Limits to Growth (1972)
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bit-player.org
Donella Meadows died of cerebral meningitis at the age of 59 in 2001[2], I truly wish she was someone we could be hearing from today.
What do you mean by that?
While related, they are not the same book.
If you're curious, Meadows has addresses this common counterargument about price (time stamp directly to the relevant remark, but the whole talk is excellent):
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems%3A_A_Prime...
There are very clear issues in both society and the environment that are both directly and indirectly caused by the obsession with growth.
In the modern world it seems like EVERY discussion is 'why XYZ is wrong' and there is zero defense/explanation of how/why we reached/settled on XYZ (current norms) in those discussion, just attempts to discredit xyz/norms.
A common rebuttal of the Meadows report that I keep reading is "they predicted we would run out of resources, and we never ran out of anything."
Do they mean metals ? Coal ? Oil ? (As I understand it, we _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil, but were able to replace it with shale oil et al... so it's unclear [1])
They also used simplification models which don't account for many of the cascading problems that can't be directly quantified (i.e. dragon king events, debt defaults/ponzi failures, pollution (pfas). There was an austrian report that showed we are following the business as usual approach, and that we have dangerously overshot.
Brittle systems lead to unexpected and chaotic failures.
Failures in food production, or related logistics; would spell catastrophe since half the population is dependent on peacetime technological production methods.
[1] https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n55/mode/...
[2] https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wggray/Teaching/His300/Illustrat...
That doesn't really change the math. It is a finite resource, the amount consumed keeps going up. There has to be a peak. Growth tends to be to a logarithmic or exponential curve, so adding a huge amount of extra resource doesn't change the date all that much on long timeframes.
And exponential doesnt mean the peak will be in 20 years. It could be 500 years.
And there is no way our current trend of oil use can be sustained for 500 years. By then our oil use will be negligible compared to what it is today unless something truly bizarre and unforseeable happens.
I'd give even odds there will always be use cases for burnable fuels, and almost all vehicles use burnable fuels currently. Sure seems a shorter path to just pull CO2 out of the air and keep moving along as we always have, vs electrifying everything.
Or course, the planet will be uninhabitable much, much earlier, so it doesn’t matter too much.
See for example https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/47070/20231113/earth-s...
So, to answer your question, in the part where humanity can certainly change the world to its own detrimental, but is currently not able to really put it in a state where absolutely no life form is conceivable anymore, and that even putting it a state where some hunters gatherers would not be able to survive is not a 100% garantie outcome of current trends. though I would rather consider the current trend rather awful if you ask.
Some optimization required...
Just because a relationship is linear-ish up to a point doesn't mean it always will be.
The system is trapped in a what-is-measured-is-what-is-managed loop, where we worship "growth" without understanding what it's for.
These can all be true without contradicting one other:
- Many people on the planet can't access as much energy as they need to achieve optimum happiness and wellbeing. Making more energy available to them would alleviate suffering.
- Providing enough for all 9Bn to reach their optimum without destroying the environment will be extremely difficult. There aren't enough critical minerals available with current tech for everyone to live a high-energy electric dream.
- Some have vastly more energy than they need, and depleting resources to make them richer won't make them, or anyone else, happier. There is a diminishing returns effect beyond a certain point, where a massive increase in consumption only produces a small net gain.
- Nevertheless, the super-rich do not have so much that we could redistribute it all and the poor would also have enough. Liquidate the rich, give it all away and the poor will be.. slightly less poor.
- The relationship between energy and wellbeing is not fixed or linear, and may indeed come down with time. For example, if you have an effective and energy-efficient information system, people don't need to expend as much to live a good life (you don't need to go halfway around the world to find the girl or the job, if it turns out there was a good one in the next town or city over, but if your information systems suck you'll never know). Same for matching buyers to sellers and so on.
$2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Elon Musk counts the same in global GDP as $2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Ghana. I don't need to tell you which one will do more for humanity.
