I'm struggling to understand how the overall Overshoot Day could be August 2 when looking at the by-country breakdown, I don't see any really significantly populous countries having a Country Overshoot Day past August 2.
It seems to me that the population-weighted average of the country dates should be the global date, right?
Edit: Found it. I looked for the underlying data and several populous countries have a Country Overshoot Day of "none", meaning they could drag the overall average quite a bit later but are not shown in the infographic.
As a separate point from the countries not shown, you can't just average the dates - if I'm using half an earth's worth of resources every day, and you're using half an earth's worth of resources every year, between us we use an earth's worth of resources much more often than once every 6 months. You need to take reciprocals to get consumption rates, then average, then convert back into a date. This results in an earlier date than just doing the weighted average of dates.
This is the kind of thing I point people to when their argument is 'China's opening x number of coal stations up per year'.
In the UK, our own country overshoot per capita is still a good bit above the world average.
Also worth considering historical emissions (and on top of that, the benefits that have came from the work outcome from them leading us til the present situation). As much as emerging countries can 'blame' industrialised countries, surely worth noting that our current technological mitigations are also based on those past emissions.
It seems to be mostly united statians pointing at China. But in this graph we clearly see that the US reaches their overshoot day twice as fast as China.
My rule of thumb is based on how much money one spends. My reasoning is as follows: it isn't too far off to say our economy is based on fossil fuels. Spending money is taking part in this economy. How much one takes part in that economy tells how much one is responsible for the pollution it creates.
What about people who spend money of organic, fair trade goods, etc.? In the end, that money will be spent by others on goods of the traditional economy.
I'm not too sure about the second part, so criticisms are welcome.
A good first approximation, surely. Money is a good proxy for consumption. Not true for leasing a fancy apartment, though, so you'll want to adjust it.
The idea that money you spend then gets spent by someone else on consumption and that you caused that is a little too hand-wavy for me. But I do suspect that a lot of the politically-correct consumption is not as great as it seems when you look deeper.
Agree in this approximation. In an ideal world, monetary value would be more closely aligned with energy consumption and in turn aligned with productivity, where productivity is less aligned with monetary value and more aligned with the sunk energy cost.
That's only a starting point. Money spent = a kind of 'cost' function, with 'cost' representing raw materials, energy etc used to produce something. Higher cost = more resources used / more damage to environment.
But that's only accurate if all costs (including environmental) are somehow accounted for in market price(s).
That is rarely the case. Apart from the difficulty of assigning $$ values to things like tropical forest cut down, mountain top removed to get copper ore, water used & polluted, or what have you.
Also it doesn't include social costs. If product is cheap but someone's health suffered, or profit helped dictator to reduce press freedom in producing country, is product still cheap?
Too many unknowns & externalities - $$ spent is a poor indicator.
Yep. It is right that Chinas CO2 output has been rising lately quite much with its huge population going to western standards, but tbh, actually China is currently doing more in cutting those emissions than all of the West combined. Our fingerpointing is just stupid lazyness, and soon we will be the ones being pointed with the finger at.. even more. Just read that great summary e.g.: https://nitter.net/KyleTrainEmoji/status/1680246994072133632...
"China is the ONLY country in the world that both has enough resources to make a real difference AND is actually treating the climate emergency like it’s an emergency"
(Still so many posts will likely come and say here how bad China is and how it is all worthless because of them.. just to excuse our non-action).
But is China opening those coal stations to power factories that export things to the developed world or to power internal demand? Should the pollution of a product get counted in the producing or the consuming country?
Consuming. Always. Assign the "blame" however you want but the only person who can stop polluting is the person actually asking for the polluting to be done.
"I turn a blind eye to the consequences of my needs/desires" has never been a valid justification for anything.
wish you'd have expressed this better. Your argument is sound but your sarcasm gave a pretext to those not wanting to hear. Now you are dismissed out of hand on shallow grounds.
I actually don't have strong arguments in favour of what I wrote. My personal point is that it's a complex subject. And you should not deal absolute in such complex subjects.
Having two completely different point of view expressed almost exactly the same ways brings balance to the discussion and leaves the reader with the decision of who is "right" or "wrong". And hopefully will answer "neither". Which is the ultimate goal.
If you look at consumption vs production co2 emissions statistics they're pretty close. Manufacturing isn't a huge portion of emissions, and we export a lot of goods to China as well.
