We’ve burned through Earth’s yearly resource budget in 7 months
We’ve burned through Earth’s yearly resource budget in 7 months
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It seems unlikely that it would take that long. My first guess is that the methodology was tuned to produce a result that's alarming enough to make people realize that something needs to change, but not realistic enough to scare them away.
Let's assume Edo period Japan had its Earth overshoot day late December. By quadrupling the population as of today this alone pushes this forward to late March. But the rate of consumption in modern Japan is much higher. At a guess, by more than an order of magnitude. So it's probably in the first week of January. And the ecosystem carrying capacity, particularly the sea, is considerably degraded relatively to the Edo period. So this would make Edo-technology semisustainable population significantly smaller.
"It seems unlikely" based on what? Your feelings? Do you perhaps want to focus on something tangible in the article and back up your assertion?
From what I read before feeling like I'd seen enough to make a casual comment on lemmy about it, apparently the deficit they calculate is largely measured in greenhouse gas emissions. As I understand it they estimate the amount of additional biologically productive land (average unspoiled forest/ocean or whatever) that would be required to absorb all the carbon dioxide we're emitting. This makes some sense since biological productivity is often measured in terms of carbon. But it suggests, as some critics have pointed out, that perhaps they leave out too many other important things. Soil erosion, water use, phosphorous, other resources and pollutants, and environmental degredation in general are not so easy to add up. Calling it a "budget" also suggests that it would be okay if we used 100% of it, whatever it is. We're using many times more in energy than we could ever extract from biological sources, which is one reason why "biofuels" are not the answer. We cannot in reality appropriate the entire net primary productivity of the planet to human ends.
So it seems unlikely due to that, but also due to my own intuition about how things are. Here's a handy infographic. It's interesting that they put "CO2 concentration" at roughly the same distance beyond the bounds of what's safe as this "yearly resource budget" puts all resource use. But you can see at a glance that it isn't the only problem we face. It's not so easy to sum things up in one simple number, and you'll get wildly different answers depending on how you do it.
Thank you very much for the detailed response and the further reading. My apologies for being a bit sassy in my earlier reply.
Overshoot day should never be in the same year. It is scary if you understand it.
I remind you that this is c/collapse. In this venue I think the idea that our species is using up the world's resources at 1.7 times the rate that would be sustainable counts as optimism.
I'm saying that even x1.0 is too much. We should be leaving a lot of slack.
Midnight last day of December means indefinitely sustainable, without further degradation. This doesn't mean entirely withot alteration, since even early hunter-gatherers made several megafauna species extinct.
Net zero is optimistic. The world isn't constant, there are catastrophes even without our doing.