Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects
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I understand fireflies are sensitive to light pollution. I can't imagine Chicago's any different from other major cities. COVID has people staying home a lot more but that has nothing to do with street lighting. I wonder what's going on.
I do think that living organisms are extraordinarily adaptable if the changes are gradual and bounded. Most of us have this idea that an ecosystem is this delicate and fragile thing, but nature actually has a lot of robustness and redundancies built-in (which are inefficient but increase chances of group survival).
I'm not sure why it was a good season for them. Like you say, traffic, lighting, pesticide sprays on farms, all really the same despite COVID. Reduced air traffic I don't think would have an affect? Even after I sprayed my vineyard with insecticide to deal with japanese beetles they were fine, and continued to prosper in and around there.
It may just be that we've had an unusually hot dry year, I assume where you have as well. Maybe that's advantageous for them somehow?
I wonder if this is cyclical behavior. We had a year like that last year down in NJ. This year it was back to maybe only a week. I live in the west part of the state surrounded by parkland. Rainfall was the only thing that was dramatically different this year. Last year was extremely wet spring and early summer (when they appeared) followed by an extremely dry end of summer into fall. This year we've had average rain in almost every month. The rain evidence isn't anecdotal, I have a state rainfall gauge a couple miles down the road from me with records going back at least a few decades.
Yet, the vast majority of scientists who study ecosystems disagree: https://ipbes.net/sites/default/files/ipbes_7_10_add.1_en_1....
By 2015, the bugs has drastically diminished enough for me to remark upon it before coming across any studies. The confounding factor here though is that the county I was in had a lot of development in it over that time. My routes stayed mostly the same (meaning both ‘where I drove’ and ‘how many buildings were along them’) but I can’t discount the expansion of the surrounding sprawl as a big factor.
Even after I moved to a neighboring more-rural county though, with a longer commute to the same workplace, I did not really see an increase.
Even accounting for this, there is sufficient evidence for a significant drop in insect populations. While it's hard to have exact numbers, the estimations in decline of population range from 70% to 90% since the 1980.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.5236
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient
We also had the sub-Brood XIII cicadas launch out in the western suburbs which was insane. They came early and they came out in huge numbers.
And at any rate, specialization only works if the problems stay relatively stable, or temporary. If we aren't stopped/don't stop ourselves we will keep inventing new insults every ten years and nothing can adapt to anywhere near that rate of change.
You're also forgetting the Carboniferous period. It took 50 million years for anything to puzzle out how to benefit from surplus lignin. In 50 million years are we going to be around? In 50 million years is anyone going to remember that Alpha Centauri is a system humans used to live in (before we used it up)?
The lot is between the river and our local garden district. I suspect I'm part of a migration route between them (I figured I was too far from the river for dragonflies, but I see at least 2 a day) It's changing my plans for the space a bit.
As for me, I've never cleaned my windshield in my life. The rain washes off the little bits of dust. There's nothing else to clean.
Our insect loss is much more likely due to climate change than light pollution though due to our sparse population between the cities.
Georgia has lots of them. Or at least we did last year. I haven't gotten out much in the COVID-19 world.
A year without fireflies.
I have a few memories of extensive fire fly experiences back in the day. But when I really think about it, I don’t remember all the days and years without a dramatic memory. And the ones I have may be distorted.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I had a similar thought a few years back and researched it only to find that the fire fly population where I lived hadn’t really changed. I just happened to be keying on a memory that had a large amount of them and not taking into consideration that wasn’t the standard case. That their yearly population is dependent on certain weather conditions during specific months. And that some years they have a bumper crop and others not so much, but on average look about the same. That doesn’t mean it’s the same story where they live of course.
Probably worded it poorly though.
Driving on a highway for 10h without any bugs on it - common sight in Europe nowadays. 10years ago, I would need to handwash it after 3h on the highway. Anecdotes can be a very powerful tool for critical thinking.
Our brains do this. We key on certain experiences and memory favors the extreme. Over time our memory does distort. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But that we should be careful with anecdotal memories to make generalized pr specific statements about today’s reality.
As for “history repeating itself” - does it? Or do historians who write history repeat themselves? Historians write about long sequences of events that seem inevitable and if only such and such action were taken then a disaster or triumph would have been avoided or accomplished. But the recording of select historical events is more a persons narrative - a story - rather than the actual past.
What are the motivations of the historian writing about the past? What have they negated? What have they chosen to focus on? What of their memories or the subjects they used to inform their history? Which people do you choose to understand what they “said or saw”?
