Earth Overshoot Day
2 views
Skip to first unread message
Peter Duval
Aug 10, 2016, 2:55:28 PM8/10/16
to underhillene...@gmail.com (Google Groups)
Monday, we -- every 7.4 billion of us -- needed to start holding our breath, stop eating, stop moving, stop drinking, and, of course, stop pooping and peeing! And we need to continue that for the next 146 days, in order to hold our consumption to *merely* the entire biological production of Earth, the only livable place we know. If everyone on the planet consumed as much as the typical Energy Committee member, Overshoot Day would have been sometime before the Ides of March. We’d be more than just a little blue in the face already.
But Overshoot Day references a full Earth's consumption level that puts every bit of the universe’s known biological output in service to humanity, with nothing to spare. That’s overoptimization and it is not good. The global footprint researchers readily point out that “ [a]s with any calculation system, Footprint accounts are subject to uncertainty in source data, calculation parameters, and methodological decisions. Exact error bars or standard errors for calculations have not been rigorously compiled, and no full, comprehensive, and quantitative estimate of uncertainty has yet been carried out.” (footprintnetwork.org) Maybe it would be smart to have a little margin for error. E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth would be a safer reference point -- if only by a factor of two.
Overshoot Day puts replacing streetlights in a new perspective. And it illustrates how hard it is to grok the scale of the emergency. OvershootDay.org suggests personal actions are almost equally disconnected from the urgency and scale of the problem as replacing lightbulbs. OvershootDay.org does ask for modest conservation: switching to vegetarian diet, avoiding car trips. Rather modest suggestions, but they are behavior modification.
-Peter
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages