Earth Overshoot Day Came Early This Year. That's a Bad Thing. (popsci.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earth's resources are limited. We only have so much water and food, let alone oil and gold. But humans are using more than Earth has to offer, and have been since 1970. In 2018, it's predicted we will use the equivalent of 1.7 Earths worth of resources -- which is, oh, almost a whole Earth more than we have. And the date at which we've consumed more than one Earth in a given year is called... Earth Overshoot Day.

In the 1960s, our consumption was almost perfectly synched to the Earth's resources, with humanity consuming one year's worth of Earth's resources in one year. But by 1971, that number slid backward, and has been sliding ever since. This year, 2018, saw the earliest Earth Overshoot Day yet: one Earth's worth of resources gobbled up by Aug. 1. (Last year, it happened on Aug. 2.) This doesn't mean that we've run out of clean water or timber today, and will have to live on scraps until New Year; it's that by exceeding the Earth's resources in August, we're bankrupting our future by consuming materials that are better off preserved for days to come.

Comments

Re:What a gigantic lie

[_Sharp'r_]

Here's the understatement of the year from the article:

But it’s clear this holiday is about prompting reflection, not impeachable precision.

Basically this "news" is that an environmental lobbying group wanted to declare that people use too many resources in their opinion.

Re:I don't get it

[Wycliffe]

I don't understand. How can we possibly use more than the Earth can provide? Where's the extra coming from? Mars?

More than sustainable. For example if there are a million fish in the ocean, you could technically harvest all 1 million of them in a single year but then you wouldn't have any the next year. This makes sense for renewable resources like fish and even water tables but not sure how this relates to gold or oil. Both are fixed quanities. In the case of gold, very little of it is really consumed. In the case of oil, once it is gone, it is gone. In both gold and oil, there isn't a sustainable level that we can extract either resource. We can keep extracting as little or as much as we want and there will still be a day when there is no more. For stuff like fish, this is a very real number as if we continue to extract fish faster than they can repopulate then we are creating a disaster.

Re:What a gigantic lie

[bobbied]

We brought back materials from the moon in the 70's did we not? It was just a bunch of rocks, but we did go get them and bring them back.

We've also brought back small amounts of material from a comet's tail.

So we've done this kind of thing. Not very efficiently, but we've done it.

Re:What's likely to happen as this continues:

[jeff4747]

The thing is, people aren't breeding. Or more precisely, we are doing a lot less breeding than we used to.

The developed world, except for the US, is below replacement rate. Replacement rate is about 2.1 children per woman (1 to replace the woman, 1 to replace the man, 0.1 to replace the people who die before having children or are infertile). The US is at about 2.3. Much of Europe is at 1.8-2.0. Populations in these countries are only stable or climbing due to immigration from the developing world.

In the developing world, birth rate is plummeting as women get better education and access to birth control. It's still above replacement rate, but it's way down from what it used to be and is still trending downward.

"Number of humans on the planet" is not yet a solved problem, but it's in the process of getting solved.