Agreed. Looks like another case of PhD scientists who can't do basic economics. Reminds me of the Simon-Ehrlich wager. If the Overshoot day keeps getting earlier in the year, then resources should be getting more scarce and hence more expensive, while poverty should be increasing. In fact exactly the opposite is happening. World poverty has dropped almost 50% in the last 20 years, just about all of which is attributable to economic growth. The fundamental problem is viewing the Earth's resources (or economy in general) as a fixed pie to be divided up. It is a statist mindset that produces crap studies like this. One example, some years back we kept hearing about a tipping point in oil production. The flaw was calculating based on current known recoverable reserves. Then this thing called fracking came along. It did not find any new reserves, it figured out how to extract oil not previously considered recoverable. The result was an additional 3 trillion barrels of recoverable oil just in North America, or over 400 years worth of oil at the current rate of consumption by the US. Not many specifics for the calculations in this story, but the reference to Singapore indicates the same mentality. That it overshoots by January second is irrelevant because shipping and trade in general is getting increasingly more efficient. That is what trade is all about, selling things that you produce efficiently to buy things that others produce efficiently. Not going to touch the carbon emissions point, other than to say they have that entirely backwards too. In summary, just because someone holds a PhD in one subject doesn't mean they can't be as stupid as the rest of us when they get outside their area of expertise.

Just for fun I tried browsing the NY Times site over Tor. Sure enough, after 16 articles I got a message saying I only had 4 left and did I want to subscribe. I then shutdown and restarted Tor, and no more messages, even after going to articles 4, 5 and 6. It appeared I was getting another 20 articles. I stopped after 10 or so. I don't know enough about the Paywall. Perhaps it starts counting the Tor exit nodes, and if enough people did the same thing, then those would quickly be exhausted I am pretty sure, however, that Tor frequently switches exit nodes, even during the same session. I was also using the Tor enabled Firefox browser, which I suppose could flush on shutdown whatever the NY Times needs to count visits. Just my speculation, I have no expertise in this area.

What a load of crap. CO2 is plant food. More CO2 makes it greener, less would obviously make it less so. Funny how the supposed Greens get this so backwards. See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/08/surprise-earths-biosphere-is-booming-co2-the-cause/ Of course seeing Greens take the side of a murderous tyrant would come as no surprise at all. :)