Today is Earth Overshoot Day – (08/22) | Hacker News Reader

Today is Earth Overshoot Day – (08/22)

overshootday.org

132 pointsKydlaw31 comments

Good marketing. Reminds me of the time when I was a student and I reached the end of my money while there was still some month left.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people this end-of-month problem is still a reality. And until that changes, I'm afraid that the Earth is just at a lower priority.

This seems a bit arbitrary. All our fossil fuel use is effectively non-renewable; so we've effectively exceeded the sustainable capacity of the earth to support us some time on 1 January.

This 'biocapacity' that has been identified isn't going to be a limit as long as we have cheap energy. The earth can't provide anywhere close to the amount of food we use; we need artificial fertiliser and machines which is, practically, non-renewable after accounting for how we source energy for transport and powering farm equipment.

Synthetic fertiliser alone means I'm not sure I care about 'biocapacity'. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and...

Bingo. The Green Revolution massively increased Earth's carrying capacity, but at the cost of total dependence on artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and machinery, with the alternative being "half of the human population on Earth starves to death".

Fertilizers we can make without fossil fuels -- the Haber process could likely use hydrogen sourced via electrolysis. I don't know about limits on phosphate or potassium (the "PK" in "NPK").

Equipment and farming practices are improving in terms of energy and material efficiency, and I suspect we'll get to the point where we can run everything off of electricity in the next decade, but we still need to generate a lot of that -- which means nuclear, because I don't see renewables getting there any time soon.

This seems more than a bit arbitrary. As another commenter said, it's a smart marketing campaign, but there's no way this is more than a very rough approximation. Fixing it to a specific day implies a lot more certainty than I think is warranted.

I believe the scientists, but I'm not sure this type of 'marketing' is effective and it could possibly even be damaging, or at least a waste of effort (which means damaging).

To someone non-sciency in mindset (which is a great deal of the population), they see this graph, and yet they don't see such hyperbolic, catastrophic, world-ending stuff happening in their day-to-day reality. It's even too cartoonishly hyperbolic to be justified by starvation in Africa.

This type of framing of this problem is alarmist, but it can then backfire due to seeming unrealistic and out of touch with reality, making science's reputation even worse.

Anyone else agree? I'm not a professional scientist, just a small thought.

Perhaps a different approach is needed entirely? We don't need 'cool' alarming and sensationalist marketing that grab newspapers' attention more than anything.

It's not really solving the problem, is it?

> This type of framing of this problem is alarmist, but it can then backfire due to seeming unrealistic and out of touch with reality, making science's reputation even worse.

That damage was done long ago. Read the "other side"[1] of the "climate debate". I am old enough to remember some of those headlines.

Even though I look at climate change as an existential threat to humanity, I also readily acknowledge that the people beating that drum have mostly done it to make themselves richer.

Nobody wants to pay a carbon tax when they think it's just driven by massive corporate interests, and going into the pocket of a bunch of corrupt politicians.

You might laugh, but I think the off-the-grid homesteaders are on the right track. There's a lot of focus on sustainable living in that community -- agriculture, home-building technologies, water, energy, food storage, the lot.

That provides fertile ground for small-scale innovation in those spaces.

We also need to stop packing people into massive cities. Low-rise buildings are, to my knowledge, much more sustainable, both to build and maintain. A larger number of smaller cities -- bikeable and totally mixed-use -- plus well-supported outlying rural areas, seems like a much better mix than the MegaCityOne approach we've been taking.

With improved battery technology, I could see those as being connected with semi-autonomous electric cars, busses and trains as appropriate.

Although I worry about how sustainable that is, but biofuels (likely alcohol) are also a carbon-neutral option.

I'm hoping that remote work helps drive this, and coupled with tariffs against countries that don't have strong environmental protections, will both open up opportunities for younger people, and help us get our act together from a sustainability perspective.

[1] https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/20/nolte-clima...

3 weeks later compared to 2019. Mostly thanks to COVID-19?

Probably, this may be the biggest argument for telecommuting. Less driving > less greenhouse emissions.

There was also a huge hit to the produce and livestock industries as restaurants closed which may play a part as well

Question is if the effect will last or if the birth rate will start climbing due to COVID-19. Then it might have been good short-term but really bad long-term.

>if the birth rate will start climbing due to COVID-19

Shifts in birth rates of developed countries are a drop in the ocean of global birth rates. "Developed" lives have a heavier ecological footprint, but it all pales in comparison to the shifts resulting from increased industrialisation of developing countries. Depressing demand for industrial goods and services (because of lockdown) is bound to have a much bigger impact than making a few kids more or less.

World birth rate is dropping.

Births per 1000 people: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/birth-rate (less than half of the rate in 1950)

Fertility rate: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN (less than half the rate in 1960)

With a lot of people losing their jobs, there is less economic activity in general.

A lot of people have really cut back their spending.

Restaurants are so wasteful. Huge amounts of food is thrown away both in the kitchen and in the form of uneaten plates. Just going from restaurants to home probably saves a decent amount of food.

