Write about peak oil, environmentalism, or any kind of resource constraints to enough people, and you'll eventually meet someone who stopped reading books after 1973. That is, this person -- male or female -- will remember one thing, and one thing only: The Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1973, and the results were mocked, dismissed, and eventually disproved by the glut and economic expansion of the 1980s and 1990s.
When our hypothetical person remembers this, they will mock your concern, dismiss it, and expect it to be disproved by history. Pretty cocky for a book that was released more than 30 years ago, but LTG has taken on a far more important role than the one it's authors intended -- the useful straw man for the corporate apologists of the world.
Except, of course, that Meadows et al (the authors of LTG) were right, and their critics were wrong. I read Matt Simmons' defense of LTG a while back, and you should read it now. But what got me thinking about this book -- which, sad to say, I have yet to read -- was the presentation [PDF] by Dennis Meadows (husband of the late Donella Meadows, lead author of LTG) to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil.
Meadows drily remarks:
One does not need a computer model to prove there are physical limits to physical growth on a physically finite planet. That was not our goal, and it was not our main contribution. Our contribution was to show that population and industrial growth are inherently exponential; and that exponential growth takes one to any existing limit quickly, whatever its magnitude. We showed also that global society will most likely adjust to limits by overshoot and collapse, not by S-shaped growth. But sustainable development is possible, if important changes are made.
It is not, as you might expect, a bright, easy read. But it is critical to understand that so long as we are addicted to exponential economic growth, we really have only three choices:
- Find more resources and energy. (Happening, but not quickly enough anymore.)
- Become radically more efficient at resource consumption. (Ditto -- happening, but not enough.)
- Choke on our own waste, while the engine of growth seizes and dies because of a lack of available inputs.
These are undeniable conclusions of our existence. These are not hypotheses, they are mathematical facts. They are exactly the same arguments made by the authors of LTG, and they deserved to have been taken seriously, not dismissed by right-wing economists or corporate shills. We have failed to do so, and if we continue to do so we are courting disaster.
(For an excellent video on how crucial exponential math is, watch this lecture by Albert Bartlett, or listen to the MP3 here.)
Comments
View as Flat
David Foley Posted 11:47 am
31 Aug 2006
I heartily recommend that people read The Limits To Gorwth for themselves. Better yet, read the 1992 sequel, called Beyond The Limits, which is, I think, better than the original or its 2002 successor.
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Jason D Scorse Posted 3:53 am
01 Sep 2006
Technology growth is also exponential
Efficiency can become so as well
Population is projected to start decreasing towards the middle of the century (caused by increased material wealth)
Yes, we have environmental problems
Yes, there are constraints
Yes, we need to act
But no, the Limits to Growth and other neo-Malthusiasn treatises are not very helpful...
J.S.
Assistant Professor
Monterey Institute of International Studies
http://policy.miis.edu/faculty/faculty.html?id=171
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danterpstra Posted 8:05 am
02 Sep 2006
Seems to me that efficiency improvement isn't exponential. It's asymptotic. But then, I found the discussions in 'Limits to Growth' to be very helpful...
- dan
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JMG Posted 11:53 am
02 Sep 2006
The three statements:
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1 Technology growth is also exponential
2 Efficiency can become so as well
3 Population is projected to start decreasing towards the middle of the century (caused by increased material wealth)
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are only sound statements from an economist's perspective, where hand-waving and pedigree count as evidence.
Engineers, scientists, and historians of both fields, on the other hand, know that all technologies follow an s-curve, which, as you noted, approaches a maxima asymptotically.
And of course, as you also noted, efficiency can -not- become exponential, both as a matter of definition but also as a matter of fact.
Last, given that we have already far overshot the world's carrying capacity, we will probably see population peak at around 8 billion or less, just before it crashes hard.
(But don't tell the economists, they get surly when you suggest that the economy is a subset of the environment, rather than forming the overall space in which the environment is simply a sector . . . )
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JMG Posted 1:19 pm
02 Sep 2006
It is a very enjoyable 57 minutes of sanity by a real hero--a physicist who has spent thousands of hours giving his talk to try and show people why the economists' fantasy is just that. Worth a look. Transcripts also available there.
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461
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bookerly Posted 9:07 pm
02 Sep 2006
For some more scientists discussing Dr. Barlett,
try this link.
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-11/p12.html
Barlett gets no respect from me, he belongs to the group of right wing neo-malthusians who oppose such things as feeding the poor (since it encourages them to breed, thus increasing population pressure).
Pretty much everything he writes comes back to population, and he makes sure to include immigration in that equation!!! He has been involved in a number of the right wing neo-environmental anti-immigration groups.
Not my cup of tea...
patrick
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LegumeSam Posted 11:52 pm
02 Sep 2006
Efficiency can become so as well
Population is projected to start decreasing towards the middle of the century (caused by increased material wealth)
Under capitalism, and especially in the current neoliberal age of finance capital, "technology" and "efficiency" will not save us from global oil resource depletion (esp. climate change). They will simply accelerate the depletion of oil resources, as new economies of scale are introduced. See this article once again.
If economists really believed that efficiency growth was exponential, they would be predicting that at some point we should be seeing violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Such a prediction should raise the hackles of the physicists. Said physicists will not be able to make magic possible just to please economists. There are indeed limits, real physical limits, to problems of efficiency, limits that the technology gods will not grant a reprieve from.
The problem isn't "population" so much as it is the submission of the world to capitalist discipline (see Kees van der Pijl's article "International Relations and Capitalist Discipline", in R. Albritton, M. Itoh, R. Westra, and A. Zuege (eds.) Phases of Capitalist Development. Booms, Crises and Globalizations (Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave) 2001, 1-16). As the world is remade into a convenient object for the short-term exploitation of business, ecologies are moved further and further away from equilibrium conditions. Business competition under capitalism motivates businesses to move faster and faster to bring products to consumers, thus accelerating exploitation past the point of natural regenerative capacities. Eventually it will all catch up with us.
If population were the problem, we should expect the increasing exploitation of the planet to be caused by increasing numbers of people. However, we can also see increasing numbers of people left out of the processes of planetary exploitation. The economic growth that serves the profit margins of the world's wealthiest in the age of finance capital hardly benefits that half of the human race currently living on less than $2/ day. It certainly doesn't do much for the burgeoning slum populations reported in Mike Davis' Planet of Slums.
"Increasing wealth" simply hasn't made a significant enough dent in the morass of global poverty to make up for the increasing habitat invasions that imperil global biodiversity and put the further creation of "increasing wealth" on an increasingly unstable foundation. We are simply consuming up the planet in the name of wealth, and this is what Meadows et al. revealed with their extrapolation of trends. We are asked by agencies such as Worldwatch to imagine that several more exploitable Earthlike planets would be necessary in order to raise Earth's current human population to the "American Way of Life." Where are these planets going to come from?
The stage of global capitalist growth that produced the highest growth rates in history is now over. It has been surpassed by a stage in which productive growth has been replaced by a series of financial bubbles created by speculative capital, in which $2 trillion in US dollars changes hands every day, in which national capital management (through the Bretton Woods agreement and the convertibility of the US dollar) has been surpassed by the power and might of capital flows, and in which the desperate search of excess capital for new realms of profit causes it to devour its own seed-bed. See Harry Shutt, The Trouble With Capitalism.
http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/
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JMG Posted 3:00 am
04 Sep 2006
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bayouboyuk Posted 5:31 pm
05 Sep 2006
Abandon Limited Objectives
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