I think I worded it poorly.
If I had to wager money, I'd say it was a blight introduced by another insect. Around the same year I saw an invasion of Asian lady bugs, the firefly memories stop. There were literally millions and millions of those Asian lady bugs released or hatched one year.
Speaking of the lady bug explosion, this year they are incredibly rare [2]. Not sure why, but they went from being a massive nuisance to being a very rare sight (of any variety).
Humans are absolutely having a calamitous effect on insect life in a variety of dimensions, however on the flip side it does seem like insect populations massively fluctuate for entirely natural reasons. A bit of an early summer, or more rain in April, etc, and one insect type explodes and another wanes.
Light pollution has the potential to get even worse with LED lighting which is no longer filterable like sodium lighting was.
So it’s not actually dark where you are and walking, it’s just dark where no one is.
Nighttime Light Pollution May Be Cause of Insect Population Decline
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Nighttime_Light_Pollution...
"An analysis of the effects of artificial light at night on insects shows that there is strong evidence to suggest a link between nighttime light pollution and declines in insect populations."
It's heartbreaking and happens at least once a year, that someone near conventional agriculture/horticulture is posting a desperate for advice in every forum they know about because some asshole upwind let a cloud of 'cide drift over their horticultural masterclass of a lot, and everything is shriveling.
Recompense can be hard to get. Maybe we need an ACLU meets EFF for biodiversity.
Let's ignore for a moment any agenda to ban monocultures, and look at not just the kind but the density. Pollinator species would be doing better if the monocultures weren't so seemless. We need a mosaic of habitat and to reduce the distances between the ones we have. But it's an uphill battle to maintain them in the face of drift and runoff (really I think we shouldn't be cultivating hilltops, that would be a start, and simply dodges the runoff problem)
Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it, rather than all over the place. Light pollution is bad, and street lights are very power hungry, with the old sodium lights consuming up to 0.25kWh per hour.
Suffering sound and light pollution is a hidden additional burden placed on lower economic status people.
Poor people experience health inequities due to increased exposure to light and sound, but more pressingly air pollution. [0]
The status of enjoying quiet is even clear in the middle class. You can even see the emerging divide on transit in who has noise cancelling headphones and who does not.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsal...
Focusing light where needed is good. Using LEDs, as we do now, has downsides though. LED lighting in cities is making astronomy and astrophotography and even animal life worse in some cases.[1]
Traditional sodium vapour lights pollute around a wavelength of 589 nm.[2] That's the yellow/orange sky you used to see in the sky around cities. In theory, if you filtered out that wavelength 10 years ago, you'd be able to eliminate a lot of light pollution. But today, with more LED lighting, the pollution tends toward white/blue. This is "nicer" in some objective and subjective ways. e.g. colour accuracy. But it's a bitch to filter out, without also removing all the white and broad spectrum we want to see in the features of the night sky.
Animals are also sensitive to white and blue light emitted by modern LEDs, and the NatGeo link and others go into why this can be a bad thing, compared to "old fashioned" lighting methods, inefficient as they are.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/11/light-pollut...
[2] https://www.peterzelinka.com/blog/2019/8/light-pollution-fil...
The problem with cold light is that it is apparently attracting insects much more than broad spectrum incandescent light sources, even more than any potential breeding partners, which in turn affects mating.
At the end he at least addresses his ignorance:
> [18:39] You may have noticed that I didn't talk about the blue light from LEDs, and how this is supposedly ruining our eyes. That's because the "science" behind this is questionable, at best.
> [18:55] [discussion of chart with percentage blue light of various light sources]
> [19:04] [...] but considering that our eyes can withstand the intensity of sunlight, which is far far greater than any normal artificial light source, and also has a lot of blue light, and ultraviolet, which definitely is harmful, I think the 'blue light' thing is just fear-mongering. If someone can point to some verified, peer-reviewed research supporting this, and not a dodgy website, I'll consider changing my stance. In any case, the high flexibility of LED technology means it can be tuned in pretty much any way we like.
The research on the harm of blue light is out there -- For example, one of the comments links to "Effects of blue light on the circadian system and eye physiology" [0]. (only partially read at this point - I don't know if this paper gets into the mechanism of damage done by blue light, as I understand it...)
The sun hangs high in the sky and casts light on everything. We never need to look at the sun directly, we use the sun's light indirectly, after it bounces off of things. The atmosphere scatters the sun's blue light before it gets to us [2]. Artificial lights hanging on poles emitting photons we can't avoid having beamed directly into our eyes... Blue photons have relatively higher energy levels, and different physiological effects, than orange photons... [note to self: expand on this.]
