Customer Reviews

Limits to Growth

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This book explains a lot more about our current economic and environmental predicament than most of us want explained. In a very few pages, it details the problem with positive feedback loops in economies and societies that lead to uncontrolled growth in population and industrialization. The book details multiple reasons why growth in these areas is fundamentally unsustainable. The current peak oil problem is just the first of many problems that the authors foresaw 30 years ago, that very few people, and no-one in power took seriously.

In 1970 a group of scientists developed an extensive computer model of "the world system" which accounted in a general way for population, food production, industrialization, capital flows, pollution, natural resources, and other variables. When running this model they found that it nearly always showed a population crash before the year 2100, often as early as 2030. This book details the logic behind the model and the "systems thinking" that is necessary to understand the world's economic and physical status.

The public response to this book back in the 1970s involved mostly negative reactions, a great deal of (sometimes intentional) misunderstanding, and very little positive action. Unfortunately for us, everything in the book is still valid today, and even more pertinent than it was in 1970. The problem in a nutshell is that populations and industries grow exponentially, while the planet we live on is not increasing in size or capacity.

The authors have written followup volumes which give updates and detail more of the issues than did the original book. They regretfully admit that the projections of the 1970 model are still valid today, more than 30 years later. All that has changed is that we now have less time to try to change things. Their computer model, which once required a mainframe computer, now can be run on any desktop computer, and it is still making dire projections. Sorry, but things don't look so good from here.

This 1972 book is subtitled "A report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind."

The collective authors -- much like the IPCC group -- wrote this book after meeting from 1968 to 1970. Their purpose was to work with the complexity of many trends -- poverty, environmental degredation, weakening institutions, urban sprawl, insecure employment, rejection of traditional values, inflation and so on. Their remit was to examine the factors that would limit growth: population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production and pollution. They used the most advanced computer models to map out the future dynamics of these five factors, as they influenced each other, with positive and negative feedback, over decades. (As you know, I am skeptical of models -- and especially of computer models -- but they can be useful as a means of visualizing interactions that are too complicated to describe.)

The Club concludes that:

1. Current (1970!) behavior will limit growth within 100 years. "The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity" [p 29]
2. It's possible to avoid this result, to establish ecological and economic stability.
3. If we want the second outcome, we'd better get to work.

This struck me as both prescient and sad. Since 1970, we have surely made some progress on natural resources and industrial & agricultural production, but we have not done very well on population control or pollution. Certainly not on the scale that the Club's authors suggested.

The main point of the book is that exponential growth (in pollution or population) will exhaust finite resources. This is a mathematical fact that the authors pound into the reader. (That doesn't mean that the reader will believe it!) And these folks do not just naively draw a exponential curve for the demand for minerals against a finite supply and then conclude that a shortage will result. They discuss the interaction of supply and demand and how those forces affect price and quantity in the market. So their reasoning is sound; they take limits and dynamic changes in behavior into account and THEN reach a dark conclusion.

Carbon wonks will be interested to know that the Club explicitly discusses CO2 as a pollutant that is being absorbed into the air and oceans, and how that CO2 will raise global temperatures. They predict (rather, hope) that nuclear power will displace fossil fuels before "the increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions... has any ecological or climatological effect." [p 87] They also say that they do not know how much CO2 can be absorbed without causing a response. We know now that the "no effect" threshold was passed a few years ago, perhaps at the same time as the report was issued.

As I flipped through the simulations, I was impressed by the analysis of binding constraints. (Like MIT guys need to impress me!) The basic idea is that you need keep all five factors (population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production and pollution) within a sustainable range. Get too much, and you crash; get too little and you crash. They conclude, e.g., that unlimited resources will not "fix" our problem because pollution will get out of control. (Something I said 25 years later :)

They also pour cold water on the silver bullet: "technological optimism is the most common and the most dangerous reaction to our findings from the world model. Technology can relieve the symptoms of a problem without affecting the underlying causes. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution to all problems can thus divert our attention from the most fundamental problem -- the problem of growth in a finite system -- and prevent us from taking effective action to solve it." [p 159] Their solution? Limit our activities to a sustainable level.

Bottom Line: This book got a lot of attention nearly 40 years ago. Too bad that we haven't implemented its recommendations. We are still running towards that cliff of "rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity." Can we stop the committees and inquiries and take some actions? I give this book FIVE STARS for being clear and relevant; I give its readers ONE STAR for failing to follow through.

Quick, nice and easy and uncomplicated, even though it was an overseas shipping. Super! Whenever theres another good articel, pleisure to order again!

Although there are those who remain in denial about the foresight and wisdom of this book, today we are left in no doubt: there *are* limits to growth, and those who refuse to accept such realities accelerate the demise of our planet while also ignoring the depradations upon the public of corporations, religions, crime families and networks, and the "states" whose officials they all bribe and subvert.

The good news is that an entire literature has developed from this one little book, and there is a growing public awareness-as well as growing financial and corporate awareness-of the urgency of harmonizing our human behavior with the larger Earth system of which we are a part.

On the dark side:
Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

A handful of current references that can trace their heritage back to this book, which is still worth reading today:
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

For easier access to all of my reviews grouped in 98 categories, visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. All reviews lead back to Amazon but are vastly easier to sort out by specifics (e.g. Environmental Problems versus Environmental Solutions).

As a graduate student
one of the other graduate students who was in my photochemistry class mentioned
the green house effect and global warming
after we had been discussing the
ozone hole "theory" that was being published
in photochemistry journals.
( It was the middle to late part of that decade that the ozone hole was confirmed by NASA ).
I've been "hooked" since.
My nephew has a site on climate change he updates.
I've been watching for news for several years as a result.

I'm kind of cynical about "government solutions" to global warming
as I saw a lot of rhetoric in the 1970's
by industry and government and
all we really got out of it was pain
on our cars being smogged in California
while trucks drove by with carbon particles
clearly visible from badly tuned diesel engines.

The only real solution seems to be a radical change in life-style
for the western world, which doesn't seem likely
with present political conditions.
When you see a bicycle traffic jam in New York
is like saying when pigs fly, ha, ha...
Wall Street on bicycles...

The book: "The Limits to Growth":
Is a classic which came out in this era
and I only got second hand in the late 80's.