Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently if you adjust a few factors and squint just right, the 1972 Limits to Growth is a remarkably good fit for the doomed trajectory of our modern world.
Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction
Sun 25 Jul 2021 16.00 AEST
A controversial MIT study from 1972 forecast the collapse of civilization – and Gaya Herrington is here to deliver the bad newsSun 25 Jul 2021 16.00 AEST
At a UN sustainability meeting several years ago, an economic policy officer came up to Gaya Herrington and introduced himself. Taking her name for a riff on James Lovelock’s earth-as-an-organism Gaia hypothesis, he remarked: “Gaya – that’s not a name, it’s responsibility.”
Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time.
Coming amid a cascade of alarming environmental events, from western US and Siberian wildfires to German floods and a report that suggests the Amazon rainforest may no longer be able to perform as a carbon sink, Herrington’s work predicted the collapse could come around 2040 if current trends held.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/25/gaya-herrington-mit-study-the-limits-to-growth
The study confirming we are on track for certain eco-doom is available on the KPMG investment bank website.
Update to limits to growth
Comparing the World3 model with empirical data
Gaya Herrington
In the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth (LtG), the authors concluded that, if global soci- ety kept pursuing economic growth, it would experience a decline in food produc- tion, industrial output, and ultimately population, within this century. The LtG authors used a system dynamics model to study interactions between global variables, vary- ing model assumptions to generate different scenarios. Previous empirical-data com- parisons since then by Turner showed closest alignment with a scenario that ended in collapse. This research constitutes a data update to LtG, by examining to what extent empirical data aligned with four LtG scenarios spanning a range of technological, resource, and societal assumptions. The research benefited from improved data avail- ability since the previous updates and included a scenario and two variables that had not been part of previous comparisons. The two scenarios aligning most closely with observed data indicate a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production over the next decade or so, which puts into question the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity’s goal in the twenty-first century. Both scenarios also indicate subsequent declines in these variables, but only one—where declines are caused by pollution— depicts a collapse. The scenario that aligned most closely in earlier comparisons was not amongst the two closest aligning scenarios in this research. The scenario with the smallest declines aligned least with empirical data; however, absolute differences were often not yet large. The four scenarios diverge significantly more after 2020, suggest- ing that the window to align with this last scenario is closing.
Read more: https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html
Of course, the original scenario had to be updated a little, to make it fit the evidence.
1.5 Updates to LtG
Several qualitative reviews of the LtG publications have described how dynamics in World3 could be observed in the real world (Bardi, 2014; Jack- son & Weber, 2016; Simmons, 2000). One such review was from LtG author Randers (2000). Around 1990, it became clear that non-renewable resources, particularly fossil fuels, had turned out to be more plentiful than assumed in the 1972 BAU scenario. Randers therefore postulated that not resource scarcity, but pollution, especially from greenhouse gases, would cause the halt in growth. This aligns with the second scenario in the LtG books. This scenario has the same assumptions as the BAU, except that it assumes double the amount of non-renewable resources. This sce- nario is referred to as BAU2, and received more focus than the BAU scenario in the second and third LtG books. More natural resources do not avoid collapse in World3; the cause changes from resource depletion to a pollution crisis.
BAU2 was quantitatively assessed in a 2015 recalibration study of World3-03 (Pasqualino, Jones, Monasterolo, & Phillips, 2015). Results indi- cated that society had invested more to abate pollution, increase food productivity, and invest in services compared to BAU2. However, the authors did not compare their calibration with SW, nor did they use their recalibrated version of World3 to run the scenario beyond the present to see if collapse was avoided. Thus, their findings could not be taken as an indication that humanity had done enough to avoid declines, as the authors themselves made sure to point out.
Quantitative comparisons between LtG scenarios and empirical data were conducted by Turner (2008, 2012, 2014). He compared global observed data for the LtG variables with 3 of the 12 scenarios from the first book: BAU, CT, and SW. Turner concluded that world data compared favorably to key features of BAU, and much more so than for the other two scenarios.
Read more: Same as above
One of the early criticisms of the original Limits to Growth was gross oversimplification. For example, the original Limits to Growth had a single factor labelled “pollution”, which we were supposed to pretend meant something. There was a suggestion in the original publication that pollution was alluding to air pollution, though it was clear they meant pollution in general, whatever that is.
In this makeover, pollution is now called Pollution (CO2) and Pollution (plastic). Neither of which is a genuine problem.
But an even bigger criticism is the setting of arbitrary limits on available resources. Bjørn Lomborg wrote a scathing critique of The Limits to Growth in 2013, which is well worth reading, which as far as I can tell applies equally to this remake.
The Limits to Panic
Jun 17, 2013
BJØRN LOMBORGWe often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas – though thoroughly discredited – are still shaping mindsets and influencing public policy.
