Climate change due to fossil fuels is our challenge

Reported by Lorraine Chow (EcoWatch.com), Popular, July 23, 2018

Earth Overshoot Day—a marker of when the world’s 7.6 billion people will “use more from nature than our planet can renew in the entire year”—will fall on Aug. 1, the earliest date yet since we first went into ecological debt in the 1970s.

“In other words, humanity is currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate—or ‘using 1.7 Earths,’” said the Global Footprint Network in a press release.

The international research organization uses Ecological Footprint accounting to calculate the date each year. Last year’s Earth Overshoot Day fell a day later on August 2nd.

“As we mark Earth Overshoot Day, today may seem no different from yesterday—you still have the same food in your refrigerator,” Global Footprint Network CEO Mathis Wackernagel said in the press release. “But fires are raging in the Western United States and in Cape Town, South Africa, residents have had to slash water consumption in half since 2015. These are consequences of busting the ecological budget of our one and only planet.”

So what will happen after August 1st? In the remaining five months of 2018, human beings will draw on Earth’s precious and limited reserves of fresh water, land, fisheries and forests, making it harder for these ecosystems to regenerate their resources.

“Our economies are running a Ponzi scheme with our planet. We are using the Earth’s future resources to operate in the present and digging ourselves deeper into ecological debt,” Wackernagel said.

Compared to the 1960s, humankind only spent three-quarters of Earth’s annual resource allotment. However, by the 1970s, economic and population growth has driven Earth into this annual downward trend.

Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels has become the fastest-growing part of the Ecological Footprint, the Global Footprint Network warned. CO2 is also being released at a rate much faster than it can be absorbed.

Thus, a significant reduction of carbon emissions is “an essential step” to avoid ecological overshoot and to also mitigate the harmful impacts of climate change, the research organization stated.

“It’s time to leverage our creativity and ingenuity to create a prosperous future free of fossil fuels and planetary destruction,” Wackernagel said.

The Global Footprint Network has listed the four following solution areas to address ecological overshoot:

>>> Cities: If we reduce driving by 50 percent around the world and replace one-third of car miles with public transportation and the rest by walking and biking, we can #MoveTheDate of Overshoot Day back 12 days.
>>> Energy: Reducing the carbon component of humanity’s Ecological Footprint by 50 percent would #MoveTheDate 93 days.
>>> Food: If everyone in the world cut food waste in half, reduced the Footprint intensity of their diets, and consumed world-average calories, we would #MoveTheDate 38 days.
>>> Population: If every other family in the world had one less child, we would move Overshoot Day 30 days by 2050.

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See also: Six megatrends that could alter the course of sustainable development | Global Development Professionals Network | The Guardian

Official 2015 NASA Photo of EARTH

President Obama Releases First Blue Marble Earth Photo in 43 Years

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com, July 21, 2015

NASA’s new Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite has released a stunning, new Blue Marble photo for the first time in four decades, prompting President Obama to tweet a gentle reminder “that we need to protect the only planet we have.”

The image above was taken on July 6 literally one million miles away and is the first Blue Marble photo of our planet since 1972, when the now-iconic photo of our glistening world was snapped by the American crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft.

“Turns out,” as NASA astronaut Scott Kelly wrote on the White House’s Medium page, “It’s quite tricky to take a good photo of the entire Earth.” Other images you’ve seen of Earth are composites assembled from multiple different shots.

EcoWatch readers know that it’s more important than ever to preserve our environment from the dire effects of climate change, and President Obama has spoken out on this issue many times before.

At his Earth Day speech delivered at the Everglades National Park this past April, the commander-in-chief emphasized this message clearly: “This is a problem now. It has serious implications for the way we live right now. Stronger storms. Deeper droughts. Longer wildfire seasons. The world’s top climate scientists are warning that a changing climate already affects the air that our children are breathing.”

At the end of his speech, Obama concluded that we must all be planetary stewards to ensure the safety of future generations:

“We are blessed with the most beautiful God-given landscape in the world. It’s an incredible bounty that’s been given to us. But we’ve got to be good stewards for it. We have to take care of it. We only get to enjoy things like our amazing national parks because great Americans like Teddy Roosevelt and Marjory Douglas and a whole bunch of ordinary folks whose name aren’t in the history books, they fought to protect our national inheritance.

And now it’s our turn to ensure that this remains the birthright of all Americans for generations to come. So many people here are active in your communities, doing what’s needed. The young people who are here, the next generation, they’re way ahead of us in understanding how important this is. Let’s make sure we don’t disappoint them. Let’s stand up and do what’s right before it’s too late.”

>>>>> See the following recent articles:

7 Climate Records Broken in 2014 Indicates Earth Is ‘Gravely Ill’

Exxon Exposed for Spending Millions on Climate Change Denial

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net