The Origins of Climate Catastrophism: The Club of Rome
The idea of zero growth did not take root in the neo-Marxist movement.
It is no exaggeration to say that most politicians, media and public figures nowadays conform to the religion of global warming and prostrate themselves before the green god. Not a single day passes without being bombarded with messages prompting us to consider “climate change” only through the prism of urgency. According to the most pessimistic of the green cultists, humanity has less than a decade to reverse the trend before the planet is pushed to its limits.
But the war against “climate change” didn’t start yesterday. We too often forget that the foot soldiers of the climate church belong to a lineage that goes back a little over 50 years. Surprisingly, the forefathers of this lineage were not the stereotypical hippies driving Volkswagen Beetles. On the contrary, environmental alarmism’s roots are more closely linked to a specific group within the liberal elite: The Club of Rome.
The Limits to Growth
The Club of Rome was founded in April 1968 by an Italian industrialist, Aurelio Peccei, and a Scottish scientist, Alexander King. Many notable members joined the organization over time, including Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the father of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In 1970, the Club commissioned a study “on the exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation.”
An empty formula that only the researchers who conducted the study at the very liberal Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could understand. Two years later, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III gave birth to a monster, a report called The Limits to Growth.
The report’s conclusion was rather fatalistic: humanity must stop pursuing unlimited growth to preserve the global system from a possible collapse. And the researchers didn’t fail to emphasize the urgency of the matter: the longer action is delayed, the less manageable the problem will be, they wrote.
The Limits to Growth was the first major study to highlight the dangers posed by economic and demographic growth to Earth and humanity. If the report is now considered a pioneering work in green literature, it was slammed by academics, economists and even businessmen when it came out, with most accusing its authors of misleading the public.
Friedrich Hayek, a 1974 Nobel Prize winner in economics and representative of the liberal Austrian school, had foreseen what the report would cause and warned the world about it: “The enormous publicity recently given by the media to a report pronouncing in the name of science on The Limits to Growth, and the silence of the same media about the devastating criticism this report has received from the competent experts, must make one feel somewhat apprehensive about the use to which the prestige of science can be put. But it is by no means only in the field of economics that far-reaching claims are made on behalf of a more scientific direction of all human activities and the desirability of replacing spontaneous processes by ‘conscious human control’. If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.”
Unlike today’s green fanatics, the co-founder of The Club of Rome, Aurelio Peccei, had distanced himself from the report, stating, “Naturally, we realize that non-growth is neither possible nor desirable.”
Still, since The Limits to Growth was published, the world has gone through five decades of false predictions about climate change.
Sources