I don't care if the system understands what's it for as long as the planet remains habitable. Regulators have a tough nut to crack without a world government to prevent runaway collapse due to either scarcity or abundance of energy.
I'm personally not convinced we'll get there. "S"-curves also look exponential in the first half of their lifetime. Trouble ahead, but on the positive side, don't underestimate human ingenuity when it comes to keeping those bread trucks rolling.
Looking at outcomes - within the global top 20% or so of nations, there is little correlation between GDP and happiness, freedom, life expectancy and so on. A net worth of $1B, $10B, $100B buys you weeks (if that) of life expectancy vs $10M. What do we actually think we're going to get in return for boiling the oceans? Food? Sex? Shelter? Love? Or just a bunch of AI-generated VR porn?
Whether we use conventional oil, shale or synthetics is really just an implementation issue. The basic idea of solar energy + hydrogen + carbon is pretty much common.
This doesn’t necessitate oil being cheap, just that we’ll never realistically be at a point where we’ve used up all oil.
Humans have made pretty steady progress in getting in ever more difficult forms of oil. Originally we found naturally near surface reservoirs, then started drilling, then deep sea drilling, and then fracking. Each phase was more technologically difficult.
To be clear I think a lot of technological progress is required for synthetical oil to be economical, but in a discission of resource limits across decades, centuries or millennia it's an important escape path.
To start with, there will always be a growing number of events that (relatively to our species evolution, until its disappearance) will be in the past. Not necessarily more events with artifacts to which we can have access to though.
It’s not like "consumption" is an act of annihilation of anything, this is all transformations. At least as far as energy-mass equilibrium goes.
In a sense, we can literally lose information, as it will never be possible to access it again, be it a star (the stellar body) existence that is out of observable, a species which disappeared million years ago that has let no trace of its passage on earth, or our beloved ones whose loving memory won’t last much centuries.
As such, we're emitting a more than economically optimal amount of carbon dioxide, and demand overall should drop. Hence, peak demand. More energy consumption can give us more good things, so the energy consumption itself isn't bad, but we've reached a point where the side effects of the energy consumption are eating into the benefits we get, probably past the point of marginal benefit overall.
Also the side effects of benefits have large delays, so economics are very dependent on the rate of discount you use for your net-present-value calculation...
Not remotely clear. First, we have enormous amounts of coal and uranium, so we can make electricity for thousands of years, and EVs mean that if we have to give up on oil, we can. Second, the U.S. has something like 1,200 years' worth of proven shale natural gas reserves(!), so again, we can make all the electricity we need.
And many countries have vehicle fleets that run on natural gas, so again we could give up on oil if we had to.
Manufacturing natgas-powered vehicles is way less resource intensive, and way more sustainable than manufacturing EVs. And if we have that much in the way of shale natgas reserves then running out of oil won't be as big a problem as you paint it.
The development of natgas-powered vehicles and EVs happened in spite or because of the demand inelasticity of oil.
Resource consumption goes up until it reaches a peak, then goes down. Generally, there are plenty of second peaks.
None of those places are producing at anything close to max capacity. Nobody really cares (other than the people who live there) because the world has enough shale.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story which touches on this (basically the last zookeeper/pet owner is confronted with the requirement that his ménagerie be exterminated) and also did some calculations --- if the earth's crust were converted to biomass, there would be a limiting element if memory serves, phosphorous.
It is very simplified simulation, of course. But seems to indicate that even in the absence of expansion beyond our home planet, humanity will not go extinct, but rather settle into some ground state .
From what our geological archives tell us, this seems rather the most likely scenario, even if we all managed to transform ourselves into wise people whose main trait would be temperance and judicious anticipation driven by efficient peaceful communication leading to the whole humanity living in harmony. Having a species that reach a stable form over million of years is not that easy.
But then, if all other life is so much better than human life, and if by adding 220ppm of CO2 we extended the time left for that life on Earth by a few million years, didn't our intervention save non-human life from a worse fate[0] than merely having to deal with us? So we can be both, disease and cure.
