sonori

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.

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.

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.