David Dodwell

Outside In | The world is speeding to hell in a shopping cart

We need to move away from consumerism and find better measures of economic progress – if we want to avoid a climate catastrophe

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Shoppers in Beijing. Our “stuff-obsessed” lifestyles are simply unsustainable. Photo: AFP

David Dodwell

Published: 5:30am, 24 Aug 2024Updated: 6:03am, 24 Aug 2024

Do you remember Earth Overshoot Day – the day on which our consumption for the year overshoots the Earth’s capacity to produce resources? Back in the 1970s, it passed somewhere in December or November. By 2015, overshoot occurred on August 7. This year it passed unnoticed on August 1.

This suggests we need 1.75 earths to supply the world’s 8.2 billion consumers and their indulgences.

Some countries overindulge more egregiously and overshoot much earlier in the year. The worst, Qatar, overshoots on February 11, with the United Arab Emirates following closely on March 4 – both are prodigious suppliers of oil and gas. The “consumerholic” United States overshoots on March 14. China and Britain sit together in the first days of June. We in Hong Kong are massively out of equilibrium – overshooting by March 24.

Overshoot Day is among an increasing number of indicators reminding us of the rising challenge of global warming, pollution, depleting resources, the oft-unnoticed extinction of animal and plant species, and the unsustainability of our “stuff-obsessed” lifestyles. Population growth and our success in lifting communities out of poverty are only augmenting our assumption of infinite growth on a finite planet.

My concern is not simply that these indicators point in a very bad direction, but that they do so unnoticed. I think I am part of the majority who read nothing in the news about the worryingly earlier passage of Overshoot Day this year.

Similarly, did anyone read about the International Degrowth Conference in Pontevedra, Spain, in mid-June? Not even the official website reported on the conference outcomes. My quick search for press coverage came up blank. For a global movement aimed at shifting us away from unsustainable consumerism and getting governments to reconsider their blind pursuit of gross domestic product growth, the silence speaks volumes.