Good point. For reference, from the OP article:

Mark Rutte, in response to Donald Trump’s demands for a 5% target – suggests member states agree to raise defence spending to 3.5% of their GDP and commit a further 1.5% to wider security spending.

I can totally see Trump agreeing to get his 5% if part of it will be spent on climate adaptation and mitigation, or infrastructure in the “hostile and abusive” EU.

BTW: 3.5% is still more than any NATO country spends on R&D, maybe except of the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_research_and_development_spending

I understand that there are real threats in Europe. But… 5 fckn percent as a (!) minimum? None NATO country spends more than 3.5% on research and development (the only countries that do are South Korea and Israel). And that is everything from new medicines to new bombs to 5G to anthropology to climate science research. And now each and every country is supposed to spend more on tanks and guns and drones only? Play it smart, not hard, please…

The narrative that the EU targets China in a way somehow analogous to Trump is also weird. It just follows a clearly defined law. There was an actual investigation on who and how makes competition unequal to EU company, not claims out of nowhere as in the US.

Let’s talk about others. I invite the Dutch people to tell us who they would like to see rise in this election.

PVV has been dropping in polls for more than a year now. Let’s hope this is the last time they are in a ruling coalition.

I don’t get it. What should the brexiters railing about Poles make others realise? That if you are rich, you destroy vocational schools to get richer, get people from abroad to do basic service and construction jobs that almost nobody in your country is educated to perform, and then make them the scapegoat once your own policies fail the people?

Thanks, that is an amazing resource! You can see yearly emissions, which are statistics. And when you click on a country/region, you get the breakdown by energy source for the electricity grid.

Note: Living in Sweden, I am still Polish, and looking at this map is embarrassing to say the least…

I care about two things with the sanctions.

1. Do not buy Russian gas and oil.
2. Do not sell weapons and weaponizable items to Russia. Prevent loopholes where Russia can get the weapons through third countries. And ofc support Ukraine, militarily and generally.

And yes, do not expect change from within coming just from the suffering of the people in the East. Support the opposition and independent media channels. As a Polish, I understand how important that was during the Cold War. But do not have your hopes too high for a quick fix.

I understand, that the data here is per capita, but I thought even per capita in Europe, and especially in Sweden, we install little compared to the rest of the world.

The three leading countries share borders with Russia or Belarus. Is this recognition of the security and resilience advantages of deploying millions of solar panels and thousands of wind turbines compared with a few large fossil and nuclear power stations?

Wow, this is very different from the view media gave me.

I live in Sweden. The perspective from the media was, for me, that Sweden has stagnated in renewable energy, while the UK, Spain, and some other countries lead the way in Europe. And that while Europe was first in the renewable game, it is now in the developing countries that most action happens.

The data from this report shows that basically all of my claims from the previous paragraph are wrong.

No opinion here about the state of development, just amazement how misleading the media narrative have been for me.

Thanks for sharing!

As Europe remilitarizes, I want drones that can drop bombs on Russian tanks as well as drop water/sand/flame-retardant bombs on burning forests.

How about:

We support Ukraine

We drop Russia (we don’t need that gas and oil anyway, it’s 2025, we have the technology to ditch fossil fuels, common!) as long as Putin and other fascists like him are in power.

We negotiate and trade with China. We do not support it, but we do not actively fight it either. We try to push it further from Russia if possible.

Dropping China altogether does not seem plausible in the near future. We need to learn how to deal with China. We have a lot of leverage, especially with Trump in power and the trade war escalating further after stagnation under Biden.

Okay, a side note here:

apart from Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, Xi was the only major world leader to attend the parade.

Can smb explain Lula’s stance on Putinist Russia?

The UK and India have agreed a trade deal that will make it easier for UK firms to export whisky, cars and other products to India, and cut taxes on India’s clothing and footwear exports.

Okay, but to export cars, you need to make some first.

Yes, the majority of the population. Everybody wanted to go to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc in general. That is why they built the Berlin Wall and heavily guarded all the borders with Western Europe. To stop all the migrants ;) (I prefer to trust people living at that time than the nostalgia.)

I agree that it is worse in Russia now than it was in the post-Stalin Soviet era, though.

Well, I’ve also grown up in the former Eastern Bloc. So 1:1. Maybe you were part of the privileged group profiting from the Soviet imperialism? ;)

Also: Do you deny the Gulag, the oppression of all opposition, including any forms of self-organization, the Holodomor genocide, and the ethnic cleansing, e.g., of the Crimean Tatars?

Yeah, the “secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe” are a tiny, tiny detail. The UK and France decided to declare war on Germany because it was attacking independent countries. The USSR decided to join Germany in the war efforts, as long as they could. They also made programs of ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration and mass murder parallel to the Nazi ones. (They themselves admitted they were basically the same thing, claiming for years that the Katyn massacre was done by the Germans and not the Soviets). The power in the Soviet Union was concentrated in the hands of a very few people at the highest ranks of the Communist Party. Any independent self-organization, including independent workers’ unions, was forbidden. Explain to me: What was so wonderful in all of that?

Okay. Even if this is correct, then we have: If the UK and the US had not stood up to Hitler, we would have a Stalinist regime spreading across all, not half of the continent. Nice.

Also, a reminder: The Soviets first collaborated with Hitler, attacking Poland together in 1939. They intensified rather than stopped the colonial practices of the Russian Empire.