According to the United Nations, You’re Already Dead

By Noah Rothman

Friday, July 25, 2025

 

Here’s a weird one from the United Nations Environment Programme:

If you’ve never heard of Earth Overshoot Day, congratulations! You’ve somehow managed to escape exposure to a Malthusian mania that bears no resemblance to our shared reality. Until now, at least. You can thank me later.

 

According to the Geneva Environment Network, the EOD (which has nothing to do with ordnance disposal) is the date by which “we have used all the biological resources that the Earth can renew during the entire year.” Oddly, given the global scale of this metric, it is also country-specific. The less developed a nation, the more congratulations it earns from European bureaucrats for consigning its population to penury and want. America’s “Overshoot Day” is March 13. This means that, for the next 232 days, the United States is “living on credit at the expense of future generations.” Indeed, if everyone on earth lived the same lifestyle as they do in the Environmental Network’s native Switzerland, “the resources of three planets would be necessary to ensure its existence.”

 

As near as I can tell, this exercise in reductionist madness exists primarily to make guilty Westerners feel bad about themselves. It does not describe any independently observable resource strains. It is contemptuous of the price mechanism — indeed, it seems to reject general economic theory entirely. It has no regard for humanity’s capacity to engineer itself out of a challenge, which has been thwarting pessimistic predictions about the planet’s carrying capacity for 200 years.

 

Presumably, the EOD is not meant to be taken literally. Throw open your window and you will not see cracked and scaling earth, bereft of vegetation and littered with the crumpled figures of the dead and dying, the few scattered survivors braving a Hobbesian state of nature as they rage against their inevitable early demise. No, this is a metaphor of some kind. It is undoubtedly designed to make us critically examine our own habits and tastes. What it achieves, however, is only to expose the degree of derangement encouraged by environmental activists. Talk about overshooting the mark.