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Earth Overshoot Day
- sokoloff 3y agoI'm struggling to understand how the overall Overshoot Day could be August 2 when looking at the by-country breakdown, I don't see any really significantly populous countries having a Country Overshoot Day past August 2. It seems to me that the population-weighted average of the country dates should be the global date, right? Edit: Found it. I looked for the underlying data and several populous countries have a Country Overshoot Day of "none", meaning they could drag the overall average quite a bit later but are not shown in the infographic.
- penteract 3y agoAs a separate point from the countries not shown, you can't just average the dates - if I'm using half an earth's worth of resources every day, and you're using half an earth's worth of resources every year, between us we use an earth's worth of resources much more often than once every 6 months. You need to take reciprocals to get consumption rates, then average, then convert back into a date. This results in an earlier date than just doing the weighted average of dates.
- sokoloff 3y agoQuite right. Thank you for pointing it out.
- MisterKent 3y agoNot in this case, since each country is calculated based approximately off its area. So, fractionally they do add up to one earth.
- penteract 3y agoBased on > A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in this country. and https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/ https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days... which specifies they use global biocapacity, I don't think a country's area is used in their calculations.
- ricardo81 3y agoThis is the kind of thing I point people to when their argument is 'China's opening x number of coal stations up per year'. In the UK, our own country overshoot per capita is still a good bit above the world average. Also worth considering historical emissions (and on top of that, the benefits that have came from the work outcome from them leading us til the present situation). As much as emerging countries can 'blame' industrialised countries, surely worth noting that our current technological mitigations are also based on those past emissions.
- Avalaxy 3y agoIt seems to be mostly united statians pointing at China. But in this graph we clearly see that the US reaches their overshoot day twice as fast as China.
- ricardo81 3y agoIndeed, North America per capita consume a lot more energy than most nations.
- sokoloff 3y agoNot to mention that we outsource a lot of our impact to supplier countries (China and others).
- ricardo81 3y agoTrue, and while the UK's emissions per capita has dropped a fair bit since 1990, it's very hard to tell how much of that has been outsourced. Put another way, it's actually quite difficult to measure your own carbon/resource footprint.
- abyssin 3y agoMy rule of thumb is based on how much money one spends. My reasoning is as follows: it isn't too far off to say our economy is based on fossil fuels. Spending money is taking part in this economy. How much one takes part in that economy tells how much one is responsible for the pollution it creates. What about people who spend money of organic, fair trade goods, etc.? In the end, that money will be spent by others on goods of the traditional economy. I'm not too sure about the second part, so criticisms are welcome.
- engineer_22 3y agoLink to their Research Report: https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2023/06/Earth-Overshoot-Day-2023-Nowcast-Report.pdf https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2023/06/Earth-O...
- lstodd 3y ago[flagged]
- burkaman 3y agoClimate change is an immediate problem for us, not the world. The world will continue along fine even if our civilization collapses.
- lstodd 3y ago[flagged]
- taylorconor 3y ago> No, we did not Citation needed
- maxehmookau 3y ago> It is hubris-as-a-sin to think that a) we changed it to the worse That's demonstrably untrue though and to be blind to that is to be blind to decades of well-researched climate science.
- unregistereddev 3y agoIf it is hubris-as-a-sin to think we changed the world for the worse, then it is ignorance-as-a-sin to pretend the massive quantities of fuels we burn would not have an effect on the world. We can look around us and visibly see changes humans have made to this world. It isn't hard to conjecture that these changes likely have unintended effects.
- shinryuu 3y agoWhy is it hubris? Human beings were behind the ozone hole, and we were also able to stop it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- thriftwy 3y ago"Country overshoot day" is actually stupid. For example, country overshoot day of Bangladesh is "none", making it an example for everybody. It's one of most densely populated countries in the world. If all countries were like Bangladesh, it would cause massive issues in addition to what we have now. This is metric where you basically divide ecological impact by population. Have more population and you get better on this metric. Go figure.
- nurbel 3y agoIf you manage to keep the same ecological impact while increasing in population, you're doing something right !
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pinkmuffinere 3y agoThis metric _does not _ divide ecological impact by population. Quoting the first line of the page: “Earth overshoot day marks the date when humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services … exceeds what earth can generate in that year” Having more population does not improve your score on this metric.The world would be much better in terms of ecological resources if we all lived like Bangladesh.
- sokoloff 3y ago"This metric" in context is the country overshoot day. If we're going to quote the page, quoting the right part of the page is important. > A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in this country. That does inherently have a per-capita nature of the consumption in a given country.
- pinkmuffinere 3y agoThat’s fair — when extrapolating to the whole earth’s population, you do have to divide by the country’s population and scale up to the earths population. However, I think the intent of “Earth Overshoot Day” still stands. If every person consumed ecological resources at the same rate as a Bangladeshi, we would be consuming less.
