The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]
donellameadows.org
donellameadows.org
Everything else was just looking at elements. Technology is important, for example, but exists within a system. They looked at the system. They had to simplify and assume a lot, which the media didn't understand (probably benign ignorance) and critics blew out of proportion (probably maliciously), but I found their approach the most meaningful.
Sadly, I know many people who care about the environment but don't understand the (relatively simple) math in their approach, and many people who understand the math but don't care about the environment, but almost no one who cares and understands. So in about a decade since reading it, I haven't found anyone I can talk to about it meaningfully.
A great companion by one of the authors is Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows -- https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp....
Both changed my views more than almost any other books.
-No exhaustible has been depleted yet and the price mechanism combined with technological progress seems pretty able to set incentives straight. Look at what the oil price bubble of the '00s did for electric cars and batteries in the now. -The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled, but not the accompanying food shortages they predicted. I'd argue the shortages of the '80s and '90s are over, although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela). -Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high. -Many more humans alive at lower poverty levels than ever before and ever imagined by the Club of Rome
They got the depletion of fish stocks right though. Although arguably, that was the simplest prediction since the 'tragedy of the commons' is so profound in international fishery.
The gloom of the club of Rome just didn't work out. I guess outside of way we are treating our environment, humanity has a lot to be proud of. (I feel the environment is going bonkers and we are a plastic-addicted throw away society.)
"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat...
Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt...
Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...
Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
Own words? Most of the blog posts are done by people much smarter than me. I could do a 1 or 2 hour PPT Presentation trying to get to the point. I think only a few people would be able to follow me. Not, because I am so tremendously smarter than them (I have a PhD), but because the topic is so tremendously complex and interlinked.
What did they predict would be depleted by December 2017, and where did they predict it? Be specific please.
> The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled
Has it? What does their model predict for December 2017? Be specific.
(http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M... shows an almost perfect fit of population growth predictions and historical data until 2014)
> Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high.
Yes, that's lovely. Where did they predict otherwise, for December 2017?
> I guess outside of way we are treating our environment, humanity has a lot to be proud of. (I feel the environment is going bonkers and we are a plastic-addicted throw away society.)
Agreed.
The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet. See table 4. Add the years in columns 3 or 4 or 5 to 1972. Gold, mercury, silver were predicted to be exhausted by 2017. None are.
You are correct. In fact, they never will be depleted. Same with the oil. Most of the oil that is still in the ground will stay there.
"These forecasts are made possible by assuming the limit on the amount of oil extracted is the amount of oil in the ground. In fact, the limit is likely to be a financial (debt) limit that comes much sooner." https://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-rander...
Please also see: Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet https://www.amazon.com/Extracted-Mineral-Wealth-Plundering-P...
It is well possible we are beyond the peak already. This brings us to the "Seneca effect" http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-or...
Otherwise: Business as usual.
Own words? Most of the blog posts are done by people much smarter than me. I could do a 1 or 2 hour PPT Presentation trying to get to the point. I think only a few people would be able to follow me. Not, because I am so tremendously smarter than them (I have a PhD), but because the topic is so tremendously complex and interlinked.
This being said. It does not hurt to read this blog posts and think about them. The conclusion would be: We are f...ed. I may have a very negative outlook into the future and I hope that I am wrong. But I am afraid we are running into mathematical limits. Quote from the last blog post (Galactic energy scale) "But let’s not overlook the key point: continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable timeframes." Then again, if you understand how energy, debt, growth and our society are interlined, this is NOT good news. Stay on the level we have now? Impossible. Read the first blog post. We are running in circles.
My take-aways: all energies except nuclear are finite in about 200 years barring unrealistic technical advances (like 100% efficiency). Don't forget the catch-up consumption for the other 6.7B world citizens. That would shorten the process. Supply and demand for energy could easily create incentives to better allocate our 7000TW budget. In the long run (and we are talking really long run) S&D should allocate research (nuclear fusion for one, but consumption lowering as well) incentive compatible with our energy budget. The end of the demographic divide suggests falling population rates in 100 yrs. One of the largest drivers of that growth percentage is population growth. But that seems ending. I agree with the CoR there. Another big energy saver.
Energy usage is not my worry. Man induced climate change without the political will the make pollution endogenous to markets, that is. Market forces cannot work on CO2 without world wide agreement. I'm a market optimist and a political pessimist.