The preceding video was about High Pressure Sodium lights, which I thought was good too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1dMlVwUsrA
My transcription of the video's faulty conclusion (italics added):
> To conclude: although the High Pressure Sodium light is very efficient, its primary output color is misaligned with our nighttime visibility. Only about 1/4 of its light is actually effective at stimulating the cells in our eyes. Although the cool color temperatures of many LED replacements is harsh and aesthetically displeasing, studies have shown that it is not only more efficient, but also makes driving at night safer. There is, however, the potential for greater circadian rhythm disruption and larger amounts of skyglow, using these bluer light sources.
> Still, it seems clear that the High Pressure Sodium is on its way out. Advancements in LED technology are happening at a breakneck pace. Just 10 years ago, they weren't seen as viable, but today even the least efficient of LED replacements ends up emitting the efficiency of High Pressure Sodium once scotopic light output is considered.
> As it stands in 2018, we are faced with the choice of efficiency over aesthetics. I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy roadways lit with relatively-warm 3000K LEDS, and these also wouldn't disrupt sleep much. But you can save a lot more energy, and potentially have safer roadways, with 5700K lighting.
> Either way, it seems clear that LED technology will very soon overtake the tried-and-true High Pressure Sodium lamp, just as the High Pressure Sodium itself replaced the mercury-vapor lamp. And in 40 or 50 years, who knows what technology might light our roadways.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/pdf/mv-... - "The radically different power spectrums can look similar when viewed directly by the eye, irrespective of how much blue emission is present."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40&lc=Ugx6MYdsMY6I_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering#Cause_of_t...
edit: this page has a discussion of drop-sag lights vs. proper fully-shielded lights: http://www.skykeepers.org/good-bad-lights-cv.html
But there is a somewhat interesting paper on North Korean entomology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3554493/
Drive around -- billboards are lit up at night. Headlights might as well be pointed into the sky and are blinding. Stores are scarcely less well-lit when they are closed than during operating hours. I can go for a walk at night and read a paperback the whole way. Porchlights are left on all night, for no good reason.
Sometimes, on a my regular trips to visit a friend, we go out at around one in the morning to a road far from other towns and I can actually see the faint haze of the Milky Way, but in the suburbs, I am lucky to pick out thirty stars and/or planets. I don't even think that all of this constant light makes us any "safer."
Given that insects are one of the corner stones of our ecosystem, we can congratulate ourselves that we are very successful in destroying our own life support systems through predatory exploitation and sheer carelessness.
Well done.
That said, that there are negative systemic effects on the planet's ecosystems that are directly related to the massive production and use of herbicides and pesticides is not as surprising.
Light though? Even after reading that article and looking through scholar.google to find papers that associate lighting with insect decline, I'm not convinced the use of lighting at night has a material impact. The ratio of unlit/lit habitat seems wildly in favor of unlit.
And yes, I understand that unlit areas are often agricultural, and those areas contain the most insecticide/herbicides. It still appears to me that the root cause is the use of those products in farms and not that cities are poor replacement habitats.
The sound pollution might have the adverse effect of causing some plants to lose this ability to preserve energy for reproduction, indirectly impacting insects via the food chain.
Currently, due to the massive use of chemicals in the countryside, cities start to be havens for insects. There is a lot of beehives in London for example (too much actually according to a beekeeper I talked with). Until we manage to massively shift the way we do agriculture it might make sense to make it as safe as possible for insects in urban areas.
My experience has shown that when people are skeptical of your argument they are less likely to comply voluntarily and so the good that you hoped to do is lost and you have damaged your credibility with the people you need to support these ideas.
A small example of this in action was back in 2010 when Google decided they were going to stop stocking bottled water in the fridges around campus because the "energy waste and plastic disposal problem." The only problem was that Google regularly achieved over 95% capture of recyclable trash out of their bins and the energy saved was on the order of maybe half a dozen employees not commuting from San Francisco.
The real reason they wanted to do this was of course cost. They could replace bottled water with filtered dispensers and that would save them a few pennies per employee per month. I had a good conversation with some folks in charge that they could have said, "We're giving every employee an insulated water bottle in your choice of size and color (12, 20, 32, or 40 oz) that you can keep at the office and use to get water from our fancy new dispensers. This will save us money, AND its better for the environment." That would have been honest and gotten a good reception I believe with the rank and file. But dressing up the reason in a cover story that everyone easily poking holes in simply lowered morale and confidence in management.
