It's Earth Overshoot Day, 2022

 

Another Earth Overshoot Day is upon us.  Funny how they keep showing up earlier each year.

This year's pitch is one partnership for the planet. Uh, yeah, sure.

Overshoot - the day each year on which humanity exhausts an entire year's worth of natural resources. But, as with greenhouse gas emissions, all countries are not equal. July 28 is just the global average.

As the graphic below reveals there are many countries that have a low ecological footprint. Then there are the gluttons.  Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and the Delusional States of America tipped into overshoot on March 13th this year.


It's said that to meet mankind's rapacious consumption would require the resources of nearly two planet Earths.  However, if other nations consumed at Canada's rate we would apparently need eight or nine Earths to meet our demand.

What does this all mean. I found one simple graph that illustrates our predicament.


The horizontal line is the planet's resource capacity. The rising red line depicts our voracious demand for ever more resources, resources that exceed our planet's "carrying capacity."  When the red line crosses the horizontal black line, you're in overshoot. But then the other shoe drops as our excessive demands degrade our biosphere's ability to generate resources. Try to figure out how that ends.


Comments

  1. Northern PoVJuly 30, 2022 at 11:55 AM

    So glad this is getting play ... and the Fraser's Int. silly tax-freedom day seems to have gone poof!

    ReplyDelete

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