Earth Overshoot Day

https://www.overshootday.org/

by ciconia • 4 years ago

133 173 4 years ago

"If everybody lived like people in the Netherlands, we would need 3.6 Earths. It would take 7.3 Netherlands to regenerate everything the country’s residents demand from nature."

I've heard this metric before and I find it believable but I'm curious of how it is calculated and what assumptions it's based on.

Y-bar2• 4 years ago

You can find the Data & Methodology here:

https://www.footprintnetwork.org/resources/data/

RektBoy2• 4 years ago

I'm curious what is the number for US then? 1000 Earths?

masklinn• 4 years ago

The US’ overshoot day is March 13, 19.73% into the year.

So a bit under 5.1 earthes.

Although interestingly because the USA are a large, sparse, and resource-rich country, it doesn’t live that much beyond its own means ecologically: 2.4 USA would be enough to fulfill its needs, whereas (per the above) the netherlands being a dense and resource-poor country it would need a bit more than 7 of itself.

fnord1233• 4 years ago

Really interesting from an ecological standpoint, but from a resource concern isn't the purpose of relying on each other (e.g. Russian gas), to link the economies so we have strong incentives to avoid wars?

lucideer8• 4 years ago

It's interesting that you see this as an incentive to avoid wars. A large proportion of wars have been caused by resource interdependence (invasions to secure external resources that are relied heavily upon), not avoided by it.

adrianN• 4 years ago

It seems hard to me to quantify the number of wars prevented by any measure.

zarzavat• 4 years ago

It’s meta-stable. War is very expensive. Resource interdependence is usually a disincentive to war. However when resources are either extremely valuable or essential, usually either oil or water, then it can overcome the disincentive and become an incentive to conflict.

hnbad3• 4 years ago

Most wars involve resource control. That doesn't mean most wars are about capturing resources.

Sure, if you simplify things enough you could argue that all wars are about resource interdependence because attacking someone for cutting you off from resources or for withholding your resources is also "about resource interdependence" and even civil wars are ultimately about unequal access to resources. But at that point you could say a peasant revolt is about "resource interdependence" because the lords own the land and the peasants provide them the food.

I don't think "resource interdependence" is the right framing. Colonialism was essentially "resource interdependence" but that is clearly a different dynamic than e.g. the European Economic Area (or EFTA).

Realistically, it's probably more about a mix of defensive pacts (essentially military MAD), economic interdependence (essentially economic MAD) and a somewhat level power dynamic (limiting the potential for exploitation).

mhandley• 4 years ago

Interdependence can be complicated and assymetric. Russian gas dependency indeed provides a disincentive for Germany to support Ukraine against Russia, but at the same time it emboldened Russia because Putin likely believed the EU was weak due to its dependency on Russian gas.

guerrilla5• 4 years ago

The EU is weak due to Russian gas. We basically have to commit suicide to get out of this.

cseleborg3• 4 years ago

I think we're recognising that this strategy was a mistake and simply didn't work with Russia. If we trade with them, they'll become more like us, was the thinking, and the strategy behind the German government's policy towards Russia for 15 years.

modo_mario2• 4 years ago

and the strategy behind the German government's policy towards Russia for 15 years.

Seeing what the likes of Gerhard Schröder is doing and given other economic incentives that favoured Germany I don't think that was the main idea behind it.

guerrilla5• 4 years ago

I don't think it was a mistake. It just wasn't deep enough because it wasn't given enough time. 20-30 years is nothing.

coffeeblack• 4 years ago

Interdependence has been big since the 90s and seems to have been disproven somewhat by Russia now. But I don’t think so. Russia assaulted its neighbors several times before, so Putin had reasons to assume that the West would not react, just like before. The West neglected to follow through 15 years ago.

guerrilla5• 4 years ago

Interdependence has been big since the 90s and seems to have been disproven somewhat by Russia now.

Hardly. It just hadn't on gone long enough and far enough. I'd say that the entire cause of the war is just that- that the interests of the two sets of elites didn't line up yet. They eventually would have because ownership would have become much more distributed as always happens as a result of neoliberalism.

bregma2• 4 years ago

Every economic theory I've ever encountered fails to account for human stupidity.

eru12• 4 years ago

Really interesting from an ecological standpoint, but from a resource concern isn't the purpose of relying on each other (e.g. Russian gas), to link the economies so we have strong incentives to avoid wars?

That's at best a nice side-effect, if it actually works.

