They’re still wrong about Global Footprint Day
ONCE again we’ve the screaming about how we’re using everything up and soon ht planet will be nothing but a bare ball spiralling through space:
Humans have used up the natural resources the Earth can provide for the year and are now in ‘overdraft’, campaigners have warned.
The world has reached ‘earth overshoot day’, the point in the year that humans have exhausted supplies such land, trees and fish and outstripped the planet’s annual capacity to absorb waste products including carbon dioxide.
For the rest of the year, the world is in ecological debt, with fish stocks and forests being depleted, land degraded and carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere, the Global Footprint Network said.
There’s a couple of problems with this calculation. The first being that they’re very dodgy indeed about the figures they use. For example, a nuclear power station is said to have the same CO2 output as a coal fired power station. Which is nonsense of course: the output of nuclear is about the same as that of hydro, or half that of solar. There’s other similar “errors” throughout their numbers.
The second is that they only count land once. We all know that that field of wheat over there is absorbing CO2. That’s how it grows. And some of that CO2 will be coming from the emissions that we make. So, that piece of land is doing two things: it’s reducing some (do note, only some) of our CO2 emissions and also growing food. But the report only counts land once. We need land to grow food, yes. And then they claim that we need lost more land to absorb CO2. Refusing to note that the land will be doing both at the same time.
And then when you dig through the details of the report we find that there’s really only two things that we are running out of. The first is fish: and yes, fishing policies have been insane for decades. The other is space in the atmosphere to put the CO2. And I think we all know about that, don’t we? None of the other things they try to measure or talk about are being used up at all.
But they trot this report out year after year, everyone goes wow and no one bothers to point out the truth. Yes, we know about global warming but that is the only major environmental problem that we do face.
Posted: 4th, September 2013 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
