and preventing a war in the Asia Pacific region.

Moreover I would argue that the US has never lacked the money for healthcare or schools because of the military, and that if Trump desolved and fired the entire military tomorrow it would still not spend more on schools or healthcare. Rather I would argue that the US is ideologically driven to generally avoid taxing the people with all the money who own its leaders, it by and large does not want that money bring spent on things that benefit poor people, and many of its voters would rather burn the whole thing down than accept a dime going to a black or brown person.

It’s worth noting that this project for a F22 replacement has been known to be in development for quite a while now, so this is less a Trump thing than someone at the Pentagon pulling him aside and changing the name to make it less likely he will kill it when Putin or Xi Jinping remember they can just ask him to and he will.

Here is an excellent as always Perun summery on the US, EU, etc projects as of a month ago, but basically it doesn’t matter how good the F22 is over the pasific if China just shoots down all your tankers and carriers from well out of range, so it’s high time for a pasific range capable fighter.

Shame it’s going to Boeing though.

Welcome to the club BYD.

Ya, zombies tend to be a really popular disaster to workshop a response to because planning a response to them can basically involve close collaboration between any group of agencies at all levels of government/healthcare.

Yup, and he also vaccinated his children as soon as they were old enough to qualify. He wants his voters dumb, trapped, and desperate, not his family.

Does Canada have any actual experience with the high enrichment necessitated by navel reactors? I thought half the point of the CANDU reactor was its very low enrichment. Otherwise the options would be either conventional or French.

Is the moon not a globe?