Nah, the main reason is that specialisation and trade is just so much more efficient. You get more from less.

bergie• 4 years ago

Somewhat related, a constructive method for trying to fit inside the resource constraints:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society

mattclarkdotnet• 4 years ago

But we don't have an energy constraint. We currently produce energy in silly polluting ways, but there's no reason we can't stop doing that and have lots more energy per person as well.

CyanBird2• 4 years ago

It is a goal of efficiency, not per se of net production

If you achieve these metrics while aiming to set up a renewables vertical, then you can overshoot and more easily at least metrics wise control co2 production

mekkkkkk5• 4 years ago

It's interesting to see population growth being listed as one of the prime factors, and that "Girl's Education" is proposed as a solution to this. I get why sex-ed and more widespread access/knowledge/acceptance of contraceptives might help the situation slightly, but aren't there much more deeply rooted problems than "girls don't know what a condom is"?

And further, it brings up interesting moral questions touching on eco-justified anti-natalism. Would it be morally justified to have a hundred kids?

EDIT: I largely take back the first paragraph, but I'll leave it for posterity. Helping girls to create a career for themselves probably has a larger impact on population growth. The anti-natalism thing is still interesting though.

ejolto• 4 years ago

Girls education is not about sex-ed, it's so they can get a job and have opportunities other than being a mom.

mekkkkkk5• 4 years ago

You are right, I glossed over the description and saw mentions of sex-ed, but it's apparently just part of it. Thanks for the correction!

ricardo81• 4 years ago

This. All nations have followed a population curve and with increased education and social mobility, the birth rate drops. It was only a couple of generations ago here in the UK that people had large families, and another couple of generations before that that women were allowed to vote.

Reading general comments on the web about the likes of the UK only have a tiny part to play and it being 'almost pointless' to combat climate change and conservation (vs larger population countries) seem to forget we've been industrialised and polluting for a quarter of a millenia. On the same token, the technology acquired over that time can solve the problem.

Overshoot day is a good reminder that we're still living above our means.

ralfd• 4 years ago

Less kids in industrialized nations will never matter though, as the missing people will be imported. If eco-anti-natalism were really justified they would be anti-immigration.

We instead need to get sustainable holistically and need technological advancements and policy changes. It doesn't matter much if we are 6 or 8 billion (currently) or 11 billion (UN forecast for 2100) people on the planet if the smaller number already overshoots resources x-times.

CyanBird2• 4 years ago

It doesn't matter much

But it does matter, because the world won't end on 2100, the world healing from current damage will take several centuries at minimum, the less damage that is done to the ecosphere during this period of heavy growth will help the recovery and healing process on the upcoming centuries

imtringued11• 4 years ago

If you follow Silvio Gesell's argument for a mother's dividend he argues that women are too reliant on men for income (remember this was at a time back when women didn't work at all) and therefore cannot choose to have less children.

tener2• 4 years ago

This exercise of "if everyone/everything was like X" is very fallacious. There is no path that takes the current world we are living in all the way to this simulated reality that makes no sense. "If everyone were like Elon Musk..." reads like a start of a joke or a horror story, but never a feasible reality.

The truth is that, once resources become scarce, various optimization mechanisms kick in. For example, Israel produces a lot of food in the desert thanks to various water usage optimization techniques.

Human civilization uses a tiny percentage of the total energy delivered to Earth. This again is tiny percentage of power generated by Sun. There are abundant resources all around us that we simply need to learn how to effectively utilise. This is not sci-fi stuff, these are "merely" engineering problems.

The challenge is to get to that "post-scarcity" (or whatever you call it) future sustainably, without killing ourselves or making Earth a toxic hellhole. This requires cooperation, but you won't get that by going around and claiming falsehoods or persuading people with fallacies.

mekkkkkk5• 4 years ago

I don't think the point is to describe a probable future where everyone lives like the Dutch. The whole point is that it wouldn't be possible.

It's just an easy to understand illustration of how our current civilization is largely resting on unsustainable foundations. Finding solutions to the engineering and societal challenges that you mention seems to be the goal of the project.

throwaway71271• 4 years ago

The whole point is that it wouldn't be possible.

Why so?

Life needs energy, we can harness energy better to produce engineered food and desalt water.

tener2• 4 years ago

I don't see the goals stated anywhere. I see solutions, but they have implied assumptions with an agenda. And how do you evaluate a particular solution against the alternatives without any goals or metrics?

I can definitely get behind some of the solutions they propose! But it is important to give a truthful rationale for these. Otherwise this is a slippery slope, like lying to your children about medicine because they will get better if they take it.