[0] All life on Earth will go extinct eventually, but if we've added a few million years to its story so far, and we could add more millions later, then maybe saying we've "saved" that life is fair.
(Of course I'm cheating - the bet stays open until I win. On the other hand I will struggle to collect my winnings)
So maybe the Earth could supply 1 trillion people with food if it was turned into a farm planet devoid of any other biodiversity but those required to support human life, assuming those 1 trillion people were living and doing all their non-agricultural industry somewhere else.
If the same could be done for amino acids, starting from feces, and if the electro-biological transducer could be mineaturized people could get it installed in their stomachs & bowels, with an extension cord coming out the exit orifice, like a vacuum cleaner...
http://bit-player.org/2012/world3-the-public-beta
The source code:
https://github.com/bit-player/limits
I haven't read "The Limits of Growth" but I assume it's from a "peak oil" perspective, predicting societal collapse once oil runs out. I think it's pretty clear we're past idea now, with solar energy and other renewable being deployed globally because of the exponentially decreasing economic costs.
One thing I do find interesting is the cyclic nature of the booms and busts of population growth predicted by the model. Even if the assumptions of the model are invalid (short term finite supply of energy) it still might explain some gross level behavior.
The World3 model came out of social studies and isn't even really science, given that the authors never tried to obtain evidence for their hypothesis before publishing. World3 is a toy with no predictive value, which is why reimplementing it in HTML is possible: it's just a handful of equations. Such a thing never could make accurate predictions, which was extremely obvious at the time and pointed out by many (e.g. Nordhaus, Smil), but this didn't stop its authors being feted as great scientists regardless.
There's a lot of similarities here with COVID modelling in the sense that these sorts of academic modelling exercises all seem to suffer the same kinds of problems and social failure modes:
• Over-simplified to the point that laypeople can easily spot what's missing.
• Guesses pulled out of thin air are treated as having equal value to measured data.
• An implicit assumption that the population is purely static and doesn't react to changing circumstances in any way. When later the predictions turn out to be wrong it's argued that they would have been right if not for the modelling causing behavioral changes, making the entire exercise unfalsifiable pseudo-science by its own premise.
• Either never validated against reality or actually falsified, but academics pretend otherwise.
• Predictions phrased vaguely enough that what most people would consider to be falsification is later argued to be within the bounds of one of the many possible scenarios.
The uselessness of such modelling exercises is evident in the fact that despite at least 50+ years of investment by academia and government into them, there are no academic computerized models widely being used to predict the course of the society or economy.
I wish the present day underpopulation panic people would get the memo. They are making the exact same errors around mindless extrapolation of present behaviors and trends. Instead of “with these birth rates we will be eating people in 50 years” it’s “with these birth rates we will go extinct!”
There are things to be very concerned about. What happens when you take current behavior and trends and drag it forward on a spreadsheet is not one of them. “If our company continues this growth trajectory we will be worth more than the entire global economy in 25 years!” Every single one of these models and panics is a version of that thinking.
I think a more useful question when faced with such predictions is “how will this not happen?”
With economics too there is a problem that a correct prediction that is acted on will be gamed and become a self defeating seemingly "wrong" prediction.
I think the 2022 recession calls were probably a good example.
If everyone believes there is going to be a recession in the future and everyone acts to avoid the recession we can't know the counter factual in the economy of not predicting the recession to know what was the right prediction.
I have read this process referred to reflexivity but even a best selling trading book by George Soros himself didn't get this idea to stick in the popular mind.
It seems like prediction is not even the right word to use or we should have a different word for a prediction that can influence the outcome of what it is predicting. Then there is even strong and weak versions of this process that we haven't bothered to separate from the proper word prediction in the sense of weather prediction. That the prediction is basically independent of what it is trying to predict.
Unfortunately people keep buying linear models for this.
