Alarmists or Cassandra’s heirs?
Apollo was a Greek god with an eye for a priestess named Cassandra. He gifted her the ability to foresee the future, hoping his unsolicited gift would convince her to sleep with him. When she said “Aπokaeietai!” (No way!), he laid a curse on her such that no one ever believed her prophesies, all of which eventually proved correct.
This little story brings me to a new look at the limits to growth. Back in the 1970s a common world view was that the technologies that had been developed for wartime destruction had been redeployed in peacetime to produce faster trains, planes and cars, more and better TVS, cassette players, VCRS, video games, yadda yadda, yadda. Life was good and getting better, all of which meant spectacular economic growth.
Aurelio Peccei, an Italian businessman running car maker Fiat spent a lot of time wondering how economic growth would affect civilization. He created an organization called the Club of Rome and commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study the effects of burgeoning industrialization. MIT researchers looked at five basic factors -population increase, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation. The MIT team fed data on these five factors into a global computer model and then tested the model under several sets of assumptions to determine alternative patterns for mankind’s future. “The Limits to Growth”, published in 1972, is the nontechnical report of their findings.
The authors said the scenarios were not predictions. They said they wanted to illustrate complex interrelationships within a dynamic system that was growing exponentially. Most of the computer scenarios showed more-or-less expected population and economic growth until the year 2050. After that, there was a tipping point that marked a sharp and unstoppable reduction in population and industrial capacity, combined with environmental destruction and widely depleted raw materials before 2100. Moreover, they concluded, a possible state of equilibrium could only be achieved if the world undertook the implementation of massive countermeasures to growth.
Criticism was swift and heated, especially by those who were doing well in those go-go years. They pointed to Thomas Malthus, who 150 years earlier had predicted that uncontrolled population growth would lead to poverty, starvation and population decline. Never happened. They scoffed that the Limits to Growth folks had underestimated human ingenuity and its ability to develop new technologies to solve any impending crisis or scarcity.
The 1972 warnings about reaching various of Earth’s system boundaries has prompted the creation of lots more organizations to deal with climate change and related issues but change on the scale suggested hasn’t happened. Today, 50 more years of accessible data and more powerful computers allow for faster modeling and data comparison than was possible in 1972. An update of “The Limits to Growth” has been done using 2022-2023 data. Here’s a link to the study: https://doi.org/10.1111/ jiec.13442
The recalibrated
model
again shows the possibility of a collapse of our current system – indeed, the 1972 model is remarkably consistent with the most recently collected data. The collapse of the system, due to resource depletion or pollution remains in almost the same timeframe as the original report. The impact of recent crises, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the Covid-19 pandemic are reflected in the new data, for example, the increase in mortality in 2020 and the decrease in investment in 2008 and 2020.
The new researchers conclude that “…despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society.”
Technology has proceeded apace since VCRS, solving crises, developing new materials, processes and products. What should we make of these new authors? Alarmists? Or descendants of Cassandra – destined to be right – and doomed to be ignored?
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