Everyone says they want "progress". Progress is an unqualified _good_, right?
Unless your doctor says you have a "progressive illness". That's not good!
The way to understand this is as the difference between scalars and vectors. In Newtonian reality things like mass and time are scalars. More is just more. Later is just later.
But ideas like progress are _vectors_, with magnitude and direction.
Progress toward what?
Growth sounds like a scalar, because we are used to the common-sense usage. Things just get bigger or smaller (in 3-dimensional volume usually). But really it's a vector in a multi-dimensional space of human and economic values. In that sense, GDP is a naive vestige of 19th century economics.
So the question "are there limits to growth?" is meaningless. And Meadows knew that. Given what we really know about the universe we're in, the answer is probably "Hell, no! To infinity and beyond..."
But the _actual_ question is more like: "Given the finite resources of the environment, human lifespans, available knowledge.. and so on..., at what point does economic and industrial growth in <_these specific ways_> stop adding to overall human happiness, utility and long term survival?"
But we've been stuck with economists and politicians for 50 years who are basically too stupid to take such a complex question on-board. They just wanna talk about "growth = good"