Essay by Eric Worrall
Guardian author Alex Clark wants the world to “move beyond” GDP as a measure of wellbeing. The experiment should start with The Guardian.
Economic growth is still heating the planet. Is there any way out?
Rising GDP continues to mean more carbon emissions and wider damage to the planet. Can the two be decoupled?
Alex Clark
Mon 9 Feb 2026 19.00 AEDT
During Cop30 negotiations in Brazil last year, delegates heard a familiar argument: rising emissions are unavoidable for countries pursuing growth.
That pattern seems to be holding. In 2024, global GDP per capita reached a new high as did annual carbon emissions. But as climate targets slip and warnings mount that tipping points may already have been crossed, faith in growth for growth’s sake is starting to fracture.This week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called for economies to “move beyond GDP” as a measure of progress, warning that the world’s “existing accounting systems” were driving the planet towards disaster.
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The standard run of the Limits to Growth model predicted a tipping point beginning in the 2020s.
…Now we are in the 2020s and it is unclear if we are facing the scenario Limits to Growth described.
Why we have avoided this – and whether we ultimately will – are key questions in post-growth economics.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/feb/09/economic-growth-carbon-emissions-impact-global-heating
The Limits to Growth. Wow.
The fact we are still happy and prosperous in the 2020s, a deadline which Limits to Growth implicitly sets as a tipping point, should be a hint that Limits to Growth calculations were a pile of junk (see the graph at the top of this article).
But let’s be fair and give the authors a chance to speak. What did Limits say about the timing of events in their graph?
The exact timing of these events is not meaningful, given the great aggregation and many uncertainties in the model. It is significant, however, that growth is stopped well before the year 2100. We have tried in every doubtful case to make the most optimistic estimate of unknown quantities, and we have also ignored discontinuous events such as wars or epidemics, which might act to bring an end to growth even sooner than our model would indicate. In other words, the model is biased to allow growth to continue longer than it probably can continue in the real world. We can thus say with some confidence that, under the assumption of no major change in the present system, population and industrial growth will certainly stop within the next century, at the latest.
Read more: Page 126, https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
So they’re not taking responsibility if they are wrong about the “exact timing”, but they think their graph is optimistic.
One of my favourite responses to The Limits to Growth was published by The New York Times in 1972, shortly after the publication of Limits. NYT points out inevitable doom was baked into the Limits to Growth calculations, by attaching exponential growth in needs and consequences to an arbitrary estimate of limits – completely ignoring that we’ve never encountered a limit we cannot overcome.
… “The Limits to Growth,” in our view, is an empty and misleading work. Its imposing apparatus of computer technology and systems jargon conceals a kind of intellectual Rube Goldberg device—one which takes arbitrary assumptions, shakes them up and comes out with arbitrary conclusions that have the ring of science. “Limits” pretends to a degree of certainty so exaggerated as to obscure the few modest (and unoriginal) insights that it genuinely contains. Less than pseudoscience and little more than polemical fiction, “The Limits to Growth” is best summarized not as a rediscovery of the laws of nature but as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
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As a first approximation of the future, the authors assume that the world is utterly incapable of adjusting to problems of scarcity. Technology stagnates and pollution is ignored, even as it chokes millions to death. A shortage of raw materials prevents industry and agriculture from keeping up with population growth. World reserves of vital materials (silver, tungsten, mercury, etc.) are exhausted within 40 years. Around 2020 the pinch becomes tight enough to cause a fall in per capita income. A few decades later, malnutrition and lagging health services abruptly reverse the climbing population trend. By the year 2100 the resource base has shrunk so badly that the world economy is unable to sustain even 19th‐century living standards.
