Today is Earth Overshoot Day – (08/22)

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&#x27;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&#x27;ve effectively exceeded the sustainable capacity of the earth to support us some time on 1 January.<p>This &#x27;biocapacity&#x27; that has been identified isn&#x27;t going to be a limit as long as we have cheap energy. The earth can&#x27;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&#x27;m not sure I care about &#x27;biocapacity&#x27;. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;world-population-with-and-without-fertilizer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;world-population-with-and...</a>

I believe the scientists, but I&#x27;m not sure this type of &#x27;marketing&#x27; 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&#x27;t see such hyperbolic, catastrophic, world-ending stuff happening in their day-to-day reality. It&#x27;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&#x27;s reputation even worse.<p>Anyone else agree? I&#x27;m not a professional scientist, just a small thought.<p>Perhaps a different approach is needed entirely? We don&#x27;t need &#x27;cool&#x27; alarming and sensationalist marketing that grab newspapers&#x27; attention more than anything.<p>It&#x27;s not really solving the problem, is it?

3 weeks later compared to 2019. Mostly thanks to COVID-19?

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&#x2F;sadness&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosbiology&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal.pbio.1001700" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosbiology&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;jou...</a>

Been doing pretty well considering we apparently haven&#x27;t had enough biocapacity for us to survive for the last 40 years.

Does anyone have a link to the methodology they use to calculate the biocapacity of the Earth? It sounds very interesting.

If prices on raw materials and food go up, then yes. Otherwise, technology keeps up with the restraints. Malthus is still dead.