I stand by my assertion that the methodology they picked ("pick a subset of civilization, make a prediction as if everything was it") is fallacious. Imagine a sustainable, closed-loop civilization, satisfying all the goals you can dream of. It is inevitable that not every part of the system will be balanced when looked at in isolation. If you are allowed to cherry-pick a subset of that civilization and scale it arbitrarily, you are guaranteed to arrive at the same unreasonable conclusion as they give us.

To make it less abstract, let us consider nature itself. There are siberian tigers which eat 9 kg of food a day. This is a lot! If every animal were to eat that much, all animals would quickly starve. Clearly, nature is not sustainable!

lm284693• 4 years ago

There are abundant resources all around us that we simply need to learn how to effectively utilise. This is not sci-fi stuff, these are "merely" engineering problems.

I think the "we simply" is the least simple part of it all. We act as if everything is just a matter of time and engineering, but nothing assures that, and even if it does we're still running against time. This isn't a CIV game, we don't know if these hypothetical saving techs will ever exists.

It's pretty much all sci fi for now, and without intent it will still be sci fi. There is no law of the universe that guarantees what we call "progress" actually makes us move towards a better future. You can call it "tech progress", "engineering progress", "discoveries", the wording doesn't matter. Lead paint was progress, freon was progress, gas powered vehicles was progress, &c. Anything that's new is called progress and only decades later we can really assess what was beneficial or not. (cue electric personal vehicles)

In French we have an idiom: "fuite en avant"; "Not facing one's problems, running away from one's problems without solving them, or continuing a problematic action without considering its future consequences" and I feel like it can be applied to tech very easily, especially when the main technocrats argument is "we'll do more of X, Y, Z and eventually we'll find a solution"

7373737373• 4 years ago

All life seems to expand until it runs out of resources. Unless we learn to manipulate atoms better (and could we even do it more efficiently than nature?), conflict seems to be inevitable.

kibwen• 4 years ago

Making our current consumption more efficient won't help much; the existence of induced demand means that making consumption more efficient will just incentivize more consumption. What we need is less consumption, but when you try to tell people this the usual reaction is to wring their hands and tell you that such a thing is impossible, which is their way of tacitly admitting that they'd personally rather destroy the planet than reduce their own standard of living.

eru12• 4 years ago

Why less consumption?

We are sitting on a huge ball of matter, and even consumption typically does not destroy any matter nor loses any to the void of space.

(The sun is a great source of energy. We also have nuclear fission and fusion, otherwise.)

imtringued11• 4 years ago

Induced demand applies to "free" resources. If you tax resource consumption it will go down overall.

SturgeonsLaw• 4 years ago

Yep. The thing that keeps any particular form of life in check are predators. A large amount of plant growth promotes herbivore populations, which promotes carnivore populations. If carnivores or herbivores overeat, they crash their own food supply, causing their own population to decline due to food scarcity. Ecosystems reach a form of homeostasis this way.

Humans have eliminated anything even close to being their predator at any significant scale, except our own behaviour. As a result, we run the risk of exhausting our own food (read: resource) supply.

mellavora2• 4 years ago

insufficient food or insufficient oxygen also do the job.

I'm assuming you include 'disease' as a predator (i.e. viral/bacterial/microscopic actors).

cseleborg3• 4 years ago

except our own behaviour

Oh, well, no risk of that predator disappearing anytime soon, then...

imtringued11• 4 years ago

Yes this is why humans must figure out how to keep themselves under control. If they don't then something else will do the job for us and we won't get a say.

iNic• 4 years ago

I am extremely frustrated by these kinds of degrowth narratives, as they usually come out of a genuine concern for the environment - but all their approaches to solutions are extremely economically illiterate.

This [1] article explains some of my frustrations, but doesn't address everything mentioned on the Overshoot website.

[1] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-...

tebs12003• 4 years ago

Which parts of the site do you interpret as describing "degrowth" narrative? I had a look at the solutions listed and the general theme seemed to be smarter use of existing resources and didn't really mention growth, or reducing growth. - Producing energy using less fossil fuels, not necessarily producing less energy - Producing food in a way that uses less fossil fuels, not producing less food.