Then you’re talking past the people you’re responding to. This visualization bakes in an assumption about how environmental resources/footprint should be distributed amongst the world’s population.
But the climate obviously does not care about per-capita figures. China emits 10 billion tons of CO2 annually, compared to the UK’s 358 million. That means whatever the UK does just matters very little to the overall problem of mitigating climate change.
In fact, China’s emissions have grown from 1.9 tons per person to 7.6 over the past 30 years. China is actually higher per capita now than the UK, which is at just 5.2 tons. More importantly, those billions of other people in the rest of Asia and Africa want to do the same thing China did. They want a western standard of living and that means western levels of energy use.
That means the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in the UK to use less. It’s figuring out how to accommodate western standards of living in Asia and Africa without a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
> China emits 10 billion tons of CO2 annually, compared to the UK’s 358 million. That means whatever the UK does just matters very little to the overall problem of mitigating climate change.
I don’t think it follows from that that “the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in the UK to use less“. China has 31 provinces, so if you look at China’s emissions by province, there will be quite a few that are at the level of CO2 emissions of the UK or below it. By your logic, that would mean the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in those provinces to use less.
If so, who has to do something?
> It’s figuring out how to accommodate western standards of living in Asia and Africa without a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
If we can do that, we can cut the UK’s emissions, too.
I also think it’s not about ‘raising’ the world to what the west currently does, but about changing western standards of living. I think there’s substantial room for decreasing CO2 emissions without decreasing well-being (thought experiment: would people be less happy if the airplane hadn’t been invented? If we had run out of oil in 1980?)
I think most people would rather live in a world that is 5 degrees hotter than one without oil.
You are ignoring the important part of why he divides people into "China" and the "UK". It's not an arbitrary distinction it's the unit with which laws get enacted and have affect. And China can set laws that affect all provinces. If the UK cuts climate change by enacting local laws it'll make the UK worse off, and the rest of world marginally better off. So the smart thing to do from the UK side is not to focus on local laws that reduce carbon footprint but on items that have global reach, such as treaties and technology.
I think it’s easy to say that before the world is 5 degree hotter than after, and will vary greatly based on impact and how much benefit you saw from what made the world 5 degrees hotter. I think almost anyone but people who are long oil production and ICE technology would rather see a world without oil though. It’s a super useful high density energy source that’s cheap and portable and requires low tech to make use of. But it’s filthy and finite. Beyond CO2, I think no one likes air pollution, high particulate counts, acid rain, soot covering everything, noise pollution, and all the other legacies of the age of fire. I for one welcome the age of maxwells equations.
I think the logic is a bit skewed from another angle. How much of the goods used in the UK are produced in China? If so, surely we should reallocate and attribute the CO2 in that production and distribution chain to the UK? If widget X is going to be produced somewhere and consumed in the UK, why does the producer get the attribution? It could just as well been produced in the UK - supply is just reacting to demand, and CO2 is a demand problem. (Not entirely true as production in one locale is likely cleaner than another due to regulation and environmental consciousness, but I think my reattribution model is closer than what we do today).
Re: well being, I think it’s a losing argument. Efficiency and better technologies are more likely to happen than mass enlightenment. I think it depends on what you mean by well being. I suspect people are generally happier for the progress that’s been made in reducing extreme poverty globally, which couldn’t have happened without a cheap and efficient portable energy source like oil. If you’re only measuring western upper middle class educated folks, I’ll wager their well being is worse. But I think you can’t separate the two - the lifting of billions out of extreme poverty and the enshittification of middle class life in the west. But whether you can or not, oil bootstrapped us to this point. But I think we’re demonstrably past bootstrapping and we absolutely must do something different.
If it is hubris-as-a-sin to think we changed the world for the worse, then it is ignorance-as-a-sin to pretend the massive quantities of fuels we burn would not have an effect on the world.
We can look around us and visibly see changes humans have made to this world. It isn't hard to conjecture that these changes likely have unintended effects.
We may not be gods, but we have certainly shaped the world. We've converted forest and prairie into farmland, changed the course of rivers, reshaped mountains for our own amusement, built structures that dominate local landscapes, and burned so many fuels that we seem to be changing global weather patterns.
It is entirely reasonable to make an effort to better preserve our habitat.