Thanks for the reference, seems a nicely concise overview. The resources and industrial output graph almost jumps out ...
I was mostly asking about details of what exact points you said they were wrong about.
> The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet. See table 4. [...] Gold, mercury, silver were predicted to be exhausted by 2017. None are.
Indeed. Thanks! Though I should add that these tables are not based on their system simulation, but simply on known reserves and know rates of consumption at the time.
Just like Moore's law, it worked much longer than anybody expected, but in the end we still hit many limits, and we can say for sure it's not going to last forever even if we don't know when it's going to really end.
They didn't predict what you said they did. They showed a range of possible outcomes based on assumptions, among many. You seem to have picked one outcome as their only one and called it their prediction.
They created a model based on a systems approach whose output depended on assumptions on physical properties of the planet and future human choices. Given the large uncertainties, they ran the model under many sets of assumptions and presented the outcomes.
The point of the book is to illustrate and promote a systems perspective, not just a linear, event-based approach, which you seem to prefer.
Perhaps I'm too much schooled in traditional economics but Robert Nobel wasn't too kind [1] and even in my environmental economics classes we spent quite some time deconstructing the Club of Rome.
The fact that certain scenarios that the Club of Rome anticipated seemed to not come true also unveiled new mechanisms to us.
Predictions can't be the benchmark, we are simply not advanced enough in the science for that.
Certainly the social sciences, like economics, should understand that best. Economics has hardly been able to predict anything.
This certainly applies to macroeconomics -- how does one empirically 'test' any prediction from a macroeconomic model based on real-life inputs, other than to see what happens? But this shouldn't preclude us from asking the really difficult questions that we care about, rather than restricting ourselves to the realm of physics, where we can get 5 sigmas in classical statistical tests.
With regards to Robert Nobel's criticism, the whole point of the Club of Rome's approach is to model a simplified, 'low resolution' view of the world economy in order to embed it in a larger network of information, goods, and energy flows constrained by the environment -- because the boundary conditions matter a lot to how the macroeconomy functions.
Sometimes you can get away with a much simpler modeling approach if you actually get all the inputs right. The biggest criticism the Club of Rome has on most macroeconomic models is that it doesn't model the environmental inputs in sufficient detail, and these things really matter a lot in the long run.
It is not simply sufficient to take current 'wage levels' or 'capital stock' or even 'level of technology' as a direct input to your DSGE RBC model -- our macroeconomies perform a quasi-ecological function of converting flows of matter and energy, largely taken from Nature and the environment, and converting them further for human use. Understanding the Nature-human interface, then explicitly modeling the stock quantities of the inputs into the macroeconomy must on some level be important, because they are key to how our entire technological society functions.
I you're inclined to learn more about their modeling approach at a high level, I highly recommend Thinking in Systems [1]. Read it a week ago and it blew my mind, as its intuitions match up with a lot of patterns that we see over and over again in dealing with any complex network, but presented in a systematic and convincing manner.
That being said... we do know that infinite exponential growth of an economy in a finite bounded space is not possible. Eventually it must either plateau or crash. We hope it plateaus. There are some positive signs in this area including most notably the decline of birth rates with development but there is no guarantee those trends will not reverse.
"Infinite" exponential growth at the scale of the universe might be possible, but the distances between even planets (e.g. Earth and Mars) make separate economies at that scale more or less separate systems. We could colonize Mars and continue growth there until that either crashes or plateaus, but that would not impact the growth model of Earth very much.
Only if the speed of light turns out not to be the hard boundary that it appears to be as of now.
If humanity is bound by any maximum speed (e.g. c, the speed of light), the maximum accessible volume of space is a sphere with radius c * t, where t is the time spent exploring the universe. The volume of this sphere is O(t^3), which is very much not exponential.
Considering people who came to Europe in the last time you can at least add Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palaestina, some African countries to this list. And I'd say (apart from often atrocious politics) it's b/c there are too many young men and no work.
> Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high
with worldwide measurable effects on the sea. (Immission probably due to only 6 large rivers, but still)
(many more signs)
I fear the Club of Rome will work out very well in time
There are examples in smaller areas, e.g. Easter Island, Trinidade South were 'over-usage' lead to consequences. I could image this to happen to the earth as a whole in time when we do not regulate.