But you correctly hint at the actual reason for German politics:
Nothing that hurts the economy like banning pesticides or cars will be done. So a scapegoat is needed, in this case the lights.
Depends on where. Germany has a very different structure due to its population density than most parts of the US, for example, with comparably less unlit habitat.
So that may be a less important issue in some places but having enough suitable space for themselves in the US doesn't help insects in Germany.
> The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars up to 70 years old.
But not everywhere: the less farm land, the more insects. Like, from literally none on farm land to "I have to completely clean my helmet because of all that yellow goo" in larger forests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon#United_K...
+1
Perhaps they were a bit oversold.
Because LED’s got so inexpensive, instead of saving money, the savings was used to increase the town luminosity.
Now, because we moved away from sodium lights, the amount of daytime-like blue light being emitted during the night has skyrocketed.
Wups
I hope my country will follow suit...
The best outdoor light is less.
Your own personal kick switch for public street lights!
Trying to interfere with that because you're too lazy to buy a black-out curtain is a terrible idea.
I had a big orange street lamp hanging right in front of my bedroom for years.
This is wrong. They should stick to ~2500K bulbs.
https://artificiallightatnight.weebly.com/uploads/3/7/0/5/37... https://www.darksky.org/croatian-light-pollution-law/ https://english.radio.cz/lower-house-passes-dark-sky-law-805...
Also, other than bees, which insects specifically benefit humans?
Yes, constant light does have a strong effect on animal circadian rhythms, but for insects, the problem is rather that they exhaust themselves from flying around the light source too long.
Basically most of the plants that were shut down simply didn't get their runtime extended again and would've been shut down in a few years anyway.
And the utility companies owning them get billions in compensation and don't have o pay for waste disposal of all the irradiated parts either...
Facts that nuclear proponents always conveniently ignore...
> What is expected to be the last new coal plant to come online in Germany entered commercial operation on May 30, more than a decade after it was first planned.
> The 1,100-MW Datteln 4 power plant, owned by Uniper and located in Datteln in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, opened despite the German government’s stated plan to end coal-fired power generation in the country.
I remember star nights walking outside as a kid seeing the Milky way Galaxy full of stars.
As for ordinary street lights, the purpose of street lights are for crime prevention, but there is motion sensors. Do we really need to have the lights on with no one on a street?
Thoughts?
Starvation levels have dramatically declined over the last century.
Now, we need to fix the problem we induced in our goal to feed the world.
The only known solution is vertical farming.
That surely plays a role, too. Light pollution of street lights in Germany, however, kills an estimated 1 billion insects _per night_.
And then there's cars on the Autobahn, of course. They kill an estimated 100 billion insects per German summer.
I'm not a big fan of encountering insects. Very weird to see someone would actually want to protect them in cities.
> Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors
So you won't be able to kill mosquitoes outside?
> So you won't be able to kill mosquitoes outside?
There are plenty of other, more specific ways to do that, no? The problem with light traps is they are indiscriminate.
Not to mention that if you apply some repellent, you don't need to kill them at all.
Well you do usually want to kill as many as possible. Bringing up mosquitoes because it's one of the most common. I cannot go out and sit down in my garden if I have insects flying around. Unless they keep an appropriate distance as to not be intimidating.
> Not to mention that if you apply some repellent
If you mean the skin applied kind it's totally unsatisfactory.
There are chemical sprays/diffusers that work very well, but even though they are marketed as "repellent" they absolutely do kill mosquitoes and many others. That's what I usually use.
I've been doing handyman work at my boss's house during COVID-19 and he has clover growing in his yard. He has a fair number of bees, certainly more than on my end of town which is all chemlawns.
It's arguably ok to use a little weed killer by hand on dandelions if you must (better to spray 2-3 courses of vinegar instead). But killing all clover, morning glories, and other broadleaf flowers in lawns has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas. Herbicides and pesticides in agriculture wiped out the rest.
Edit: fixed the first sentence to distinguish between broadleaf herbicides and glyphosate (which kills everything).
My wife is militant about this, insisting that our lawn is sprayed with horrible chemicals at least once a year to kill off the clover, daisies and moss.
Seems such a pointless thing to do, and very obviously not good for wildlife.
If covid ever lets up, you should try taking your wife on a trip to Japan. The moss in Japanese gardens is extraordinary!
About three years in a row now she's tried to get lawn seed and poured a load of cheap weed and feed on instead. Completely going overboard on the quantities for good measure. At this point I'm amazed we have anything left to grow.