"Country overshoot day" is actually stupid. For example, country overshoot day of Bangladesh is "none", making it an example for everybody. It's one of most densely populated countries in the world. If all countries were like Bangladesh, it would cause massive issues in addition to what we have now.
This is metric where you basically divide ecological impact by population. Have more population and you get better on this metric. Go figure.
This metric _does not _ divide ecological impact by population. Quoting the first line of the page: “Earth overshoot day marks the date when humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services … exceeds what earth can generate in that year”
Having more population does not improve your score on this metric.The world would be much better in terms of ecological resources if we all lived like Bangladesh.
That’s fair — when extrapolating to the whole earth’s population, you do have to divide by the country’s population and scale up to the earths population. However, I think the intent of “Earth Overshoot Day” still stands. If every person consumed ecological resources at the same rate as a Bangladeshi, we would be consuming less.
My point is that the metric totally ignores P. An austere country of 100 million people on a tiny plot of land is seen as more acceptable than a few million people on a huge area. This promotes wrong answers.
> A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in this country.
This implies a certain political belief system that most people I know don't hold, namely that everyone should use about the same amount of resources.
In reality even within a country there are enormous differences between rich and poor. It would be very strange to me if someone were to draw a circle around a wealthy neighbourhood and claim that their personal overshoot day is Jan 31 or something.
Maybe everyone shouldn't use exactly the same amount of resources (e.g. living in some places "naturally" requires more energy for heating/cooling than others), but so long as the externalities associated with consumption are not accounted for (and equitably used to compensate those harmed by consumption), I think there's a reasonable case to be made e.g. the rich American neighborhood with large air-conditioned houses and private pools, whose residents do several long-haul flights per year and buy a lot of consumer goods with high intrinsic carbon, etc etc, is meaningfully contributing to the harm of people who die in a heat wave, or larger storm or flood than would otherwise occur, or whose homes are lost to rising water, etc. If you're flying on a private jet or something, why _shouldn't_ you be singled out?
The linked footprint network says that globally we're at a deficit of ~1 hectare per person, and because they're using 2019 figures for population, this is about 7.8B hectares total. Apparently the earth's land area is around 14.8B hectares, so the deficit is around 53% of all land. So ... E.O. Wilson's "Half Earth" proposal is in pretty close agreement, though he approached it from a species diversity lens.
Both Canada and the US share an overshoot date of March 13th. Assuming roughly equal consumption but very different population density, I wonder how they came to the exact same day?
Thanks! It sounds like the metric is something like specific consumption divided by global production. I imagine the reason for that is because specific consumption over specific production would only highlight export economies?
I think we’re more likely to advance on the production side with improving yields and reducing waste rather than trying to reduce consumption though. This metric wouldn’t really show progress in that direction.
Earth Overshoot Day would carry more weight with information I don't believe any of us can know - how much reserve remains.
If Earth Overshoot Day were Beer Overshoot Day - 4 astronauts stuck in a rocket to Mars, each drinking one beer extra per day - and knowing that they will forego beer for the final 6 months of the trip, there would be rioting.
Actually, maybe that's the best reason not to know.
High per-person consumption (wealthy inhabitants). Consuming luxury goods, vacations, big cars or whatever.
And: high carbon intensity - activities that require relatively high input (like fossil fuels) per produced unit(s). For example factory using not-very-efficient process powered by mostly fossil energy.
> The nowcast produced the following estimates:
• The biocapacity for the world in 2023 is estimated at 1.5 global
hectares per person.
• Humanity’s Ecological Footprint is 2.6 global hectares per person,
of which 60% is carbon Footprint.
The "of which 60% is carbon footprint" is an important line here. To be very frank, I think the use of some standardized unit like "global hectares" is misleading for a problem like carbon emissions. My distaste for this is that using a land-area-like unit implies that the total resource is fixed. There are many technologies in various stages of development that will increase our ability to sequester carbon, though at large cost, and many that allow generation of clean energy, sidestepping the need for this resource entirely. To this groups credit, they do state clearly that transitioning to clean energy moves their date significantly. A single variable representing "resources" might be a useful rhetorical tool, but you can't use it to understand a problem in a meaningful way.
I'll speculate a bit more that this type of limited-resource framing is intentional and plays into their pro population control stance. I was surprised (and disgusted) to see the population section of their site quote Paul Ehrlich uncritically.
