Lessons from Overshoot Day 2020
What's happening this weekend, you ask? Well, Saturday, August 22 is Earth Overshoot Day.
What's Earth Overshoot Day?
Earth Overshoot Day marks the day each year when humanity has used up "all the biological resources that Earth can renew during an entire year", as calculated by the Global Footprint Network.
Yeah, I'm still not getting it.
Imagine you get your annual salary of $50,000 in one lump sum on January 1. You have to go out and make that money last all year. If you go out in February and blow half of it on a new car, that means you only have $25,000 to live on for the rest of the year. By the time August rolls around though, you're pretty short on cash. Rent is due and you can't pay it. So to make ends meet, you take out an advance on next year's salary...and then the cycle repeats and repeats each year, all because you're spending beyond what you can afford. The day that you take out that advance on next year's salary is your personal overshoot day.
The same thing applies to the Earth and its available resources. There's only so much that the Earth can renew - by spending beyond that renewal threshold, we are gradually depleting Earth's resources. And if we continue unchecked, there will be a day when those resources run out.
By current estimates, we only have about 50 years before Earth's petroleum resources start failing to meet global demand.*
Right now, humanity uses about 60% more resources than Earth can renew each year. This chronic overspending of resources has gone on for decades, and puts us deeper in the hole in terms of what Earth can renew. Our overspending has only increased as the years have passed. And as the climate crisis has grown in the last decades, it has become increasingly untenable to believe that we can continue on this path of resource overuse.
Like all climate news, this sounds pretty dire. Is there any good news?
The good news is that this year's Overshoot Day falls about three weeks later than last year's, which means that we've made our resources last slightly longer. This is due, in large part, to the drastic, double-edged effects of the global Covid-19 pandemic. People have been driving less, shopping less, flying less, and all of those behavior changes have added up.
The bad news is that it's only August, and we've achieved these gains mostly because of a devastating pandemic. Ideally, we wouldn't overshoot our resource availability before December 31st.
What can we learn from 2020?
There are many things about 2020 that you probably don't care to repeat (hello, lockdown). At the same time, the events of 2020 did lead to a fairly solid lengthening of Overshoot Day. Here are three big takeaways from this year's Overshoot Day, and how we might be able to carry this progress forward in the future:
Government and leadership matter. It is important to elect leaders that observe facts, listen to experts, and consider long-term effects (consider Ed Yong's recent story). It's also important to support government policies that protect the health of the environment and modulate our access to expendable resources so that they can last longer. Government mindset and cooperation matter at the local, state, federal and international level.
We are capable of making dramatic lifestyle changes on short notice. Back in January, who would have thought that most of us would be working from home? Covid-19 has demanded rapid changes to all areas of life, and while many of these changes have been uncomfortable or disruptive, they have achieved one big upside: we slowed down our consumption. Business media is using scary words like "plunge" and "collapse" to describe this demand drop, but the effects are clear - and they highlight the fact that dramatic change will be needed if we are ever to get our emissions under control.
Our economic assumptions are due for re-examination. The social unrest triggered by the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic-related unemployment and housing crises have helped illuminate a looming issue: for all its great aspects, capitalism isn't working for everyone. It's certainly not working for the environment, where the destructive side-effects of capitalist economics have been historically relegated to a murky box labeled 'Negative Externalities'. With so many cracks exposed in our global economic assumptions, we should now ask: do we want to continue in this way? (for more on this, see the Freakonomics podcast, Ep. 429: "Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal?")
Comments