This is why I was careful in my post to talk about public sector models (academic, government). There are lots of private sector actors successfully modelling aspects of society and the economy: actuaries, quants, even day traders. They're all acting on the predictions of a private model in a dynamic and even adversarial environment, yet they succeed. The problems here are not on the conceptual level, they're to do with the prevalence of sub-zero intellectual standards in the public sector. Nobody forces academics to make a big fuss over models that have never been validated, or which have massive CIs, or which generate so many or such long term 'scenarios' that they're effectively unfalsifiable.
All these things are the kind of pseudo-scientific modelling practices that result in firings or bankruptcies when done in the "real world". Government subsidies keep the low standards going in the public sector. Ultimately, ending this farce requires the social studies to be defunded, as is now happening in NZ and hopefully soon in the rest of the world.
The inputs don't matter that much when you are growing exponentially. By the time you get pricing signals, you are already cooked.
Its like bacteria in a petri dish, one day you are at 12% full, then, 25%, then 50%, then 100%, then you die off.
We are already seeing the early signs of the system collapse with climate change and we have more and more people pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
The keystone of modern society is agriculture, which was only possible because the climate stabilize 20k years ago. We are destabilizing that climate and are in uncharted territory. We had the opportunity to do a course correction when the book was published but people like you down played the ramifications. In the last 50 years we have done nothing and are now cooked.
Bluntly, "you don't understand exponential growth" is the sort of thing said by people who don't understand it themselves. I'm really sick of this meme. COVID was full of nonsense being talked about exponential growth, and I was calling it out from the start (e.g. here on HN [1]). A huge number of people are confused about this topic, probably because so many of the self-proclaimed experts presented by media and government are also confused.
Limits To Growth and similar socialist/green arguments have several problems with the concept:
1. An implicit assumption that populations naturally grow exponentially until they run out of resources. They don't. There are many periods in human history where populations were stable for thousands or even tens of thousands of years, or where they actively shrunk despite not fully exploiting their resources. Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the history of the Australian Aboriginals and the whole modern developed world are examples of this.
2. An assumption that GDP cannot grow forever, even though it can. GDP isn't a natural resource, it's a number on a ledger. Nothing stops GDP growing exponentially because it's basically a multiplier of population and productivity (broadly defined as "technology"), and there's no known limit on technological progress.
3. To try and make (2) seem more plausible they ignore the possibility of technological progress reducing resource requirements. This is the problem Malthus had. But technology fundamentally changes the relationship between man and his environment, eliminating some constraints whilst creating others. Before fission was harnessed, nobody cared about uranium extraction. The resource was ignored by all arguments about limits to human growth. After reactors were invented uranium limits suddenly became relevant and coal limits became much less relevant, but uranium is abundant and power plants need hardly any, so this basically eliminated electricity generation as a meaningful constraint on human growth. For the societies that choose to use it, at least.
I learned these lessons the hard way early on in life. It was 2004 and there was one of the semi-regularly occurring peak oil scares happening at that time, which a friend turned me on to. The argument for peak oil at first seems irrefutable: oil is a finite resource, fields run dry, we're using lots of it and in many use cases there's no known replacement. On top of that, in 2004 world production wasn't increasing despite prices growing to never before seen levels, which gave the appearance of unsolvable supply constraints, and there were signs that the secretive Saudis could not pump more. The scare ended thanks to a few things: the 2008 recession (killed some demand for a while), the Bush Iraq troop surge, and fracking. The latter was known about in peak oil circles but at the time the technology was not yet proven, and many dismissed it as delusional "cornucopianism", meaning the belief that the needs of humanity can be solved through technology. Others said it can't work because of a pseudo-economic concept called EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Of course we know what happened next: the US made fracking work and the US oil industry went from long term decline to the world's top producer of oil again. That broke the back of OPEC and prices fell again, albeit not to the low level they were at pre-2004.
20 years later and I just filled up my car for $2.89 ...