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
Of course, none of this came true, but Ehrlich stood by the book. I will quote a section of this book that when I first saw quoted, I had to look up to believe it was real:
> While we are working toward setting up a world program of the general sort outlined above, the United States could take effective unilateral action in many cases. A good example of how might have acted can be built around the Chandrasekhar incident I mentioned earlier. When he suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion a good cause. I am sometimes astounded at the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food aid. All too often the very same people are fully in support of applying military force against those who disagree with our form of government or our foreign policy. We must be relentless in pushing for population control around the world. I wish I could offer you some sugar coated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have...
69 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadIt seems to me that the population-weighted average of the country dates should be the global date, right?
Edit: Found it. I looked for the underlying data and several populous countries have a Country Overshoot Day of "none", meaning they could drag the overall average quite a bit later but are not shown in the infographic.
> A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in this country.
and https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days... which specifies they use global biocapacity, I don't think a country's area is used in their calculations.
In the UK, our own country overshoot per capita is still a good bit above the world average.
Also worth considering historical emissions (and on top of that, the benefits that have came from the work outcome from them leading us til the present situation). As much as emerging countries can 'blame' industrialised countries, surely worth noting that our current technological mitigations are also based on those past emissions.
Put another way, it's actually quite difficult to measure your own carbon/resource footprint.
What about people who spend money of organic, fair trade goods, etc.? In the end, that money will be spent by others on goods of the traditional economy.
I'm not too sure about the second part, so criticisms are welcome.
The idea that money you spend then gets spent by someone else on consumption and that you caused that is a little too hand-wavy for me. But I do suspect that a lot of the politically-correct consumption is not as great as it seems when you look deeper.
But that's only accurate if all costs (including environmental) are somehow accounted for in market price(s).
That is rarely the case. Apart from the difficulty of assigning $$ values to things like tropical forest cut down, mountain top removed to get copper ore, water used & polluted, or what have you.
Also it doesn't include social costs. If product is cheap but someone's health suffered, or profit helped dictator to reduce press freedom in producing country, is product still cheap?
Too many unknowns & externalities - $$ spent is a poor indicator.
"China is the ONLY country in the world that both has enough resources to make a real difference AND is actually treating the climate emergency like it’s an emergency"
(Still so many posts will likely come and say here how bad China is and how it is all worthless because of them.. just to excuse our non-action).
China has the bigger emission deficit. Therefore China should have the earlier overshoot date.
It doesn't matter how many people live there.
"Look what you made me do" has never been a valid justification for anything.
"I turn a blind eye to the consequences of my needs/desires" has never been a valid justification for anything.
Having two completely different point of view expressed almost exactly the same ways brings balance to the discussion and leaves the reader with the decision of who is "right" or "wrong". And hopefully will answer "neither". Which is the ultimate goal.
But the climate obviously does not care about per-capita figures. China emits 10 billion tons of CO2 annually, compared to the UK’s 358 million. That means whatever the UK does just matters very little to the overall problem of mitigating climate change.
In fact, China’s emissions have grown from 1.9 tons per person to 7.6 over the past 30 years. China is actually higher per capita now than the UK, which is at just 5.2 tons. More importantly, those billions of other people in the rest of Asia and Africa want to do the same thing China did. They want a western standard of living and that means western levels of energy use.
That means the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in the UK to use less. It’s figuring out how to accommodate western standards of living in Asia and Africa without a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
I don’t think it follows from that that “the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in the UK to use less“. China has 31 provinces, so if you look at China’s emissions by province, there will be quite a few that are at the level of CO2 emissions of the UK or below it. By your logic, that would mean the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in those provinces to use less.
If so, who has to do something?
> It’s figuring out how to accommodate western standards of living in Asia and Africa without a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
If we can do that, we can cut the UK’s emissions, too.
I also think it’s not about ‘raising’ the world to what the west currently does, but about changing western standards of living. I think there’s substantial room for decreasing CO2 emissions without decreasing well-being (thought experiment: would people be less happy if the airplane hadn’t been invented? If we had run out of oil in 1980?)
