Humanity Has Consumed All Of Earth's Resources In Eight Months

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Megalith

Megalith

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On August 13, the human population overshot the environment, which means that we exceeded the Earth's capacity to regenerate the resources spent this year. Mother nature hates us.

Calculated by the Global Footprint Network (GFN) sustainability think-tank, the landmark is a relatively recent concept. Humanity lived within the Earth's means up until 1970 but, driven largely by carbon emissions, it has been in steadily increasing debt ever since.
 
And the solution is to...

Cull half of humanity in the name of sustainability? Another World War? Plague outbreak? I find this to be a massive load of BS.
 
EODetroit said:
And the solution is to...

Cull half of humanity in the name of sustainability? Another World War? Plague outbreak? I find this to be a massive load of BS.
Click to expand...

Stop polluting the earth, cutting down rainforests and destroying the world would be one main thing we could do.....
 
No more than 2 children per family, please. The world population is increasing too fast.
 
Sigh, Another think tank that gets paid to spread bad news. They know exactly what they need to say to maintain funding from their contributors and make sure that no matter what ... it gets said.

I should start a "charity" organization to study fly genocide and release a whole bunch of guess work in the guise of scientific studies that say exactly what those dumb enough to contribute to it every year feel it should say.
 
hahaha...I have lake front property for sale...in the Mohave...any of you sheep interested?
 
Gabriel said:
No more than 2 children per family, please. The world population is increasing too fast.
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Not only increasing too fast, but where are we supposed to bury everyone? We can't keep taking up real estate with burial plots.

I see a day where cremation is mandatory.
 
hahaha...I have lake front property for sale...in the Mohave...any of you sheep interested?

"think tank"...another term for "bums"...right there with "artist" and "research scientist"
 
Oh, and while I'm not a tree hugger by any means, I do agree. We need to leave the rain forests the fuck alone. They are our air scrubbers and producers.
 
Just more claptrap from the doomsday squads. Of course the solution will be for you to turn over large sums of money and freedom to these groups. The tyrannical side of liberalism always shows it's face.
 
I'm telling you, Charlton Heston had it right way back in the 1970s...

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!!!
 
Wow for once the comments in here dont make me wanna puke. Looks like the majority see this for what it is.
 
I mean, it doesn't take a genius to see we have a problem in the future with air quality being filtered and food supply.

I don't know what good a study pointing out the obvious does.
 
Err... Nobody ever heard of a Malthusian cycle?

If not then...

We've had them before and as this article points to we're right on track for another one.

Such is the way of things, until we learn better. (If ever)
 
If the US stopped importing immigrants and illegals our population would actually shrink just like the EU as the birth rate is down.
It's Africa, India, Indonesia and basically 3rd world countries have 5+ kids.
Even with their 1 child policy it does not look like China is denting it's 1.3B population, not yet.
 
The doomsday preachers have been at this since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. This is getting tiresome. The solution is always some sort of control mechanism, with the people making the noise conveniently in control.
 
Relaxed only in rural areas in which boys are needed to tend the farms, it's not relaxed in urban areas.
 
Meh, all we have to so is stop being retarded about consumption. Maybe a new thing every single year isn't strictly necessary? Cutting down on air pollution would be pretty great as well, cities kind of stink. Even people who reject science think cities smell bad.
 
There is only one answer, the number of humans on the planet has to reduce massively and we need start living in a way that is sustainable.

Whichever countries decide to put their population into decline (not just reduce growth) will suffer economic disaster because society is built on expansion and suffers even when in stasis.
Those countries in decline will become the lesser parts of the world population because a lot of others will see this as their cue to move for control, so there probably wont be a policy this extreme.
The inevitable conclusion is a disaster like disease or starvation that will end up reducing the population but the world that is left wont be anything like now.
The extremes of the third world will be the world over.

Even if we could find another planet to go and can get there, its not going to change anything. It wont make a dent in the population here.
The same process will begin on the new world.

Live it up, this is about as good as its going to be.
The human condition.
Soz.
 
some countries are over populated, and others are under populated.....

the key to human consumption will lie in population controls when is required. though i have my doubts it will be totally successful, because not everyone will be responsible in keeping a maximum of 3 kids per family :/

that and also more investment/development into ITER and other similar nuclear fusion initiatives which promises cheap and almost limitless energy which would solve most of our power issues especially regarding carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

need more recycling especially for plastics and other materials where is possible.
 