I think what the site is saying is we depend on ecological systems and natural resources to sustain our current standard of living, but we are consuming them at a faster rate than they can replenish. We need to use the available resources more efficiently - doesn't necessarily translate to less or even slower growth though.

imtringued11• 4 years ago

Sustainable resource use leads to more growth, just not faster growth. You can overfish or overgraze to boost growth in the short term while sacrificing overall growth as ecosystem collapse will result in no or little growth. It would be more appropriate to look at 'lifetime' income of a resource but that would require 0% interest rates as positive interest rates devalue future income and reward short term thinking.

raxxorraxor• 4 years ago

economically illiterate

This is proposing that people are lacking faith. You believe something must work because an economic theory proposed that it does. In reality these theories often fail to predict anything substantial.

Our economic system is very primitive and requires steady growth. But in reality the productivity of a finite area of land cannot grow any further even with technological advancement and long before you hit the limits of thermodynamics. The only thing that can grow in an unlimited fashion are excuses by economists to be honest.

Sorry, perhaps I just don't have the growth mindset.

Not proposing that the end is nigh, but bullshit has to be called what it is in the interest of progress.

eru12• 4 years ago

You might want to read up on the bet between Ehrlich and Simon.

stinos• 4 years ago

but all their approaches to solutions are extremely economically illiterate.

Not quite convinced about that. That, or the solutions you read aren't up to par with what science has to say about it. For starters not all presented solutions are even about degrowth?

Just one example, take land use: the last talk I heard about that be a professor from a local university, people aren't exactly advocating 'less growth, less land use' but more like 'we expect synthetic meat to be x% of food intake so there's y% less land needed for animals and if all of that would be taken up by the produce needed for the synthetic meat that is actually i% more protein produced/acre' and 'x% of nice fertile land is going to degrade within the next decades because of erosion so if we implement some relatively simple measures that can be countered' and 'instead of dividing land into massive fields for production and some small dots of nature in between, as far as preservation goes it is often actually better to not do that but create one area for nature as large as those dots and optionally but even more optimal create lines of nature to connect those bigger patches'.

Sounds economically viable to me, or at least certainly not 'extremely illiterate', and also not impossible.

lm284693• 4 years ago

Almost as if they were criticising the current economic framework, its ideology and consequences, it really makes you think doesn't it...

baq2• 4 years ago

economics is a social science. it always must bow down to physics and it repeatedly has, to the dismay of economists...

guerrilla5• 4 years ago

economics is a social science.

economics is a psuedoscience like all social sciences and astrology. They've predicted absolutely nothing of value. It's just people studying these things prior to them becoming scientific, like people did with alchemy and whatnot before chemistry.

mac01021• 4 years ago

I'm glad you linked to that article, which I had not seen before.

I think I agree with the author about degrowth as a goal being a political nonstarter. But I'm pretty skeptical about the notion that future growth can consist of ever increasing amounts of "dematerialized" goods and services without ceasing to be real, meaningful growth (however it might be defined).

I also think the political and physical challenges inherent in technological or "pro-growth" (I need a better word) solutions for getting out of overshoot are widely underappreciated. This [1] article runs some numbers to show that, for our global civilization to satisfy its current level of energy consumption without emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases in 2050, we will have to bring online clean energy generation capacity equivalent to one nuclear power station every day between now and then. Given that, I'd be extremely surprised to see us get there by 2150, or maybe at all.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...

imtringued11• 4 years ago

What is truly economically illiterate is to think that an economy needs to grow every year just to maintain the same standard of living. The economy is currently set up in a way that we will lose more than just future progress if growth stops, we will also lose past progress. It would be wise to get rid of this pointless rigidity.

This fixation on growing every single year hurts prospects to grow more over longer periods of time. It also causes needless environmental destruction. We would rather deplete the soil for a quick buck than maintain it and make it better every year at the cost of lower initial yields.

fold3• 4 years ago

As a counterexample: In 2019,2020, the French government did an experiment with a random sample of citizen. It showed that if people are properly formed and educated about the climate crisis, they are willing to make a change and can even be more radical that what the climate expert wished for

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Clim...

Also economy is just numbers going up and down, it's not real. You just need to change some variables of what makes economic growth if you want your numbers keep going up in gdp. Earth overshoot is not as flexible, we don't make the rules.

PostOnce5• 4 years ago

If everyone lived like people from the year 1910, we'd all have long since starved to death. If we lived like people from the 1950s, food would cost far, far more than it does today.

The Haber process and modern agriculture feed us all, and cheaply. We get five times more milk per cow and eight times more corn per acre than we did a century ago. We synthesize fertilizer out of thin air instead of scraping bird shit off of remote islands.

