earth overshoot day

If you use up your monthly salary before the next payday, you borrow money to tide you over. Which might be alright, if you have a good credit rating and you don't do it every month. But if you spend just as much next month, you just go deeper into debt. In the same way, we use Earth's resources to run our lives, and the New Economics Foundation has come up with the date we go into ecological "resource debt" each year. This year, we used up the equivalent of Earth's annual budget last week, on Sept 23. At the rate we spend, Earth only produces enough to support us for 267 days a year; after that, we use up resources that have been "banked". And these resources are not only fossil fuels, they are also habitats, fresh water, forests, fish, and so on.

Unfortunately, the date this happens gets earlier every year, with the result that we are borrowing beyond our means - and have been doing so since 1986, according to NEF's calculations. We won't be able to repay the loan unless we make drastic changes. One can argue that overshoot day is just a concept, and probably not very accurate, but I don't believe anyone can seriously suggest that we can carry on with business as usual indefinitely. Dependence on finite oil reserves alone makes that an impossibility, but the environmental degradation we are causing makes it an ethical issue.