Yakk said:
Err... Nobody ever heard of a Malthusian cycle?
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I wouldn't exactly rely on Malthus in terms of accurate predictions.

What this article is implying is that if life were wiped out to the point where civilization had to start anew we would likely lack the ability to sustain another industrial revolution to the point where we could escape the planet. Something to consider is that the fossil fuels that got us here only came through hundreds of millions of years of life matter before us, such that an intelligent species that evolved earlier on another planet might never have an industrial revolution or a space program at all.

Actually, about 250 million years ago there were mammal-like reptiles that had a good chance at evolving like we did but much earlier. Had they done so, they likely would have lacked the fossil fuel supply to escape the planet. Something to think about.
 
Stiler said:
Stop polluting the earth, cutting down rainforests and destroying the world would be one main thing we could do.....
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I agree but this still doesn't change the fact that this is complete BS.
 
The problem with these type of "reports" is that they always fail to take into account our penchant for discovering new tech, as well as making the tech we use more efficient.
 
TechLarry said:
Oh, and while I'm not a tree hugger by any means, I do agree. We need to leave the rain forests the fuck alone. They are our air scrubbers and producers.
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No they're not. 50-85% of our oxygen comes from plankton in the ocean. Now if something were to wipe out the plankton in the ocean, most life on earth would be hosed...
 
LBJM said:
I agree but this still doesn't change the fact that this is complete BS.
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Well the prediction might be BS, but I think it's already happened to a certain extent. Dust Bowl anyone? That was because humans took from the Earth faster than it could regenerate, luckily we learned better and hopefully don't do that shit again... meanwhile rain forests get chopped down to turn into farm land... whoops maybe we didn't learn better, and just for the final nail in the coffin that farm land isn't to help feed the locals, it's to feed our fat McDonald's eating asses up here.
 
Maxx said:
I wouldn't exactly rely on Malthus in terms of accurate predictions.

What this article is implying is that if life were wiped out to the point where civilization had to start anew we would likely lack the ability to sustain another industrial revolution to the point where we could escape the planet. Something to consider is that the fossil fuels that got us here only came through hundreds of millions of years of life matter before us, such that an intelligent species that evolved earlier on another planet might never have an industrial revolution or a space program at all.

Actually, about 250 million years ago there were mammal-like reptiles that had a good chance at evolving like we did but much earlier. Had they done so, they likely would have lacked the fossil fuel supply to escape the planet. Something to think about.
Click to expand...

It is interesting.

I don't particularly see fossil fuels affecting a [Malthusian] cycle. At different times in human history these collapses happened when human population exceeded what could be produced to sustain itself. These happened at different times, and at different technological advancement levels.

Each time the setbacks were major and devastating, but eventually were overcome.

Fossil fuels are one type of stored energy. Do we have just one chance with them? Well, since fossil fuels take so long to form, in all practicality yes. Taking the Malthusian collapse scenario, could we continue to develop by finding other types of stored energy? Possibly, or by improving our ability to capture this energy in various forms in real-time from the sun, such as plants developed for example.

Either way it would still be a colossal setback before going forward again. Without fossil fuels we couldn't produce a second industrial revolution as per our history, but it doesn't mean another type of discovery wouldn't again improve our harnessing of energy 40 fold or more as was done in the past.

Obviously avoiding surpassing or ability to harness enough resources to sustain our population is the first thing we should do, especially now as it would be on a global level, not just regional as on the past. But... This is doubtful IMHO, as a species we've never had the ability to avoid a collapse before. And time wise we haven't had much time to better evolve since the last one.

Heck, add in capitalism which is essentially based on ever increasing consumption and we are currently going in the complete the opposite direction. Changing this direction might actually be just as bad, or worst, than a collapse itself before it gets better.

Right now the only thing we know for sure is we are consuming more energy than the planet can accumulate again in various forms from the sun.

Not a good thing, interesting to see how this will be dealt with.
 
sleepeeg3 said:
No they're not. 50-85% of our oxygen comes from plankton in the ocean. Now if something were to wipe out the plankton in the ocean, most life on earth would be hosed...
Click to expand...

You mean like the ocean acidification currently taking place due to excess greenhouse gases?
 
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