On top of that, human fertility rates have dropped far, far below replacement in substantial parts of the world, and when the developing world is developed, I suspect they also will see declining population. Each person needs slightly more than one child for us to have a stable population. So, a fertility rate of ~2.1 (2 children per woman). In the US it's 1.7, in Germany it's 1.54, in Japan it's 1.36, and in Korea it's 0.94. China: 1.7, Brazil: 1.72, India: 2.2 (just above replacement, and dropping)

We can outsmart, and have repeatedly outsmarted, all sorts of potential disasters.

We can't ignore our problems, but neither have we met with any sort of defeat.

DrBazza2• 4 years ago

We can outsmart, and have repeatedly outsmarted, all sorts of potential disasters.

Unfortunately, the main one we can't outsmart is volcanic winter, which has produced planet-wide famines on several occasions, and is all but certain to happen again.

Geologically speaking, the 20th century was pretty quiet. In the 21st century we've already had two tsunamis (including the 2nd or 3rd biggest earthquake), and the Tonga volcanic eruption, which was fortunately below sea level, but still likely the second loudest noise in human history after Krakatoa, and Eyjafjallajökull which had the potential for volcanic smog but fortunately didn't happen.

We're overdue a Cascadia mega-thrust earthquake which would have "interesting" repercussions for the tech industry, given how much of it is based on the US west coast.

I agree with your point though, we've largely progressed through normal seasonal issues with crops, and dramatically improved yields via science.

bregma2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, the main one we can't outsmart is volcanic winter, which has produced planet-wide famines on several occasions

And yet, here we are still.

tebs12003• 4 years ago

when the developing world is developed, I suspect they also will see declining population

I suspect you are right.

What is less clear is whether earth has the resources to sustain the standard of living rising in these developing nations.

There is currently 1.2 billion people living in developed countries and 5.4 billion in developing countries. Even if the developing populations stabilise, if their standard of living increases to match that of the 1.2 billion developed population, will our natural resources and environmental systems cope?

If not, we need to work on ways to maintain a developed world standard of living without using nearly as many natural resources.

eru12• 4 years ago

For a high standard of living, we mostly need energy and some gadgets.

We are sitting on a big ball of matter, so at long as we have the energy, we can make all the gadget we need. (You can even make food underground in multiple levels, if you have enough energy to burn on lighting.)

So the real problem is energy. Luckily, renewable are currently getting a lot cheaper. And we also still have nuclear, if we really want to go that route. Fission works, and fusion is in the works.

ravi-delia2• 4 years ago

Productivity increases at the same time. It's not free, there'd need to be complementary expansion of resource gathering and development of more efficient technology, but naively plugging in the values for life in developed nations won't get you the right result. In reality, this translates to a slower climb to developed nations status, not resource shortages (barring unrelated issues).

mrpopo2• 4 years ago

neither have we met with any sort of defeat.

Defeat against whom? Is human race at war with someone?

Earth overshoot day isn't about survival of human race, it's about human being in balance with Earth. Countless species are extinct because of us. Is this victory?

PostOnce5• 4 years ago

The very act of living is a war against entropy. It wants our motion to cease.

All the other animals want our food. Many of them want our flesh. Plant viruses destroy our crops. Locusts will starve human children to death. We are absolutely at war.

A trillion parasites want our blood: hookworms, ticks, mosquitoes, you name it.

We destroyed smallpox for ourselves, but we also eradicated rinderpest to the benefit of a great many large animals (deer, giraffes, goats, cows, etc). We never started a Save the Hookworm campaign for good reason. We will wipe those fuckers out eventually.

We don't even have to worry about our children being eaten by wolves in most forests now... because we killed most of the wolves. A fairy tale ending.

So yeah, we're at war and always will be. Let's kill HIV next.

r3trohack3r2• 4 years ago

Earth isn’t in balance. It’s in a constant state of trying to find a temporary equilibrium.

There is this nonsense idea that the earth would be fine if humans didn’t come along. It wouldn’t. This planet is in its death throes. Life has delicately established itself in a habitable zone that is coming to an end. The carbon cycle has a good 800M years left before photosynthesis starts grinding to a halt. That might seem like a long time, but life’s been here for a good 4B years - we are 75% through life on earth. It’s taken evolution 4B years to print its first ticket off this rock: humans. That it’ll print another in 800M years is a poor bet.

The idea of saving life on this planet by curbing human progress is a fools errand. You save life on this planet by bringing it with you when you leave this rock.

ASalazarMX2• 4 years ago

Even if we were at war in a planetary scale, a population of billions is more than enough to survive anything but the most apocalyptic scenarios. We can surely scale back without risk to our species.

redprince• 4 years ago

We can outsmart, and have repeatedly outsmarted, all sorts of potential disasters.

