It's politically interesting (cringe), the line between assisting Ukraine's defense by sending weapons and funding as opposed to actively committing troops and implementing a no-fly-zone etc. Interesting that Russia is now accusing NATO of effectively conducting a proxy war against Russia - it seems that Russia wants to have war declared upon it in order to post-justify their invasion as "see, this is what was going to happen anyway" - it doesn't have to make sense to anyone other than the Russian leadership in order for them to be assured of the righteousness of their own cause.
Energy independence used to come up more often in US elections until prices collapsed in 2014ish and the US became a net exporter of refined petroleum products. The whole “Nuclear Renaissance” that began under W. was derailed by insanely cheap natural gas production, so it just kinda fell off everyone’s radar since people in the US considered the problem solved for the time being.
Nobody could make the hard choice and they hoped that technology would solve the issue eventually - which to be fair, it did look like that was going to happen.
On the other hand, we have this situation. In my country natural gas prices have risen 40% in the last month and some items in supermarkets are close to double what they were a year ago.
It's probably always been like this in politics though.
Switch to renewables is such a huge win for everyone (less oil producing nations). Cheaper, cleaner electricity (unlocking new manufacturing capabilities on price), lower social unrest impacts from climate change, better water quality, less reliance on foreign oil, etc. Costs are now starting to hit the point where it's far cheaper to go renewable - if we could get some political will power to push us further we could get continued wide spread adoption and massive scale up.
The funding coming on my back out of my labor and my taxes.
Is this the democracy which started when it forcibly overthrew the elected government, banned a number of political parties right after that, and which just banned the second largest political party recently? Some democracy.
The "elected government" which restricted rights of speech and protests, ordered police to open fire on protesters killing more than 50 people, and then fled to Russia.
>and which just banned the second largest political party recently
The head of that political party is Victor Medvechuk, a close associate of Putin who proudly claimed that Putin is his daughter's godfather, who was charged with treason and put on house arrest a year ago for funneling money to the DPR / LPR whomst Ukraine has been at war with for 8 years, and was recently captured while attempting to flee the country in a stolen Ukrainian military uniform after escaping his house arrest.
And the point of it, for those that don't know, is to remove the last shreds of legitimacy from any BS referendums Russia might try to hold in occupied territor, in which a minor pro-Russian politician whose party had low-single-digit support in previous elections is suddenly "elected".
> Is this the democracy which started when it forcibly overthrew the elected government
You just parrot a blatant lie by Russia
I'm not a big fan of my country's military spending, and it's probably trivial even in terms of percentage of GDP, in comparison to that of the US, Russia or China.
In terms of regime change "approach", if the US did manufacture the overthrow of the previous Ukraine government, it has the appearance of a much lower cost of human life than the approach Putin is taking. And I'm no fan of the US' "manifest destiny" ego trip but I don't want to get too far into whataboutism.
(The German nuclear shutdown looks extremely bad in hindsight, though)