And wild blackberry vines come up straight from hell.
I feel like it's been nice. I think the clover is pretty, and I feel like we have many more butterflies this year than any of the previous years. The grass has been thriving. Dandelions don't seem to enjoy growing with clover very much, so there's less of them this year, although goosefoots seem more than happy to coexist with clover.
The clover has held up well to dogs, too, which has been a nice bonus.
I think I'd like to add some creeping thyme next year.
Before the widespread use of herbicides having some clover in the lawn was viewed as a good thing because of this. Lawn seeds even included a bit of clover.
When herbicides came out that killed clover as a side effect then we saw people saying (marketing) that clover is bad.
Glyphosate kills everything. If you use it as a broadleaf herbicide you are going to have a very bad week...
Is that the case for sure?
I thought the state of the bee population wasn't quite that well understood...
I have no doubt that various herbicides hurt, but I'm not sure that just that science means their current population is entirely due to such use.
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/651618685/study-roundup-weed-...
Admittedly, my sample size is only 1 as far as clover. I'd recommend anyone reading this to go to a clover honey farm near where you live, to see for yourself.
Part of the problem is that so many of us live in cities now that we have no personal experience about the issue, which leaves us more vulnerable to misinformation/propaganda from big agribusiness corporations, their lobbyists and the politicians beholden to them.
https://www.amazon.com/Scotts-Turf-Builder-Clover-Lawn/dp/B0...
After seeing this, I realized it was perhaps a bit unfair to assign so much blame to one company, and even bought a bag.
It sounds like Germany is already on their way to banning glyphosate[0]
0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/04/germany-...
US just renewed it. https://foodandwaterwatch.org/news/why-it-should-anger-all-u...
* If the ivy is near pavement, you could scald it with a tea kettle.
* Add a bird bath and/or salt lick to the yard to encourage white-tailed deer to snack on it.
* Get a goat.
2) Dig up what you can
3) See if you can find a syringe so that you can actually inject vinegar directly into whatever is left. Apply as close to the root as possible.
They would describe it better than I can, but they can get away with e.g. just having plants that are repulsive to aphids (and plants that attracts insects that eat them).
They sometimes do have to use stuff like bordeaux mix but very rarely (if ever) use glyphosate.
Their garden is pretty amazing as a result. There are tons of birds (they have bird feeders) and insects. Bats in the summer as well.
Definitely how I see my garden if I ever get a house (I have been living in large cities all my adult life).
Edit: they hold many other cards too - Food source sustainability was just the first to mind.
Why do you want bees in residential areas ? I think that it's illegal to keep bees in some proximity to residential areas around here (my grandparents used to keep bees).
Humans will find a way.
And I say this even not considering Trump, which is a big menace. But democrat candidates in the US also don't care about the environment, not showing much promise. So do the Americans in general with their huge SUVs and completely unhealthy lifestyles(for them and the environment). I wonder how much this shitshow can go on.
Incredible as this may sound, around half of the US land area is completely uninhabited. Fully 1/3 of the land is owned by the federal government, and most of this is managed with environmental considerations at the forefront. The only part of the US that is even vaguely like European population density is the northeast corridor from Boston to DC, which represents a small percentage of the country.
People in the US care a lot about the environment, but the issue has been politicized of course and pits different factions against each other. We also have a housing crisis, and it’s very difficult to get humans to worry about saving anything else when they can’t get a roof over their head.
The US has myriad environmental problems and needs to do better, but it also has a very different situation on the ground compared to Europe, and thus requires different approaches in some areas.
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/a-century-ago-pennsy...
How is it "more about than"? What are the costs to people by mandating dimming the light?
Is not a "us or them" dichotomy. The only possible alternatives are insects-win/humans-win or insects-lose/humans-lose. We can't have agriculture without insects.
The US created the concept of state-protected wilderness reserves and national parks.
The US was the driving force behind the Kyoto Protocol, and the originating nation of solar power, wind power, and nuclear power.
California leads the world in automobile fuel economy targets, and the US as a whole has cleaner-burning fuel than the EU, which for bizarre reasons settled on diesel as their standard even though it's far worse for the air than gasoline.
Europe's pretty far behind in caring about the environment.
But that's not b/c of actions of local residents.
> The US created the concept of state-protected wilderness reserves and national parks.
