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...