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.

It’s effects tend to very based on plant and local conditions, but typically the point of agrivoltaics is to shade plants in hot, dry climates around midday to improve yield. At low angles sunlight goes around the panels, but at peak sun they are shaded.

This way an ‘innovative’ and ‘disruptive’ approach that can be the basis of a startup that can be sold to a bigger company or IPO for a bunch of money, and as a bonus draw clean energy funding away from tried and tested solutions into inefficient gimmicks that in turn keep the gas plants running that much longer.

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

I mean while there are some that are actually dumb enough to believe it, most of the Tea Party republicans don’t feel the same way as their constituents, but rather that their constituents are a bunch of idots easily distracted from the ways their getting screwed over by proformitive nonsense. This is to say nothing of how most of the ideas the Far right supports are pretty damn unpopular across the board, or how tirelessly they worked to kick and pressure every candidate who wasn’t on board the Trump train out of the party.

Moreover, if we are not supporting the candidates who do agree with us and fighting to eliminate those that don’t or who actively go back on their word after being elected nothing will actually change beyond some pretty words every now and then.

Every currently serving Dem says they wholeheartedly Support the idea that the rich should be paying their fair share, just like nearly all of them support abortion or equal rights for all americans. A majority of them don’t obviously, but they sure do love to talk about supporting the abstract idea of such.

It is demonstrably trivial for canadates to say they wholeheartedly support X and then vote against it in practice without consiquence. We need to actually hold them to account, which yes, means fighting and running against them when they are chosen and not just supporting anyone who can give a platitude about how great X is.

The Idea that candidates will automatically loose if they don’t actually uphold the ideas their voters want would seem to be pretty ludicrous when places like Montana voted 58% yes to abortion and 59% to elect the man who got it taken away from them in the same election.

We are not talking about outword messaging, but rather what we actually are doing to make said ideas come to pass.

I mean the progressive caucus has been pushing for universal healthcare, an end to mass incarceration c and a wealth tax for decades now, but have lacked the votes to makeup a majority of Dems let alone congress as a whole.

Pushing for ideas however seems to assume that there is some correlation between how popular a policy is and its chances of becoming law, which is just at a factual level untrue in the US. Studies have found a proposal with 70% public approval and a proposal with 30% public approval have the same chance of actually becoming law.

There is some correlation between how the super rich feel about a piece of legislation and its odds of passing, but the primary statistical determinant is how congress criters themselves personally feel about a law.

As such, getting actual progressives on the ballot and getting the neoliberals off the ballot will lead to real, if not as significant as I personally would like, change that will benefit actual people’s lives, while congratulating ourselfs on all the great ideas that are never going to be adopted by people’s whoms job literally depends on how much their billion dollar donors like them will just lead to disillusionment when said great ideas are never put into practice.

Also worth noting, the detailed plan is the slort of thing that tends to get talked about over signal with your local cell, not necessarily on a public forum.

At least locally our public strategic plan is to build parallel structures of support like food banks while making all the shity things the Republicans doing to our town so obvious that we might just flip the state Blue for the first time since 1964, or at least make some solid gains at the city and county level.

At the national level, I think the long term plan is to build enough voter mass to primary the shit out of non progressive-caucus dems for 2026, counting on the general anti Trump wave that we’ve seen in Florida and Winsconson’s recent elections to carry us to a progressive caucus majority in elections that have big enough margins to be exit polling evedent.

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.

Note, his team is prepping an escalation of the insurrection act on the 20th, with the possibility of martial law. Mass nonviolent protests on the 19th followed by relentless online mockery for the parade makes more sense.

Make sure to research and mention all the work Trumps done to undue all of Ragen’s foreign policy accomplishments.

This is a funny accusation in light of the amarican situation where our leader openly owns multiple businesses in Russia and other foreign nations, to say nothing of selling pardons or any of the other blatant corruption.

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.