Think Denmark Is A Green Leader? Earth Overshoot Day Hints Otherwise

Today August 1, 2018, is Earth Overshoot Day which marks the date when all of humanity have used more from nature than our planet can renew in the entire year.

An article on World Wide Fund For Nature’s (WWF) Danish site makes it clear that Denmark is no leader when it comes to protecting the worlds resources from overuse.

Global Footprint Network has the numbers that show we use more than we have for the rest of the year figuratively speaking. When 2018 runs out we will have used 1.7 times the resources the earth can supply, and countries like Denmark is in very bad standing when you look at it this way. If everybody on earth lived like us Danes, we would need 4.2 earth globes to balance!

Denmark is now no. 9 in this very unflattering ranking, which is up from no. 18 last year! No. 1 is Qatar at 9.3 globes, the USA is at 5 globes, and those who contributes the least to our destruction is India with 0.7 globes. Yes people, we are all borrowing from India!

Bo Øksnebjerg, secretary-general in WWF states:

In Denmark, we have an incredibly big and negative impact on the world. We simply pay the price of not having done enough for nature for the past many years. It is especially our agriculture, fisheries and Denmark’s CO2 emissions, that are the major culprits. We simply use up every last straw and every last fish of our natural resources.

In our defence we could say we export a lot of foods, but still, in countries we compare ourselves with we are still one of the worst. We have the tools to do something about this, but as always, it’s the money talking right?

Earth Overshoot Day comes earlier every year. What will it take before we realize this will not hold up? Are we so dumb as a species that we simply can’t feel the heat?

I don’t know how this will play out, but I refuse to lose faith. I refuse to believe that the Fermi Paradox is about every civilization that ever existed in the universe runs itself out of existence in the astronomical blink of an eye when intelligence prevails. I choose to believe that we are simply fortunate enough to be the first civilization to realize problems in the nick of time and do something about them.

So what do you think we should do? Leave?

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Image credit: Wikimedia commons

 

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