COPENHAGEN – We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas are still with us. But time has not been kind.
The Limits to Growth warned humanity in 1972 that devastating collapse was just around the corner. But, while we have seen financial panics since then, there have been no real shortages or productive breakdowns. Instead, the resources generated by human ingenuity remain far ahead of human consumption.
But the report’s fundamental legacy remains: we have inherited a tendency to obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.
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The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilizing society at a significantly poorer level.
That message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong. For example, the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.
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Read more: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-growth-and-its-critics-by-bj-rn-lomborg
My question – given the Limits to Growth has already proven to be spectacularly wrong, why does anyone still take it seriously today?
Our cities today, at least in rich countries, are clean and healthy, with well managed pollution, except of course for those cities unfortunate enough to be managed by politicians who focus more on combatting CO2 than basic urban hygiene.
There is no evidence of any hard limit to resources. 71% of the Earth, the vastness of the ocean depths has barely been touched. In a few short years we shall have the technology to enormously enlarge our resource gathering scope.
Beyond Earth even greater riches beckon – the moon, asteroids whose density suggests billions of tons of precious metals, resources beyond any imaginable rate of consumption, just waiting for us to reach out and take them.
We were supposed to run out of crude oil in 2010, according to one Doomsday TV movie – can’t remember the name of it, there were so many – and yet, well — we’re still pumping.
Has anyone squelched that methane gas firehole in Siberia yet? Anyone? Vlad?
BBC tv Panorama c1970 had “experts” predicting that we’d run out of oil by around 2020, so we’d have to cut down on our lifestyles big time to survive!!! More fossil fuels now than ever before, result bigtime failure!!! With Brazil recently discovering the largest oil/gas field on Earth so far & that great Socialist eco-bunny lawyer Obama offering unlimited help to extract those resources from the good old US of A!!!
If you don’t know about, the Simon Aby um ndance Index is an interesting source of reality, versus doom-syaing predictions that are simply wrong in their ex anti and a priori presumptions before they start. The more people there are and the more their economies prisper, the cheaper and more plentiful the necessary resources become.
Counter intuitive but true, because we the more we need the more we look for and find, and also develop natural and synthetic replacemnts for, such a plastics for metal and glass, while the refinement of ores and the processes of manufacturing and recycling all improve with the wealth and technology generated by energy use.
https://www.humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2021/
REality trumps green delusion, every time.
What the hell did you type that with? Were you wearing thick mittens or oven gloves? Any chance you could redo at least the first part, it’s barely legible.
what we need is?
limits to gullibility
The Club of Rome is motivated by greed and self-interest, as are those who seek to profit by feeding on their leftovers. Limiting gullibility wouldn’t solve the problem, just make for fewer victims.
The update is wrong because CO2 is “neither a pollutant nor toxic but it is a greenhouse gas”.
Source: Former Chief Scientist of Australia, Dr. Alan Finkel in “Getting to Zero”,Quarterly Essay,No.81, April 2021.
So it is all down to what the greenhouse effect produces in temperature change over time and whether such change is significant and dangerous.
“Carbon pollution” is propaganda not science.
Seriously, these pathetic squashbubbles really need therapy, some kind of comfy room where they can chuck their cares right out the window and watch the clouds float by.
Just think, if they had their very own enclosed habitat, with no contact with “other”, or with the real world which is whizzing along in its orbit quite nicely, they could talk all they like, watch the clouds come and go, and have food served to them.
They really do need their own habitat. They are such a peculiar species all on their own that they need to be observed by Real Science People (from a distance, of course) and the rest of us can go about our business just fine without them.
A few years ago I did an update to a 2000 graph by an Australian researcher (Matthew Simmons) using data up to 2015. It actually doesn´t look so bad for a 50-year old prediction.
It is going to look much closer to the predictions in a few years considering the COVID pandemic effects. A lot of countries are going down the drain: Libano, Egypt, Tunnis, India.
Peak Oil took place in late 2018 (no longer in the future).
Peak Car took place in 2017.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-28/this-is-what-peak-car-looks-like
These peaks took place before COVID. Recovery will not be possible. We are entering an affordability crisis as we keep adding 70 million people to the world every year. Adding more debt to pay for things will eventually stop working.
I know this comment will not be popular here, but I am data-bound and I tell things as I see them, regardless of ideology.