The global system seems robust, yes. But there is plenty of oil still and most nations are stable. But who knows? This will/could change. For the former there is technology. But for the latter it seems difficult, a former-china-like-one-child-policy would be in order for certain regions, but I don't see this coming.
While the supply-side of the equation will at some point prevent growth, the dissipation side is not concerning, but alarming.
While in theory economic growth may stem purely from gains in efficiency, historically efficiency gains have spurred so much activity that the total entropy creation has increased nevertheless.
The counterproposition is that there are no limits to growth. This tends to render itself absurd in fairly short order. (Though that fact has done little to dent the propositions's popularity.)
You can find proponents of such views easily.
Julian Simon is among the better-known, having by a mix of chance and a general failure to understand economics of extractive resource economics, won a rather famous wager.
There's M.A. Adelman, an obscure, but influential, M.I.T. economist specialising in petroleum:
Minerals are essentially inexhuastible. Oil, gas, coal, and copper, for example, will never be depleted. Investment in exploration and development creates an in-ground inventory of proved reserves, constantly used and replaced.
This is an M.I.T. economist.
(Simon's arguments are even sketchier.)
An oil company CEO -- I can't recall which -- wrote an editorial in one of the major weekly magazines (I think it was The Atlantic though I haven't been able to turn it up), arguing to the effect that there were no limits to oil. This in the 1950s.
At the time, the US was some 20 years past its largest-ever on-shore oil discovery, the East Texas Oil Field, and 20 years from its own conventional production peak, in 1972. The world's largest-ever oil field, at Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, had already been discovered.
By the 1880s, the general locations of most U.S. oil finds was already well-established: they were betrayed by natural seeps and existing finds, in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and in California. Guides that rapidly appeared on how to get rich (or broke) quick in the Pennsylvania oil fields, such as Dr. Gesners (below) list out a litany of familiar locations and bearing materials, including, yes, tars, sands, and shales, as well as coal.
Again: the message is a simple one. Unending constant percentage growth is impossible. At some point it has to cease. The limits are so significant that even very crude estimates (such as those employed by the LTG models) are fairly accurate -- most of those showed a peak sometime in the 2020 - 2040 period, a result which seems borne out.
Where history has shown otherwise, it's largely been on either of two bases:
1. The growth trends slowed. This occurred in population after a phenomenal boom in the 1950s and 1960s. This had proved exceptionally concerning at numerous levels.
2. Capabilities have improved, slightly. Most especially in food production. But the improvements have themselves come at a cost of more intensive activity, greater resource utilisation (including of petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides), of topsoil erosion, and of environmental impacts.
Those two developments staved off one of the worst predictions, of global starvation by the year 2000. But the avoidance itself came through mechanisms consistent with the general concept. That is: one trend slowed, another increased, but through increased impacts. The net is a slight time shift, but a minuscule one given the history of Earth, or even of Humanity.
Ghawar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field
Oil, as seen from the 1860s:
https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n1...
Some of the cornucopians, and what they've had to say:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1xch1j/bradley...
I don't think they predicted depletion for our current era in any of the models. The only model that even came close to that was the "Business As Usual" model, which predicts a peak of production around our present time. Looking at current production levels we do see a levelling off of oil production mostly due to declining output from major fields. [0] That said, certainly depletion is a very strong claim that no one has made.
> - the price mechanism combined with technological progress seems pretty able to set incentives straight. Look at what the oil price bubble of the '00s did for electric cars and batteries in the now.
First of all, switching to electric cars will amount to a shift in what the automobile fleet burns for fuel. Instead of gasoline and diesel, they burn whatever the power plant burns, and that's still predominantly petroleum-sourced. Additionally, current lithium supplies can not support massive expansion of the fleet. If Tesla builds all the gigafactories necessary to convert the fleet (let's assume 100 million EVs per year, which is approx current auto production; requiring 800,000 metric tons of lithium) and runs them for 17 years, they will deplete the known reserves of lithium (13.5 million tons of reserves[1] divided by 800,000 = 16.9 years). Speculative Estimates from[2]
Next, A lot of the material required for an EV still has to be sourced from petroleum resources. The metals need to be refined with high-heat processes. The wheels are rubber and sourced from natural gas or oil. Lots of plastics are involved. Mining and transporting the raw resources is still done with diesel machinery.
