Earth Overshoot Day

-

ISRO launched Chandrayan 3 successfully last week, and as usual, there are mixed opinions including some old-school people labelling a space mission as a waste of money. There are some solid arguments like advancement in technology, GPS, weather data etc etc to counter these opinions.


But today I want you to look at the bigger picture. Why Space exploration is the need of the hour?

I introduce you to a day that deserves to be celebrated (it must be) but most of us are unaware of it.

 

It is “Earth Overshoot Day”, but when is it?
There is no specific date to celebrate it because, with the support of humans, it is shifting ahead.

In 1971, it used to be in December

1991 - October

and this year, i.e. 2023, is on “2nd August”.


It is the day on which DEFICIT starts, by 2nd August this year we would have extracted resources from Earth that can be, in a year. Whatever we use after that will be from future years.

In other words, we humans need 1.7 Earths to fulfil our annual needs and sadly the number is increasing.



What’s the solution?

The honest solution which I can think of is reducing our consumption. It can be achieved from various measures like reducing the population etc.

But, there’s a catch

>It’s not as easy and glorious as it seems, especially for consumption-driven economies, GDP growth rates will be negative and will give lesser room for underdeveloped and developing countries to develop.

>Governments will not be able to achieve their targets (eg. Japan in recent years has seen no significant growth in population and as a result in GDP growth rate as well)

>Capitalists will not be able to digest the fact that their revenues aren’t growing. 

(eg. Companies from developed nations want to enter India because of the large population which will eventually CONSUME and eventually increase their revenues)


Alternative Solution:-

Now you have to fulfil the gap between the Demand of Humans and the Supply of Earth, which Capitalists and Governments are trying to fill by extracting resources from other parts of the Universe, be it extracting resources from the Moon or planning to Colonize Mars. And they are always in a race of who will do it first because the one who cracks the space code will eventually be the future leader/superpower.


I would leave you with some astonishing facts:-

>EOD shifted 3 weeks later to 22nd August in 2020, because human consumption, carbon footprint or forest harvests saw a significant drop because of Covid and we also saw how nature healed itself during Covid.

>If the world population lived like Qatar - we would need approx 9 Earths, USA - 5 Earths. 

See the image attached and have a look at some so-called developed, developing and underdeveloped countries. (Who’s harming more?)





This year let’s CELEBRATE a not-so-happy “Earth Overshoot Day” on 2nd August and in July next year to spread awareness.


If you like this post then just go and know more about Earth Overshoot Day, and share your opinion on the same in the comments and share this post.


That’s all for today


Signing off

Devansh Singla

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IPO Frenzy: A Hidden Leading Indicator?

-
Image
 An IPO boom is seen as market's positive sentiment. News outlets and influencers flood us with stories of high listing gains from IPOs. We often confuse it with the whole market going green forward. But data tells a different story: 1. IPOs squeeze liquidity from market - Listings, either primary or secondary, put money in the hands of company for expansion or the shareholders; leading to a cash outflow from the secondary market. 2. Correlation - I analyzed the last 18 years (2007-2024) of Nifty 50 returns against the annual number of IPOs and amount of Capital Raised. The statistical correlation between them: Nifty 50 returns against the annual number of IPOs +0.12 Nifty 50 returns against the Amount of Capital Raised +0.09 A correlation of +0.12 and +0.09 indicates a very weak positive relationship. In simple terms, knowing the Nifty's return for a year gives you almost no ability to predict the number of IPOs. But this gets interesting when we try to predict the Nifty's...
Read more

Middle East Crisis - Oil or something else?

-
Image
Next time you hear about conflicts or gas pipe shutdowns in the middle east, remember, it’s not just about your car or electricity bill — it’s about the food on your plate, and millions of Indian farmers. Whenever we talk about tensions in the Middle East, everyone immediately jumps to oil and logistical disturbances. But here's the twist — it's fertilizers that we need to start worrying about. And for India, it's a big deal. Here's how it connects The Middle East isn't just about oil; it’s also a fertilizer powerhouse, especially for nitrogen-based fertilizers like urea (made from natural gas). Now with conflicts disrupting natural gas supply (especially after recent tensions involving Israel, Iran, and Egypt), fertilizer plants in the Middle East have shut down. That’s squeezed the global supply — and prices are already rising. (Refer Image) We are the second-highest fertilizer consumer in the world. And for some more than half of it is imported. For some types —...
Read more

TikTok, Trump, and the World’s Weirdest Love Triangle

-
Image
A national weapon. A national threat. A political strategy. The Tiktok-Trump saga is an epic case of how a naive start-up became the epitome of geo-political tug-of-war between world's 2 biggest powers. That start-up marked a turning point in how we consume content globally. ByteDance (parent of Tiktok) founded in 2012, launched a short video app - "Douyin" for Chinese market in 2016. The app named as TikTok for international market was launched in 2017. In 2018, it was among the most downloaded app. The growth was immense, establishing it among the top social media platforms. Here are some key stats that frame the power of social media in today’s world: - 5.24 billion people (63.9% of the global population) currently use social media worldwide, up more than double from 2.07 billion in 2015 - The average social media user engages with an average of 6.83 various social media platforms - Globally, the average time a person spends on social media a day is 2 hours 21 minutes ...
Read more