Being “data-bound”, as you say, your own data (just eyeballing) says that “Non-renewable resources remaining” in 2015 were some 30% higher than predicted in 2000, “Food per capita” also higher than predicted, while “Global pollution” was 30% LOWER than predicted. Conveniently, all of the predicted peaking points postdate 2015 so the actual data, though trending very differently, still looks “in the same direction” at least with enough squinting and handwaving. No trace in the curves for Food, Services, Non-renewables of heading for a peak or even a major “dent” in the curve any time soon, just following the trajectory they already were on in 1970 or earlier. The slight underperformance in “Industrial output per capita” compared to the prediction can probably be blamed on the Ecofascist movement having massively hobbled European industry since the late 1970s (anti-nuclear and anti-“pollution” movements with subsequent over-regulation of industry resulting in reduced productivity and efficiency). Without this, not only the “Industrial” but also the “Non-renewables” curves would both be a few percents further up. The “peak oil” curve shows the Covid breakdown in Spring 2020, surely something transient rather than the beginning of a long and steady downslope: Despite the “best” efforts to continue locking down the ecomony, 1/3rd of the enforced 2020 reduction has already picked up, and at that tempo 2023 is already likely to be as high as, or higher than, 2018. “Peak car” is being orchestrated by anti-car laws (absurd “emission targets” to ruin the industry, efforts to replace workable ICE cars by useless battery-powered ones that nobody buys), so the curve again shows Ecofascism in action – a free-market car industry would continue to flourish, just as the oil industry wouldn’t have stopped flourishing in 2020 except for the anti-wealth and anti-human Covid interventions of “our” governments.
During the up-trend the peak keeps being postponed as many have noticed in these post comments. During the down-trend it is the recovery that will keep being postponed. Now it is 2023, then it will be 2024, 2025…
The truth is that the oil price required to increase production to the point it was by the end of 2018 cannot be supported by the world economy and constant decline has a heavy hand, so in a few years it will be imposible regardless of price. The oil reduction will have a perverse effect as it will affect some countries a lot and others very little, as the export market dries up.
Renewables have failed. The industrial civilization is starting its energy descent. We’ll just have to adapt.
The elites know this was coming, obviously. Hence the Agenda 2030 with its “by 2030 you’ll own nothing and be happy,” except that we are not going to be happy at all.
Every dip in oil consumption is proof that peak oil has FINALLY arrived.
Until the old records are surpassed as demand starts growing again.
How many end-of-world cults have people followed, predicting the end on this day, no that day, no the other day, and yet people keep following? How many “experts” have had their predictions go wrong over and over and over, yet people keep hanging on their every word? (i.e. Krugman)
We see this repeatedly. I’ve never understood it, but apparently that’s just how people are.
Won’t be any different here.
It’s always depressing to see resource econ illiteracy expressed in all directions from the “think tank” prediction to the targeted public and commented and interpreted by “journalists” with no training or education in the field.
It is illiteracy that keeps the scarcity message alive and profitable.
One of my favorite web comics is xkcd. Today’s xkcd is about the way activists deal with stubborn reality that doesn’t behave according to their beautiful theories. link
Recommend “Merchants of Despair” by Robert Zubrin. It’s old, but explicitly revelant.
Petr Beckmann wrote a critique that was not only scathing, but so darned funny, I had tears running down my face while reading it. Now, some of his humor won’t resonate with a modern, young audience because he speaks of things like a “stop card” in the Club of Rome similations deck, pertinent to the days of assembling a deck of punch cards to make the model run. Yet, the many points he raised in his book “Ecohysterics and the Technophobes” (1973) are surprisingly little changed from then. The fearmongering is sometimes updated slightly, but can’t be put away.
“…the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank…”
Not to be outdone, the Club of Poughkeepsie, a Burkina Faso (neé Upper Volta) thinktank, went one better than the Club of Rome with its landmark 1975 tome “The Limits to Limits.”
Using the Functional Algorithm Programming (FAP) language, the Burkinabé researchers performed extensive simulations of the World. FAP is a mid-level, scripting, misinterpreted, object-ignorant language with ultra-doubleplus-doublespeak syntax, a kernel written in Super Mario Brothers, and the rest written in…well, Super Mario Brothers. It allows the programmer to simply diddle the keyboard at random, producing code which can ingest any amount of data and, without crashing, produce vast amounts of numbers having less than no relationship to reality (it’s a very popular language in the climate science community).
Years of non-stop FAP analysis (or “FAPping”, as the programmers like to call it) produced no usable results, so the Club of Poughkeepsie senior analysts locked themselves into a room, and set about thinking through the problem. Unfortunately, they hadn’t told anyone they were doing this, and didn’t have a key with them. Their remains were discovered some months later, along with the manuscript for the The Limits to Limits.
The document was presented to the world in a 1975 press conference. The presenter spoke the most obscure of the 59 Burkina Faso languages, so no one really knows what he said. Or who he was. Or if it was even really about The Limits to Limits.
But the document’s findings have been ably summarized by later scholars, and amount to this: The limits that humanity imposes on itself in order to avoid catastrophe will be limited by the limits humanity imposes on itself, so that, in effect, our best efforts to limit ourselves will be self-limiting, and lead to the unlimited, which is always catastrophic.
Now who can argue with that?
“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
GENESIS 8:22