Finally, even if EV rollout is possible, we can't do it for all the people expected to be buying cars in the future. Even replacing the developed world's fleet is a major challenge, but doing it for the world looks insurmountable at this point. Given these real constraints, I'm willing to grant that price mechanism will not overcome these problems, except insofar that it can exclude most of the world from owning cars and other resource-consuming stuff.
> - The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled, but not the accompanying food shortages they predicted.
The business-as-usual model did not properly account for how extensively we started turning petroleum into food. These days, there is a tremendous amount of embodied energy in most of the industrial food system.
> I'd argue the shortages of the '80s and '90s are over, although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela).
South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Venezuela. Also likely near-term famines in North Korea and Egypt. There are more active famines in 2017 than any recent time. Whether the number of affected people is similarly high is unknown at present.
> -Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high.
I'm not sure why this is listed as a positive. Is that what you meant?
> -Many more humans alive at lower poverty levels than ever before and ever imagined by the Club of Rome
Some models they presented in the book had far more wealth, far lower poverty, and far higher populations than our present. In these models, pollution was also far higher than our present situation. The point was that resources inevitably get converted to pollution somehow. The models show that if we find a solution to our resource problems, we'll end up with more pollution.
[0]: http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-october-production-data/ [1]: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs... [2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...
Quote from Appendix C of the government report pointed at by [2]: https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/2015/mcsapp2015....
> Reserves may be considered a working inventory of mining companies’ supply of an economically extractable mineral commodity. As such, the magnitude of that inventory is necessarily limited by many considerations, including cost of drilling, taxes, price of the mineral commodity being mined, and the demand for it. Reserves will be developed to the point of business needs and geologic limitations of economic ore grade and tonnage. For example, in 1970, identified and undiscovered world copper resources were estimated to contain 1.6 billion metric tons of copper, with reserves of about 280 million metric tons of copper. Since then, almost 480 million metric tons of copper have been produced worldwide, but world copper reserves in 2014 were estimated to be 700 million metric tons of copper, more than double those in 1970, despite the depletion by mining of more than the original estimated reserves.
Something I found especially interesting in the LtG model is that the costs of dealing with environmental damage and extracting more scarce resources build up gradually over time, but the way it works out is that economic output keeps growing rapidly, until these costs become overwhelming and it all suddenly crashes down. Everything looks great until you're on the verge of catastrophe.
But to this day, people look at our growing economy and think it refutes LtG, because they assume LtG predicts a gradual decline.
I wish I could remember details, I've been searching my hard drive for my notes.
http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M...
I always loved that the biggest leverage point in any system is to change the system itself!
> "When the facts change, I change my mind," I included because of its implied inverse: "When the facts don't change, I don't change my mind."
It is my understanding that "A implies B" does not imply "not A implies not B".
Maybe I am just hairsplitting, but when I read/hear something I see these kind of sentences as bad indicators.
You are interpreting "when" as indicating an implication, it could also be an 'if and only if'.
I should email the website team directly they probably know.
ps: mail sent
In the mean time, here are the reading suggestions I got:
- http://donellameadows.org/donella-meadows-legacy/danas-writi...
- http://donellameadows.org/archives/the-club-of-rome-and-sust...
- http://donellameadows.org/archives/forty-years-later-the-rec...
I'll ping you when the news come
http://www.videoproject.com/Last-Call.html
and this youtube film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc
which has old footage in it but is not the from the 70s conf.
Keep looking
This particularly:
There's one in particular that has an excellent bibliography, and which I've cribbed from extensively: William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, published in 1977. I'm linking the 1992 update (which might be found online via LibGen or Bo-ok.org), which doesn't depart much from the original, does extend some observations, and should include the references of the former. Both books are based on Ophuls PhD thesis (political science, Yale), published ~1972.
In particular, Ophuls looks at much of the literature of the previous 25 years or so, both on the limits side and the cornucopians.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...
You might in particular be interested in The Next Hundred Years, a view from 1950:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/next-hundred-years/oclc/12006...
Or Charles Galton Darwin's The Next Million Years. Yes, grandson of the other C.D., and with a ridiculously qualified biography of his own.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/next-million-years/oclc/14145...
Richard Meier's Science and Economic Development is also fairly mainstream:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/science-and-economic-developm...