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It is no coincidence that all the simulations based on the Meadows world model invariably end in collapse. As in any simulation, the results depend on the information initially fed to the computer. And the “Limits” team fixes the wheel; no matter how ‘many times you play there is only one possible outcome. Critical to their model is the notion that growth produces stresses (pollution, resource demands, food requirements) which multiply geometrically. Like compound interest on a savings account, these stresses accumulate at a pace that constantly accelerates: Every child born is not only another mouth to feed but another potential parent. Every new factory not only drains away exhaustible resources but increases our capacity to build more factories. Geometric (or as mathematicians prefer to call it, exponential) growth must eventually produce spectacular results. If the Indians who sold Manhattan 300 years ago for $24 could have left their money untouched in a bank paying 7 per cent (a number chosen no more arbitrarily than many in “Limits”) they would have more than $25‐billion today.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/02/archives/the-limits-to-growth-a-report-for-the-club-of-romes-project-on-the.html
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As for post growth economics, why not lead by example? The Guardian could make a start right in the offices of The Guardian.
Borrowing from one of my favourite authors PJ O’Rourke‘s writing on post growth economics, let’s replace Guardian salary income with hugs.
If every Guardian reporter were to voluntarily take a £100 / week pay cut, and instead receive a hug every day from the senior manager of their choice, that would be a powerful statement of commitment to disavowing money and economic growth as the sole measure of human wellbeing.
After all, a hug is a way of improving your happiness which doesn’t involve damaging economic activity. Receiving a hug instead of money eliminates an entire cascade of greenhouse gas emissions which spending that £100 and circulating that £100 through the economy could have caused.
For the truly climate ambitious Guardian staff, when they receive a promotion, they could demand two hugs per day instead of an increase in salary.
As for senior management, look how many hugs they would receive under this system. This would be an opportunity for senior management to equalise the monetary component of their salaries with their workers, while receiving lots human kindness and hugs in place of all the money they would otherwise have earned. The village which is The Guardian could become truly equal, with love replacing monetary reward for those who have the toughest jobs.
Of course the damage would still occur if a selfish senior manager trousered the missing £100 salary sacrifices and spent the money, so that money must never be spent. Destroying money is illegal in the UK, so throw it into a vault with no door, just a slot for shoving in money.
Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath waiting for that post growth economic experiment to be implemented.
Once they get deliberately rid of reliable energy and food supplies…..
Yes, populations could crash.
It’s true – you can’t fix stupid!
The authors of Limits to Growth have probably never managed to play SimCity for more than an hour without summoning Godzilla to do some earthmoving, and it’s highly likely they’ve suffered a few crushing defeats at Monopoly. My interpretation might be a tad psychoanalytic, but I find it more amusing than imagining that these people have developed, innately, such an aversion to the very idea of progress, development, and human well-being that only capitalism has engendered.
And I say this as someone who has always hated Monopoly and has never managed to build a single city in SimCity without it ending up like something out of a kaiju movie.
“Kaiju, Japanese for “strange beast” or “giant monster,” refers to a genre of films and media featuring massive creatures, often destroying cities or battling each other. Originating from Japanese cinema with Godzilla (1954)”
That’s right! What brave beasts, those monstrous lizards and other giant moths.
Socialists for the most part have never succeeded in life. Despite the fact that they always got participation trophies while in school, they have met nothing but disappointment out in the real world.
Instead of blaming themselves and working harder, they blame the system and seek to destroy it.
This is something I’ve noticed as well. I was never a good student, in middle school or in high school, but it never crossed my mind to blame society for my lack of interest in studying. On the other hand, I have “conservative” cultural interests (I would simply call it common sense), and there is truly no way to make me prefer today’s subculture, in terms of music or literature, to the great French or Francophone lyricists such as Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel, or Félix Leclerc, or to great poets like Saint-John Perse, Dylan Thomas, or Gaston Miron.
More generally, I find it rather amusing to have accumulated, over the past few months, a body of popularized scientific knowledge that is probably greater—one might think—than that of most eco-leftists, who are convinced that humanity is destroying the planet and that we will all be more or less dead by the end of the century if we do not put an end to capitalism.
Though to “win” the original SimCity (by reaching 600k population), you need to do a lot of counterintuitive things that no sane city planner would sign off on.
And Monopoly was originally “The Landlord’s Game,” created by (iirc) a Quaker wife who wanted to teach her kids about those sinful, scummy landlords. If the game feels like an unfun slog most of the time, be assured that was by design.
