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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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> If all countries were like Bangladesh, it would cause massive issues in addition to what we have now.

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.

If you manage to keep the same ecological impact while increasing in population, you're doing something right !

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.

"This metric" in context is the country overshoot day. If we're going to quote the page, quoting the right part of the page is important.

> 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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT

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).

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.

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