Life on a limitless planet: 50 years on from “Limits to growth”
Exploring Economics and Governance in a New World (4)
This month we ‘celebrate’ 50 years since a team of scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, led by Donella and Dennis Meadows, published their seminal “Limits to Growth” report commissioned by the Club of Rome.
Just a few years earlier, The Club of Rome had emerged as an initially informal group of people, convened with a view of aiming to foster better understanding of the varied but interconnected components that make up the global system. This led the Club to initiate an ambitious project to explore the “Predicament of Mankind” by examining the complex problems faced by humanity.
Even though we’re now talking about 1972, the challenges they were concerned with sound as relevant as ever: e.g. the occurrence of poverty in the midst of plenty; degradation of the environment; loss of faith in institutions; uncontrolled urban development; insecurity of employment; alienation of the youth; rejection of traditional values; and inflation and other monetary and economic disruptions.
The resulting publication on Limits to Growth was informed by one of the first computer modelling studies. The model, Earth3, modeled a variety of scenarios including the so called “standard run” and 11 others. This ranged from scenarios which assumed twice as much resource availability as known at that time, to those that would introduce ‘stabilization’ policies such as stabilizing the world’s population, stabilizing capital accumulation, and introducing pollution controls.
Although the resulting book sold millions of copies and helped spur the environmental movement, Limits to Growth was equally despised and ridiculed, with the likes of Nature and The New York Times considering it a flawed and misleading ‘doomsday’ scenario. Criticism was surprisingly fierce, even though the authors had not set out to model a worst-case forecast of future events. The “standard run” was simply a long-term Business-As-Usual scenario of the then-present global trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion.
In fact, the standard run did deliberately not account for potentially destabilizing events, such as wars and pandemics, that could worsen the outcomes. In addition, the team set out in several scenarios how the impacts of BAU could be avoided or mitigated if we took timely action. As Donella Meadows said many years later “We saw, with the help of the computer, not one future but many, all possible, some terrible, some terrific.”
Its labeling however as empty, misleading, or even irresponsible nonsense conveniently allowed policy makers to be relieved of any moral obligation to consider the implications of the book and its BAU scenario, and by and large the world has continued to ignore its message ever since. Perhaps not surprisingly, over the past half century, the world has progressed fairly close to the standard run as presented back in 1972, showing continued growth of several key variables modelled; and with the model assuming that over the next decade or two, the principal trends will start peaking out and then begin to decline — probably even sharply.
Now look at the Run 1 graph, find 2022, and see where the food and natural resource curves would be heading according to this 50-year old model. Nonetheless, our physical resources — whether it’s the metals and minerals that have to fuel the renewable energy transition or the food we produce to feed a growing world population - receive considerably less attention in the environmental debate than climate change. With it, there appears to be a background assumption that, if we reduce emissions to “net zero”, we will have sufficiently avoided major harm and can continue living our lives on this planet with 8 billion people or more. Even the extremely credible IPCC reports so far only assume scenarios of continued growth.
This however is far from a given, with a relatively high likelihood of future shortages and resulting conflicts; potentially even collapse with a rapid decline in population. Perhaps it’s not even surprising that decisive action has been lacking: in humanity’s few hundred thousands years of evolution, a focus on the short-term nearby rather than the long-term far away has so far provided us with high survival value.
Although the window for constructive action is considerably shorter than when Limits to Growth came out, the fact that soon we may be faced with having no choice but to conform with ecological reality may also become our savior as it creates room for a profound overhaul of our fundamental enabling systems, such as the way we run our economies, the way we govern, the way we finance, and the way we relate to each other.
I therefore conclude by letting Donella Meadows have the last word: “I’ve grown impatient with the kind of debate we used to have about whether the optimists or the pessimists are right. Neither are right. There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.”
