Climate lunatics in Hamburg pass referendum committing Germany's leading industrial city to deindustrialise completely in 15 years

Hamburg is German’s leading industrial city. Its companies add 20 billion Euros in gross value every year. Much of this economic output is related to Hamburg’s happy location on the Elbe and the fact that the city is home to Europe’s third-largest port. All of this has made Hamburg extremely prosperous, which prosperity has filled it with rafts of clueless virtue-signalling morons who have no idea how anything works, why they find Hamburg attractive in the first place or how their hip urban lifestyles are maintained.

In this photo, published by BILD, you can see some of these unmitigated retards having a happy because they’ve just scored cheap virtue points by voting in their own personal energy apocalypse.

Specifically, these dumbasses are celebrating because their completely insane popular referendum passed with 53.2% of the vote on Sunday. This referendum, the so-called Zukunftsentscheid (“future decision”), binds the Free and Hanseatic City to achieving total carbon neutrality by 2040, five years earlier than the 2045 goal set by the almost equally insane Germany-wide Climate Protection Law as emended in 2021, which is in turn five years earlier than the 2050 goal established by the selfsame law as it originally passed the Bundestag in the year of the child-saint Greta Thunberg 2019.

Turnout was pretty low in Hamburg last Sunday, with less than 44% of eligible voters bothering to cast a ballot, most of them by mail. Thus just 23% of the most deranged Hamburgians could take their city hostage and commit its government to destroying all of its industry and most of its economic activity inside the next decade and a half. The biggest joke is that when Hamburg has finally achieved the sacred Net Zero, it will make absolutely zero net difference to anything. Hamburg is responsible for something like 0.022% of CO2 emissions globally. The city is not even a rounding error.

The referendum was an initiative of Fridays for Future, but it gathered the support of various social and environmental organisations, among them Greenpeace, the union Verdi and even FC St. Pauli. It will successively cap annual CO2 emissions sector-by-sector, imposing a slow and relentless strangulation in turn on transit, households, commerce and industry.

Consider just some of the consequences: All gas and oil heating systems in every last building in Hamburg will have to be changed out in the coming years. The cost to landlords will be reckoned in the billions. Hamburg’s entire natural gas network, constructed over generations and extending to nearly 8,000 kilometers, will soon have to be decommissioned entirely. The city will probably have to impose on all of its streets a strict speed limit of 30 kph (19 mph) and take drastic steps to reduce traffic. Municipal industries must transition from petroleum coke and gas entirely to hydrogen and e-fuels, although there is hardly a market for either of these alternatives or even the hope of one. If this law is not reversed, Hamburg will become a wasteland. First industry will leave, and then all the people will.

Look again at this photo:

It is absolutely imperative to get these sorts of people out of politics. They are crazy and they are doing everything in their power to destroy civilisation. They are insulated from a lot of the economic chaos they wreak because they’re overwhelmingly government bureaucrats, university types and hipsters who are to varying degrees reliant on the state to make their living. They’re renters rather than owners, they live near the city centre rather than in the suburbs, they’re young rather than old (h/t Apollo News for that link) and they think what they’ve done is just fantastic.