Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Today is "Earth Overshoot Day," which supposedly marks when humankind starts using more resources than the planet can provide.

It — and the "Ecological Footprint" theory it's based upon — are pseudoscientific nonsense.

I debunk them here:

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

Six years ago I helped debunk Earth Overshoot Day and the Ecological Footprint calculation it's based on upon in a paper for the peer-reviewed scientific journal, PLOS Biology called "Does the Shoe Fit? Real vs. Imagined Footprints."

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…

We broke down the six measures that comprise the Ecological Footprint and found that five of the six, including food and forestry, were either in balance or surplus. The only thing out-of-balance were humankind's carbon emissions.

But solving that problem doesn't require that rich nations become poor — or that poor nations remain poor — but simply that we move toward energy sources that don't produce carbon emissions, a process known as "decarbonization."

And the only two cases of nations significantly decarbonizing their energy supplies, France and Sweden, did so not by becoming poor but rather by becoming far richer thanks to the use of nuclear energy.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

Today, France spends little more than half as much as Germany to produce electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions, thanks to nuclear.

How did the creators of the Ecological Footprint hide what they had done? By assuming that the only way to solve climate change was by expanding forest cover to absorb all industrial carbon emissions.

In other words, the Ecological Footprint converts emissions of carbon dioxide into a land-use category, thereby ignoring all the other ways of absorbing or never emitting CO2.

It gets worse. Different forests absorb carbon dioxide at different rates over time. But EF arbitrarily chooses a single number to represent the rate of carbon uptake for all forests around the world for all time.

The EF method is best known as "garbage in, garbage out."

The implication of the Ecological Footprint is thus either that everyone in wealthy developed nations like the US, Europe, and Australia should try to live like Cubans and Nicaraguans, or that we should convert all of the world's old-growth forests to fast-growing tree farms.

The Ecological Footprint and Earth Overshoot Day were created at the same time that Western European nations and the United Nations embraced a neo-Malthusian approach to environmental problems.

Ironically, the UN promoted the use of wood fuels over nuclear.

In a 1987 report called “Our Common Future,” the UN denounced nuclear & insisted that poor nations should use wood fuel more sustainably.

“The wood-poor nations must organize their agricultural sectors to produce large amounts of wood and other plant fuels.”

The Ecological Footprint has as much scientific merit as astrology, phrenology, and flat-earth theories.

It's time to treat the Ecological Footprint as the pseudoscientific theory it is.

/END