You are ignoring the important part of why he divides people into "China" and the "UK". It's not an arbitrary distinction it's the unit with which laws get enacted and have affect. And China can set laws that affect all provinces. If the UK cuts climate change by enacting local laws it'll make the UK worse off, and the rest of world marginally better off. So the smart thing to do from the UK side is not to focus on local laws that reduce carbon footprint but on items that have global reach, such as treaties and technology.
Re: well being, I think it’s a losing argument. Efficiency and better technologies are more likely to happen than mass enlightenment. I think it depends on what you mean by well being. I suspect people are generally happier for the progress that’s been made in reducing extreme poverty globally, which couldn’t have happened without a cheap and efficient portable energy source like oil. If you’re only measuring western upper middle class educated folks, I’ll wager their well being is worse. But I think you can’t separate the two - the lifting of billions out of extreme poverty and the enshittification of middle class life in the west. But whether you can or not, oil bootstrapped us to this point. But I think we’re demonstrably past bootstrapping and we absolutely must do something different.
Citation needed
That's demonstrably untrue though and to be blind to that is to be blind to decades of well-researched climate science.
We can look around us and visibly see changes humans have made to this world. It isn't hard to conjecture that these changes likely have unintended effects.
We may not be gods, but we have certainly shaped the world. We've converted forest and prairie into farmland, changed the course of rivers, reshaped mountains for our own amusement, built structures that dominate local landscapes, and burned so many fuels that we seem to be changing global weather patterns.
It is entirely reasonable to make an effort to better preserve our habitat.
This is metric where you basically divide ecological impact by population. Have more population and you get better on this metric. Go figure.
Having more population does not improve your score on this metric.The world would be much better in terms of ecological resources if we all lived like Bangladesh.
> A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in this country.
That does inherently have a per-capita nature of the consumption in a given country.
Isn't that exactly what they're representing by a country's overshoot day? FTA:
> A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in that country.
The impact of human activity on the environment:
I = P × A × T
The expression equates human impact on the environment to a function of three factors: population (P), affluence / consumption (A) and technology (T).
This implies a certain political belief system that most people I know don't hold, namely that everyone should use about the same amount of resources.
In reality even within a country there are enormous differences between rich and poor. It would be very strange to me if someone were to draw a circle around a wealthy neighbourhood and claim that their personal overshoot day is Jan 31 or something.
> A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in that country.
I think we’re more likely to advance on the production side with improving yields and reducing waste rather than trying to reduce consumption though. This metric wouldn’t really show progress in that direction.
If Earth Overshoot Day were Beer Overshoot Day - 4 astronauts stuck in a rocket to Mars, each drinking one beer extra per day - and knowing that they will forego beer for the final 6 months of the trip, there would be rioting.
Actually, maybe that's the best reason not to know.
High per-person consumption (wealthy inhabitants). Consuming luxury goods, vacations, big cars or whatever.
And: high carbon intensity - activities that require relatively high input (like fossil fuels) per produced unit(s). For example factory using not-very-efficient process powered by mostly fossil energy.
The "of which 60% is carbon footprint" is an important line here. To be very frank, I think the use of some standardized unit like "global hectares" is misleading for a problem like carbon emissions. My distaste for this is that using a land-area-like unit implies that the total resource is fixed. There are many technologies in various stages of development that will increase our ability to sequester carbon, though at large cost, and many that allow generation of clean energy, sidestepping the need for this resource entirely. To this groups credit, they do state clearly that transitioning to clean energy moves their date significantly. A single variable representing "resources" might be a useful rhetorical tool, but you can't use it to understand a problem in a meaningful way.
I'll speculate a bit more that this type of limited-resource framing is intentional and plays into their pro population control stance. I was surprised (and disgusted) to see the population section of their site quote Paul Ehrlich uncritically.
[Paul Ehrlich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich) is notable as author of the 1968 book [The population Bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb). This book warned about population growth and opened with the quote:
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
Of course, none of this came true, but Ehrlich stood by the book. I will quote a section of this book that when I first saw quoted, I had to look up to believe it was real:
> While we are working toward setting up a world program of the general sort outlined above, the United States could take effective unilateral action in many cases. A good example of how might have acted can be built around the Chandrasekhar incident I mentioned earlier. When he suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion a good cause. I am sometimes astounded at the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food aid. All too often the very same people are fully in support of applying military force against those who disagree with our form of government or our foreign policy. We must be relentless in pushing for population control around the world. I wish I could offer you some sugar coated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have...