Good marketing. Reminds me of the time when I was a student and I reached the end of my money while there was still some month left.<p>Unfortunately, for a lot of people this end-of-month problem is still a reality. And until that changes, I'm afraid that the Earth is just at a lower priority.
This seems a bit arbitrary. All our fossil fuel use is effectively non-renewable; so we've effectively exceeded the sustainable capacity of the earth to support us some time on 1 January.<p>This 'biocapacity' that has been identified isn't going to be a limit as long as we have cheap energy. The earth can't provide anywhere close to the amount of food we use; we need artificial fertiliser and machines which is, practically, non-renewable after accounting for how we source energy for transport and powering farm equipment.<p>Synthetic fertiliser alone means I'm not sure I care about 'biocapacity'. See <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and-without-fertilizer" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and...</a>
I believe the scientists, but I'm not sure this type of 'marketing' is effective and it could possibly even be damaging, or at least a waste of effort (which means damaging).<p>To someone non-sciency in mindset (which is a great deal of the population), they see this graph, and yet they don't see such hyperbolic, catastrophic, world-ending stuff happening in their day-to-day reality. It's even too cartoonishly hyperbolic to be justified by starvation in Africa.<p>This type of framing of this problem is alarmist, but it can then backfire due to seeming unrealistic and out of touch with reality, making science's reputation even worse.<p>Anyone else agree? I'm not a professional scientist, just a small thought.<p>Perhaps a different approach is needed entirely? We don't need 'cool' alarming and sensationalist marketing that grab newspapers' attention more than anything.<p>It's not really solving the problem, is it?
These kinds of metrics give the environmental movement a bad name. It’s complete bullshit.<p>Edited to add: you probably have an intuitive idea of what “overshooting” our “environmental footprint” means, but I guarantee that your intuition does not tally with the details of how this number is derived. The huge number involved principally relies on <i>the area of forest required to offset human carbon emissions</i>, which is a bizarre choice of land use.<p>File this one away with the “happiest/sadness/most flatulent” day of the year formulas. It’s a bunch of numbers multiplied together designed to generate headlines, not a serious instrument we can use to guide policy decisions.<p><a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001700" rel="nofollow">https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...</a>