Sometimes it was just mankind surviving as a species though. Humans as a whole are probably hard to kill. But that says nothing about one of the defining traits of mankind: Their ability to form advanced cultures and civilizations. The survival rate of these cultures is abysmal and there is no reason to be believe, the current culture with its incredible high standard of living for as many people as ever before, will not fail. I blame Hollywood and their stories about the eternally advancing human race for this fallacy.

Sure humans will likely survive a great many catastrophes but they might find themselves again in an agrarian society and in far fewer numbers.

We can't ignore our problems, but neither have we met with any sort of defeat.

Yet.

walleeee• 4 years ago

The problem with this is it's easy to say "we can't ignore our problems", and everyone will agree, but for most meaningful purposes that is exactly what is happening. We've been ignoring the problems and saying things like this for over half a century, while they continue to get worse.

When does it become advisable to start ignoring the people saying "don't worry, it's not too late, we'll figure it out"? While this may still be true, it's a great way to rationalize putting off the massive social, psychological, legal and technical changes we desperately need.

i_am_proteus• 4 years ago

The turkey tells his comrades what he is thankful for in early November.

(with tongue very slightly in cheek)

vrfvr• 4 years ago

Well, I think it's time to start outsmarting.

If we continue down this path, were going to run against a wall

cheese_goddess• 4 years ago

We can outsmart, and have repeatedly outsmarted, all sorts of potential disasters.

We are so smart it took us two hundred years to realise we are creating a disaster ourselves, and we still can't figure out how to stop it. Because we are so smart we keep outsmarting ourselves. Or our greed does, I'm not sure.

jerrre• 4 years ago

We can outsmart, and have repeatedly outsmarted, all sorts of potential disasters.

While this is my general take on these kinds of things as well, it's good to keep in mind that it takes just one outlier disaster to never be able to outsmart anything ever again, and perhaps it's just dumb luck that we're in a timeline where that didn't happen so far.

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

Yeah I don't see how we could outsmart a volcanic winter. I mean I'm sure we can grow some food under artificial sunlight, but nowhere near enough to ensure the survival of everyone.

carlmr• 4 years ago

when the developing world is developed, I suspect they also will see declining population

The problem is that the developed world needs too many resources per capita. The developing world will have similar issues when it reaches a standard of living where they start declining. Also this decline is too slow and too far out to matter. We need to effectively at least halve global resource usage in the next 1 or 2 decades. Waiting until the developing world stops growing in 30 years is not a solution.

RektBoy2• 4 years ago

I didn't look into their calculation. But I tried their app to calculate my number and input no car use or public transport, inside multi-store building, no flying at all. Still I got 3.7 Earth, wtf.

Y-bar2• 4 years ago

I got a similar number and by far food was the big number, the past few months have been meat-heavy and I can see that reflected in the results. It alone was at 2.7.

My transportation is at 0.2.

Same thing with me living alone in an apartment caused my shelter score to grow to 0.7 from 0.4 if I was to claim that two people shared this apartment. Which kind of makes sense, many people living alone generally means more buildings have to be built and more energy be used to heat/cool and light them, and land have to be used to build them on.

bradhe• 4 years ago

This website reads like it was generated by an AI.

teekert• 4 years ago

Hmm, I would love for Sabine Hossenfelder [0] to take me through the numbers that claim my country needs 3.6 earths if we were to invite everyone to our lifestyle.

She did a very nice job changing my mind about nuclear power: [1]

[0] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/p/about.html

[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-nuclear-power-g...

lom• 4 years ago

One of the numbers that is probably factored in is how much less efficient the food production would be if we adopted the food policy of one single country for the entire world.

While we currently use about ~50% of habitable land for food production, if we all adopted the diet in Bangladesh we would only need about 14%. If we all had the diet as in New Zealand we would need 190%. The dutch fall at 100% in the data that they published: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

Not exactly the 3.6 worlds listed in the link above, but diet is only one small part...

irrational• 4 years ago

Am I the only one seeing tons of raw code on this webpage? For example,

[divider line_type=”No Line” custom_height=”40″][nectar_btn size=”jumbo” button_style=”regular” button_color_2=”Accent-Color” icon_family=”none” url=”https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/webinar-dutch-overshoo... text=”DUTCH OVERSHOOT DAY WEBINAR” css_animation=”bounce” margin_left=”40″]

What’s the deal?

pineconewarrior• 4 years ago

wordpress shortcodes not rendering properly

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