Statistical Crap: Earth Overshoot Day

I have spoken many times about statistical claims that simply cannot be true because there is no way to actually know the data they crunch. Well, one of our loyal readers has sent me a link to a National Geographic article which promotes just such a steaming pile of fakeness. A group calling themselves Global Footprint Network has invented something called “Earth Overshoot Day” and it is utterly ridiculous.

According to GFN, Earth Overshoot Day is the day “the total combined consumption of all human activity on Earth in a year overtakes the planet’s ability to generate those resources for that year.” This supposedly happened on August 13... except it's crap.

It should be obvious right off the bat that this claim is utter horseship. Why? Because it logically cannot be true. They compare this to spending more than your yearly salary by that date and thus any further "spending" that you do during the year must be done on credit. But there is no bank holding natural resources which can be tapped. Indeed, if we eat all the world’s corn by August 13th, there is no one to loan us the corn that we eat in September and October and November? (Clearly, Santa provides for December.) So where does it come from?

Now, you could argue that maybe we’ve saved up corn somewhere so we are living on storage, except that this group claims that the first overshoot day occurred in 1970. So supposedly, for the past 45 years, we’ve been burning more resources than the Earth is capable of replacing. So how much storage can their be? And more to the point, doesn’t it seem odd that despite running a massive “debt” for 45 years that there are more forest lands now than ever... more food than ever... more clean water than ever... more oil reserves than ever? How can we spend more than the Earth can produce for 45 years and yet simultaneously our reserves keep going up? It’s not possible.

And that’s just one problem.

Another problem is that we have no idea what resources the Earth actually contains. Take the theory of “peak oil.” Since at least the 1970s, we’ve been told over and over that we’ve reached “peak oil,” meaning that we supposedly reached the point where all the oil has been found and we would now run out of reserves. Yet, every single year, more oil is found and “peak oil” gets pushed back. If you don’t know how many resources there are, how can you calculate when you will run out of those?

To get around this, these idiots use a theoretical measure of the Earth’s ability to produce resources. They take the amount of resources consumed and then multiply that need by the amount of space they think it takes to produce those resources. Hence, when their calculation leads to more land space than the Earth possesses, they conclude that we have exceeded the Earth’s capacity to produce resources... hence, Overshoot Day.

Yet, if this were at all accurate, how can it be that so much of the Earth remains unused even as we are living in times of massive surpluses? If these liars were right, we would be using every square inch of land and still struggling with scarcity. But we aren’t. I guess they forgot to carry a one somewhere.

Another problem with their method is that it does nothing to account for improvements in technology. This was the failure behind the scaremongering in the 1970s when leftists like this predicted the population bomb, the draining of the last drop of oil, and massive starvation. Those leftists pretended that science could not get more resources from less land, but that is exactly what happened.

They also clearly have no concept of substitutes. For example, we could drop oil and switch to natural gas where we have hundreds of years of reserves. We could switch power plants to nuclear and have thousands of years of reserves. Wanna bet they’ve ignored that?

This is the problem with theories like this: they are garbage. They only work if you take a static view of the world and you ignore lots of truths and you accept estimates that sound great on paper but make no sense if you do so much as peek out your window.

This is typical of environmentalists and it’s why they struggle to win over a public who should happily embrace their cause. You can’t win people over when your theories are such obvious BS that people instinctively know they are wrong before they even think about them. Sure, you can get some mindless leftist journalists to repeat them, but the public will never buy it. And ultimately, all you end up doing is discrediting your own side. Nice work Global Footprint Network.