That's quite incorrect, e.g. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bia%C5%82owie%C5%BCa_Forest
The forest was declared a hunting reserve in 1541 to protect bison. In 1557, the forest charter was issued, under which a special board was established to examine forest usage. In 1639, King Vladislaus IV issued the "Białowieża royal forest decree" (Ordynacja Puszczy J.K. Mości leśnictwa Białowieskiego). The document freed all peasants living in the forest in exchange for their service as osocznicy, or royal foresters. They were also freed of taxes in exchange for taking care of the forest. The forest was divided onto 12 triangular areas (straże) with a centre in Białowieża.The average American use about three times the fossil fuels the average Swede does, and if the statistics are correct, the ratio has been increasing for decades.
Germany is one of the European countries with the highest fossil fuel usage, at about half the US consumption per capita.
The European average seems to about half the US average.
As for Sweden, we've got strict rules for almost any kind of emission, and diesel cars have never been very common here.
California is great, Kyoto was great, but actual environment track record over the entire United States is far from great. Unfortunately.
If US has led as much in action as in words, I'd be happy to name you the best.
We're only 10 million in Sweden, and it's outright depressing to think how little it matters even if we reduce emissions to zero. It's still the right thing to aim at, and I hope we continue on this track, but it would be much easier if big economies like the US were more heavily invested.
It is of course very lucrative to try to convince others to use more expensive energy sources, and yourself use a cheaper one. Which is one perspective of the US involvement in Kyoto that is hard to entirely dismiss because of the somewhat lackluster results overall. The changeover to more gas instead of coal is good, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that US oil consumption alone is more than most EU countries use in combined oil, coal, and gas.
I'm all for big wild forest lands, I probably spent the first decades of my life more in forests than outside them, but that has barely anything to do with being environmentally conscious. It has little bearing on acting in the best interests of the environment, and all people who depends on it. It doesn't matter how much you care for the forest lands if excess carbon dioxide cause entire biomes to disappear, which is a significant concern today.
Careful here: the US optimises for low NOx for health reasons while the EU optimises for low CO2 for environmental reasons.
See for example https://theconversation.com/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-reall... (the first website I've found that doesn't look like an all car manufacturers propaganda site) which claims "In use, on average, this equates to around 200g CO₂/km for petrol and 120g CO₂/km for diesel."
They even refer to the Kyoto protocol as a reason for the push for Diesel and also point out the issues with optimizing for CO2 only. But still it's not as simple as "Diesels pollute, the EU must be mad".
I really don't want to get into a Europe vs US argument, but this statement strikes me as odd. Sweden and California are roughly similar in size, and Sweden is nearly 70% covered by forest. For California to have more forest than Europe as a whole, not only does California need to be covered in forest to a larger extent than Sweden (this may be true, I don't know), but Sweden needs to hold more than 70% of the total amount of forest in Europe - something that seems exceptionally unlikely at best.
What am I missing?
Germany: beetles!
Regardless, for any issue there is usually middle ground to be found and snark comments like yours do nothing to help find or support it.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Humans are already not allowed to build anywhere because of environmental regulations (unless you are a corrupt politician) and to keep the rents high.
Germany is getting more and more ridiculous. People must use energy saving bulbs to increase the profit for Philips, but one can legally burn 100l of fuel per day in a car.
Noise laws are lagging behind but insects need to be protected.
Yesterday I had 10 flies and 5 mosquitoes simultaneously in my room. What do the bats eat? They are everywhere.
There are more bats, foxes, rats and insects in big cities than ever before.
Furthermore, those that live in less-urbanized less-sterile locales are painfully aware that nature and her army of insects always has the upper hand.
That there are insects in some places doesn't mean the issues with insect, and general biodiversity loss suddenly disappears.
Bugs are everywhere, but there are species disappearing every at a rate much much higher than they should disappear for natural reasons.
There certainly are cases where fetishization can be part of it environmental policy, but usually it's then about something you can brag about, not about the impact light has on the sex life of bugs.
Even with the possible fetishization of nature, most people still don't care enough to be willing to lower their standard of living, even quite superficially. Generally, I would say cynicism regarding environmental policy is often misplaced, as even terribly inefficient policy makes the existence of the larger issue apparent, and opens the door to better and more informed policy the next time around.
Look at almost any are of legislation, the first plodding steps into a new area is often hilariously misplaced, or terribly expressed with the 20/20 of hindsight. Regardless, they were necessary steps. In some areas, biodiversity arguably one of them, the first plodding steps are taken just now. It's progress, if small.
So perhaps, maybe, "speculation in action", this is not only useful or exclusively about insects