Oh, I didn’t know that anecdote about Monopoly! I actually find it quite consistent with the overall “software” of Malthusians and degrowth advocates: few pleasures, lots of austerity, a demonization of abundance, and if you’re not happy under those conditions, then you’re the problem. It feels like something straight out of 19th-century Protestantism, hostile to any kind of distraction and to any activity other than the austere contemplation of God. Well, God has been replaced by Mother Earth, and I don’t think I’m taking much of a risk in saying that some of the pastors of that era were more cultured—at least when it came to classical literature—than many contemporary technocrats and other would-be dictators.
I’ve heard many times that mayors play SimCity to “understand” how to organize a city, but that has always struck me as, at the very least, absurd. The real danger would rather be believing that managing a city can be something simple… which it most certainly is not.
That said, if the “Reset to zero via dinosaur-monster attack” option were available, some might well have given in to the temptation!
Good news: We aren’t eating Soylent Green made of people yet
Bad news: I still have to be careful to not accidentally buy that awful “impossible” meat in the frozen foods section
The Club of Rome should have discredited unbased computer models forever. As essentially all the input numbers are pulled out of their nether regions, it is mere sagecraft, as bad as a liability lawyer’s expert witnesses.
Only a genius can predict technological development, and most geniuses will actually get it wrong. A predicted 9ft of horse manure in London streets early in the industrial revolution shows how people cannot see ahead. But if you want to sell copy you have to predict doom. I reckon that AI has the potential to lift living standards much as the industrial revolution did, and I am confident that very many others think that way too, but that idea isn’t going to get into a headline any time soon. [Make that any headline, any time]
I agree with the thrashing of Limits of Growth. But:
“If every Guardian reporter were to voluntarily take a £100 / week pay cut, and instead receive a hug every day from the senior manager of their choice, that would be a powerful …” lawsuit for emotional trauma and sexual misconduct.
Who cares about lawsuits? The hugs are a plan to save the planet 🙂
Not if the hugs are consensual.
Guardian editor to reporters: “It’s time for your weekly hugs!”
Guardian reporter: “Did you bathe recently?”
I think they should get what graduates from the University of East Anglia School of Idioting get; a diploma, a handful of mud to the face, and a kick in the head.
h/t Monty Python.
World-wide adoption of renewables (wind + solar) only would plunge humanity into a very dark age indeed, renewables can’t make renewables.
The only reason wind and solar exist for the time being is because the hardware is manufactured in China using coal.
US has reduced emissions mainly by substituting natural gas for coal for electricity generation, fracking being a major factor.
UK France and Germany had anaemic or no net GDP growth since around 2008 when climate policies were adopted, time will tell how long the plebs will put up with that.
The most remarkable decline since 1972 is in the quality of journalism at the NYT.
Guterres framed it as an accounting system problem, that we “need to move beyond GDP as a measure of progress”. In other words, to his way of thinking, wealth is the problem. But as usual, he has things totally backwards. No surprise. How Clark jumped from that to “Limits of Growth” is odd to say the least. The only thing trying to limit growth is the anti-human, anti-CO2 Climate Cabal.
Perhaps Guterres (a Portuguese former Maoist) could show us all the way by foregoing his generous UN salary.
Certainly the cost of hitherto basic resources is climbing steeply.
However much better we have managed to sustain growth to date, the planet does not have infinite resources.
It is inevitable that at some point the world economy will have to transition from ‘exponential growth in everything’ to steady state or even falling GDP (in real terms) accompanied by population decreases.
This will happen in different regions at different times.
The greatest fear among economists is that this will result in unsustainable debt burden: There will need to be a global debt moratorium.
As yet no politician has deemed the public intelligent enough to deal with this situation, so they are simply lying about it.
The claim resources are finite simply isn’t true, in terms of them being an economic limit to expansion.
7/8 of the world has barely been touched – undersea mining will keep us going for at least a century. There is enough Thorium in sea water to power our civilisation for a million years, once some clever bugger figures out how to economically extract it.
There are vast amounts of untapped minerals under the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, just waiting for someone to build an armoured nuclear powered melt borer to get to the good stuff.