It's very much not in a restaurant's interest to waste food in the kitchen. Ingredients are a significant part of their costs, so restaurants worth their salt (hah) are usually pretty good about this. And this is starting to be regulated in some places as well.

Portion sizes on the other hand are entirely ridiculous. I often eat out with a tiny friend (in height and width). They tend to ask for smaller portions, but it's insane that many restaurants simply refuse to be amenable to that request. This means either I get fat eating their leftovers, or half a portion goes in the rubbish. Taking the leftovers home is rarely an option over here. I get that you probably can't serve half a chicken breast. But there seems to be no logical reason not to serve fewer fries, potatoes, pasta, whatever when a paying customer asks for it.

At least in the restaurants I've worked in, serving a smaller portion of a common item like a dish of pasta would probably just result in the same waste, just in the kitchen. The portions are generally prepared during the morning's mise en pas setup, and there's little motivation for changing that pattern. Not to mention no waiter wanting to try and figure out what a discount should look like.

That said, I'm surprised taking leftovers home isn't an option. Around me, at least, the expectation is that you do take leftovers home.

I assume you're somewhere other than the US? Usually when I go out to eat I end up with two meals: the half I eat at the restaurant and the other half I eat the next day.

American portion sizes are ludicrous but most restaurants won't ever bat an eye at wrapping up the rest of your food for you.

Even a $200 per head restaurant will do it. The only places that won't are the high end places where you're getting a $400+, 19 course tasting menu (+$150 or more per person for wine).

Why isn’t it an option to take leftovers home? I do that all the time.

It isn't done in Europe. Some OSEA countries think it makes you look poor as well.

I do it every outing here in the US, though! Our portion sizes are ridiculous.

Here in Eastern Europe (Romania) it is definitely an option. I know both people who do and people who don't like to do it.

Maybe, but supermarkets also throw away a lot of food and restaurants are more consistent in their weekly ordering and usage than individuals. Also, at least in NYC, many of the restaurants donate their unused product. And individuals have to buy individually wrapped products using more packaging than restaurants. Does anyone know for if cooking from home creates less or more overall waste?

If you think restaurants are wasteful, you should see the food waste from many special events. I have seen enough food to feed hundreds of people tossed away at the end of events, in a facility that can only host a couple of hundred people. That is before considering kitchen waste or uneaten food that made it to the plate.

Food waste in home vs. restaurants is more difficult to compare. Many people will eat food that restaurants would not consider serving, simply because they have no other choice. On the flip side, there are very wasteful household that buy far more than they will consume.

These kinds of metrics give the environmental movement a bad name. It’s complete bullshit.

Edited to add: you probably have an intuitive idea of what “overshooting” our “environmental footprint” means, but I guarantee that your intuition does not tally with the details of how this number is derived. The huge number involved principally relies on the area of forest required to offset human carbon emissions, which is a bizarre choice of land use.

File this one away with the “happiest/sadness/most flatulent” day of the year formulas. It’s a bunch of numbers multiplied together designed to generate headlines, not a serious instrument we can use to guide policy decisions.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

Been doing pretty well considering we apparently haven't had enough biocapacity for us to survive for the last 40 years.

It's the difference between stocks versus flows: the flow has been negative for the last 40 years, depleting stocks accumulated over the last n hundred million years. Earth overshoot day is defined from the imbalance in flows, it doesn't capture what's going on with the stocks.

Things will get exciting when the stocks are reduced below critical thresholds, that'll generate a bunch of obvious symptoms, but the underlying problem is the imbalance in flows.

This is all a bit abstract, for something more concrete in terms of specific quantifiable metrics, one arbitrary place to start is the 2009 paper "Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity Space for Humanity". https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

Figure 6 estimates that the rate of biodiversity loss, climate change, the nitrogen cycle all exceed estimated boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity.

It’s more like taking a new payday loan every month, and never fully paying off the old ones. You may think you’re managing until finally nobody will lend you and the house of cards comes down.

The lender here is the ecosystem, and the skyrocketing interest rate is the planet’s temperature and loss of biodiversity, among other warning signs.

Better analogy would be getting inheritance and using it up at a growing pace while congratulating yourself for doing good job by getting the growing under control a little bit while the inheritance is still drying up very quickly.

Our children and grandchildren won't have the luxury of inheritance and are going to pay for our carelessness.

Down voted because this seems like a flippant response in the face of evidence that human activity is significant. And that regardless of whether past estimates were accurate to the decade or even century.

Mercury didn't suddenly fill the oceans by itself. If the core samples are to be believed.

Does anyone have a link to the methodology they use to calculate the biocapacity of the Earth? It sounds very interesting.

Poked around their site a little and found this, seems to answer your question?

https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2020/06/Earth-O...

Great, thank you!

If prices on raw materials and food go up, then yes. Otherwise, technology keeps up with the restraints. Malthus is still dead.

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