Overshoot - the road we couldn't take, and the road we did.

[GliderGuider]

17. That's why I bracket the dates 1900 and 1925.

I think we were already heading into overshoot by 1900 - if we weren't quite in overshoot yet, it was just ahead. I used 1925 to pin my population numbers to the planet's carrying capacity. I think the earth could have supported indefinitely the two billion population we reached in 1925 - with the proviso that we didn't use any more fossil fuel than we were using then. Our our subsequent expansion of fossil fuel is what has driven us ever deeper into overshoot and simultaneously degraded CCo . I think CCo is around 1.8 billion now, and declining toward my ultimate estimate of 1.25 billion.

My date for entering overshoot is quite a bit earlier than the one proposed by Wackernagel and Rees, because the "ecological footprint" concept is a bottom-up approach that IMO doesn't give enough weight to the survival of other species or the accumulation of GHG since 1900.