Deep mantle mining will also become a thing – either triggering artificial volcanic eruptions to bring the minerals to us, or digging deep with as yet undeveloped engineering technologies, perhaps super efficient cooling systems to stabilise hot mantle rock as the good stuff is extracted.
At some point our engineering capacity will grow to the point that it will become economical to mine the moon or the asteroids. Self replicating AI mining robots will scour the solar system for resources, feeding our growing needs.
When we run out of asteroids, by then nuclear synthesis will be a thing – mining the atmosphere of the gas giant planets or the sun for material to feed into giant nuclear fusion reactors to produce whatever minerals we require.
When the sun starts to look depleted, frankly the technological solution to that problem is someone elses problem.
Actually if you were to scrape off the top 20 meters of the continents…you would find a new planet’s worth of natural resources where you didn’t realize there were any….
You seem not to have taken into account that most metals (copper, silver, iron, manganese etc) can be recycled.
While I do not agree with points made, these points certainly deserve conversation and debate.
One point missing. We are on the cusp of major resource acquisition from space, especially the asteroid belt. While the resources of this abundant planet are limited, influx from extra terrestrial sources will augment those. Then, too, is a robust recycling and reuse effort. We are not doomed. We intelligent monkeys do seem to always find new and better ways. It is not time to write us off yet.
FIrst off, there are plenty of resources to power hundreds of years of exponential growth.
Secondly, most “economic growth” in the west involves better computers and fancier cars.
Third, most economic growth, world wide, requires reliable and affordable energy.
I am unclear why Leo and I received down votes.
Leo made points that are valid, including how politicians are lying.
I made points that we are not constrained to the bountiful, yet finite, resources of this planet.
Puzzling.
One should look at that graph, not as an indication of trend, but as a plan. Then it makes some kind of sense. The Guardian has long been the gatekeeper of nonsense. They continue this nonsense even though their readership declines year on year. The Guardian, the bbc, the gov’t, all conspire amongst themselves to deceive the public.
There was a time when the NYT was a real newspaper with people who could think.
I was thinking that as I pasted the quote.
The one flaw in your suggestion, THIS is senior staff at The Guardian…
For some reason, he reminds me of these guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statler_and_Waldorf
I love those old school graphics with ‘D’s, ‘B’s and ‘S’s gliding across green bar paper. Well, it came from a computer so it’s got to be correct!
In the mid 1980s I picked up a book at a used book store written by Petr Beckmann entitled “Ecohysteria and the Technophobes’. He skewered the Club of Rome and its Limits to Growth efforts in such a devastating and humorous way that I laughed at times until I had tears running down my face. I recommend the book despite its age because what he describes still applies to much of simulation.
You see, from the conditions they set for their simulation runs, the only possible response was to ration resources ever more stringently. All this would do is delay the inevitable, not alter the end point. As Buggs Bunny would say … “What a bunch of dopes!”
Maroons is more the word Bugs would ues.
I don’t think hugs are environmentally friendly or sustainable. I would suggest the use of ‘jazz hands’, fist bumps, elbow bumps and twerking carried out sequentially in a ritualistic commie manner. Perhaps all the employees could perform this together while singing ‘La Bomba’, to the tune of La Bamba.
You must have watched LX halftime show. 😉
Over at overshoot.footprintnetwork.org it is claimed we (humans) are getting through 1.8 Earths a year and we have been exeeding what the Earth provides for over 50 years. Logic and maths don’t seem to be strong points for the Club of Rome offspring but they are confident to put all these claims out there without any regard for the ambarrasment to their Grand Children down the line. Have they thought this through?
The real disasters here would be caused by anyone listening to Guterres or believing any of the alarmism peddled after each COP conference. Give us a rest, already!
Butan’s GDP is measured by Gross Domestic Happiness… by order of the king.
Perhaps hugs as payment are not that big a stretch after all ?
You could be onto something.!
A brilliant idea. Alas, we know it will never happen because in modern Progressivism, it’s always up to someone else to make the real sacrifices.