- gd1 3y ago[dead]
- throwaway22032 3y ago> A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in this country. This implies a certain political belief system that most people I know don't hold, namely that everyone should use about the same amount of resources. In reality even within a country there are enormous differences between rich and poor. It would be very strange to me if someone were to draw a circle around a wealthy neighbourhood and claim that their personal overshoot day is Jan 31 or something.
- ricardo81 3y agoTBF change is partly driven by legislature, which doesn't really apply at neighbourhood levels.
- abeppu 3y agoMaybe everyone shouldn't use exactly the same amount of resources (e.g. living in some places "naturally" requires more energy for heating/cooling than others), but so long as the externalities associated with consumption are not accounted for (and equitably used to compensate those harmed by consumption), I think there's a reasonable case to be made e.g. the rich American neighborhood with large air-conditioned houses and private pools, whose residents do several long-haul flights per year and buy a lot of consumer goods with high intrinsic carbon, etc etc, is meaningfully contributing to the harm of people who die in a heat wave, or larger storm or flood than would otherwise occur, or whose homes are lost to rising water, etc. If you're flying on a private jet or something, why _shouldn't_ you be singled out?
- abeppu 3y agoThe linked footprint network says that globally we're at a deficit of ~1 hectare per person, and because they're using 2019 figures for population, this is about 7.8B hectares total. Apparently the earth's land area is around 14.8B hectares, so the deficit is around 53% of all land. So ... E.O. Wilson's "Half Earth" proposal is in pretty close agreement, though he approached it from a species diversity lens.
- pitched 3y agoBoth Canada and the US share an overshoot date of March 13th. Assuming roughly equal consumption but very different population density, I wonder how they came to the exact same day?
- grotorea 3y agoIt doesn't adjust for density like that. > A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in that country.
- pitched 3y agoThanks! It sounds like the metric is something like specific consumption divided by global production. I imagine the reason for that is because specific consumption over specific production would only highlight export economies? I think we’re more likely to advance on the production side with improving yields and reducing waste rather than trying to reduce consumption though. This metric wouldn’t really show progress in that direction.
- digitalsushi 3y agoEarth Overshoot Day would carry more weight with information I don't believe any of us can know - how much reserve remains. If Earth Overshoot Day were Beer Overshoot Day - 4 astronauts stuck in a rocket to Mars, each drinking one beer extra per day - and knowing that they will forego beer for the final 6 months of the trip, there would be rioting. Actually, maybe that's the best reason not to know.
- throwawayai2 3y agoWhat make Qatar and Luxembourg overshoot in Feburary?
- badpun 3y agoExtremely high consumption levels?
- RetroTechie 3y agoProbably: High per-person consumption (wealthy inhabitants). Consuming luxury goods, vacations, big cars or whatever. And: high carbon intensity - activities that require relatively high input (like fossil fuels) per produced unit(s). For example factory using not-very-efficient process powered by mostly fossil energy.
- jackdeansmith 3y ago> The nowcast produced the following estimates: • The biocapacity for the world in 2023 is estimated at 1.5 global hectares per person. • Humanity’s Ecological Footprint is 2.6 global hectares per person, of which 60% is carbon Footprint. The "of which 60% is carbon footprint" is an important line here. To be very frank, I think the use of some standardized unit like "global hectares" is misleading for a problem like carbon emissions. My distaste for this is that using a land-area-like unit implies that the total resource is fixed. There are many technologies in various stages of development that will increase our ability to sequester carbon, though at large cost, and many that allow generation of clean energy, sidestepping the need for this resource entirely. To this groups credit, they do state clearly that transitioning to clean energy moves their date significantly. A single variable representing "resources" might be a useful rhetorical tool, but you can't use it to understand a problem in a meaningful way. I'll speculate a bit more that this type of limited-resource framing is intentional and plays into their pro population control stance. I was surprised (and disgusted) to see the population section of their site quote Paul Ehrlich uncritically. [Paul Ehrlich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich) is notable as author of the 1968 book [The population Bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb). This book warned about population growth and opened with the quote: > The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate... Of course, none of this came true, but Ehrlich stood by the book. I will quote a section of this book that when I first saw quoted, I had to look up to believe it was real: > While we are working toward setting up a world program of the general sort outlined above, the United States could take effective unilateral action in many cases. A good example of how might have acted can be built around the Chandrasekhar incident I mentioned earlier. When he suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion a good cause. I am sometimes astounded at the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food aid. All too often the very same people are fully in support of applying military force against those who disagree with our form of government or our foreign policy. We must be relentless in pushing for population control around the world. I wish I could offer you some sugar coated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival. I consider myself to be a committed environmentalist. I sincerely believe that good stewardship of the natural environment is critical to human well-being and that our society needs to get its act together with regards to unsustainable practices. However, as long as so-called respectable environmental groups continue associating with people like this, I will remain skeptical and keep myself at arms length.