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Comment by splittingTimes | Hacker News Reader

The German parliament had two interesting votes last week:

(1) Recoginze the ongoing climate catastrophe - propose measure to counter act [1]

(2) Stop using coal power stations [2]

You can guess how the ruling parties voted. It makes me furious in the light of recent devastating news (No permafrost in Candian arctic, melting Greenland ice, hottest June in Germany since record keeping, Anchorage seeing unprecedented temperatures...)

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[1] https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...

[2] https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...

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What alarms me even more is that the insect apocalypse is MORE urgent than climate change.

And almost infinitely easier to stop. All we need to do is ban a relatively small number of insecticides and insect populations will rebound in a very small number of years.

You should probably write up your findings so you can gather a lot of research money and fame. /S

If only things were that simple...

I am not sure if pesticide usage has increased in Western Europe since the early ninetees. But I am certain that agriculture has been de-intensified as a whole in the former GDR. And it's not an insect paradise here...

In France in 2010, they signed some "green pact" promising to reduce the quantity of pesticides by 30% before 2020. Reality check: pesticide use grew by nearly 20% since this "pact".

They play us like violins.

Humans ability to adapt will be tested in the near future I fear. Not only due to tensions among humans but the disasters we are creating in nature.

To me this reveals three possibilities:

1. There is confidential information that the damage is irreversible at this point (e.g. permafrost is melting three times faster and 70 years earlier than expected) and any attempts to break the layers upon layers of prisoner's dilemmas are completely futile.

2. The political caste does not care about more than 20 years into the future because most of them will have died by then (avg. age of the conservative parties is 60(!) [1]).

3. The dangers of a manmade climate catastrophe are being overstated.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/192255/umfrag...

Sorry the same people who peddled "Its not happening" for years, don't get to switch over and start with "its too late to do anything about it" as a new excuse to not act.

Sure they get to, as long as they control politics.

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