A new report on China’s ecological footprint opens with some grim news for the planet as a whole: The demand humans place on the planet — in terms of land use, resource consumption, pollution, and so on — overshot the Earth’s threshold for sustaining that demand back in the early 1970s. Since then the gap has only grown wider.

The report measures that demand by “ecological footprint,” which takes into account the area people use to produce the renewable resources they consume, the area that’s taken up by infrastructure, and the area of forest needed to absorb CO2 emissions not absorbed by the ocean. The report then compared that to the Earth’s biocapacity, which measures the amount of area available to serve all those purposes.

Both factors are measured in units of global hectares (gha), which represent “the productive capacity of one hectare area of utilized land at global average biological productivity levels.” And as it turns out, humanity’s footprint now outpaces the planet’s total biocapacity to the point that it would take one and a half Earths to sustain our total level of consumption:

In 2008, the Earth’s total biocapacity was 12.0 billion gha, or 1.8 gha per person, while humanity’s Ecological Footprint was 18.2 billion gha, or 2.7 gha per person. This discrepancy means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to fully regenerate the renewable resources that people used in one year, or in other words, we used the equivalent of 1.5 Earths to support our consumption.

Just as it is possible to withdraw money from a bank account more quickly than the interest that accrues, biocapacity can be reused more quickly than it regenerates. Eventually the resources – our natural capital, will be depleted just like running down reserves in a bank account. At present, people are often able to shift their sourcing when faced with local resource limitations. However, if consumption continues to increase as it has in the past decades, the planet as a whole will eventually run out of resources. Some ecosystems will collapse and cease to be productive even before the resource is fully depleted.

Between 1961 and 2008, population growth drove much of the increase in humanity’s global ecological footprint. But growth in footprint per capita was also a significant contributor to the rise, particularly in the developed western nations of the OECD and the up-and-coming countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Even though its population is significantly smaller, America’s per capita footprint far exceeds that of China, and actually ranked 6th out of 150 countries measured in the report. And as the report’s description suggests, the per capita footprint is amenable to reform: Shifting to renewable energy, upgrading to energy efficient infrastructure, smart land and water use, and a host of other changes can bring down a population’s per capita footprint while also protecting and respecting its quality of life.

Smart use of energy and resources could also help close the overshoot gap from the other side as well: As the graph shows, the global ecological footprint has essentially plateaued over the last few decades, while the Earth’s biocapacity has continued to drop. Which in turn brings up the limitations of how we currently measure human economic progress — even as global gross domestic product has climbed over the last four decades, global biocapacity has been in a continuous decline.

by Rob Perks, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Why are states passing up billions of dollars in federal transit funds? That seems crazy but it’s true.

As reported in The Atlantic magazine:

Money for mass transit is hard to come by, so you’d think when the federal government offers some, states and localities would jump at the chance. A few do, but most don’t, according to a GAO report released earlier this month [PDF]. Of the $53 billion in “flexible” transportation funding issued from 2007 to 2011, only about $5 billion was used for urban public transit.

So, state and metropolitan planners simply declined the option to shift a significant chunk of federal dollars intended for highways over to transit projects. Unbelievable. Unfortunate. Unacceptable.

What’s the big deal about transit, you may ask? I’ll spare you my typical rant and go with something Bill McKibben just wrote in Huffington Post:

“Think about the transportation sector, which accounts for 27 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from cars and trucks. Tailpipe pollution is also a major source of asthma and other illnesses — the transport sector contributes 80 percent of the harmful air pollutants that cause 1.3 million premature deaths each year. Road fatalities claim 33,000 lives per year on average, making traffic accidents the number one killer of people under 34 in the U.S. And traffic congestion is known to elevate stress levels and reduce quality of life for millions.”

McKibben then lays out a 3-step public transit program to help U.S. communities thrive, protect our climate, and promote human health. He also was nice enought to give a shout-out to NRDC for our recent nationwide public opinion survey demonstrating transit’s popularity among Americans, including 59 percent who believe that the U.S. transportation system is “outdated, unreliable and inefficient.” Americans also want to be less dependent on cars – with 55 percent prefering to drive less; but 74 percent saying they have no choice; and 58 percent insisting they would use public transportation more often, but it is not convenient or available from their home or work.

Clearly, transit is a solution to whatever ails us. It creates jobs, drives (no pun intended) economic development, eases congestion, saves oil, reduces pollution, promotes public health, and enhances quality of life in our communities. America needs — and wants — more transit, not less.

Fortunately, some leaders at the state level recognize the many benefits of public transortation.

Read more

Opine away!

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner David Horsey had a cartoon and column in the L. A. Times this week, “Blind faith of climate change deniers endangers us all.” Here’s an excerpt:

Great harm is what comes from denying scientific facts about 21st century issues. That is the concern of the second Newsweek article. Written by Mark Hertsgaard, author of “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth,” it documents a stark threat to mankind’s food supply:

“By 2050, scientists project, the world’s leading wheat belts — the U.S. and Canadian Midwest, northern China, India, Russia, and Australia — on average will experience, every other year, a hotter summer than the hottest summer now on record. Wheat production in that period could decline between 23 and 27 percent, reports the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), unless swift action is taken to limit temperature rise and develop crop varieties that can tolerate a hotter world.”

Hertsgaard takes the reader to North Dakota, where climate change has forced production of durum wheat from the east into the west of the state. Ironically, farmers are now bumping up against the oil boom in western North Dakota that is gobbling up farmland, sucking up vast quantities of water and flaring huge amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere, thereby exacerbating the ongoing rise in global temperatures that are threatening not only wheat crops, but rice and corn as well.

Yet, even though the consequences of climate change are becoming frighteningly obvious and, as Hertsgaard writes, “scientists at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency linked the record heat and drought of summer of 2012 with man-made climate change,” far too many conservatives cling to a blind faith that climate science is a hoax. Doug Goehring, North Dakota’s Republican agriculture commissioner, is typical of them all. Rather than believe the science, he says, “I believe an agenda is being pushed.”

Yes, it is — but it is the agenda of oil companies and other extracting industries that will not let a looming peril to humanity get in the way of their profits. And it is the climate change deniers in Congress and in state governments who faithfully push that agenda and will not be dissuaded, even by a host of angels.

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• My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security