Will I love The Limits to Growth?

A vast propaganda effort has been undertaken since the Club of Rome first issued ‘The limits to growth’ report in 1972 to rubbish its predictions and hypotheses. If you actually take the trouble to read the 1972, 1994, and 2004 reports, then you can see through this desperate effort. The authors were fundamentally – in broad terms – correct, and visionary. True, they overestimated how rapidly the planet was likely to succumb to world-scale resource-depletion crises; but they actually underestimated how rapidly we would start to succumb to crises arising from pollution. Their warnings need to be heeded very rapidly,… show more.

The model still shows, even more starkly than in the 1972 original, that industrial civilization is headed for overshoot followed by collapse to some lower level of complexity in the very near future. The model has proven to be robust: the original base run has tracked real-world curves quite closely. Don’t be put off by its technicality. The model is not that hard to understand—and, once understood, the implacability of its conclusions will appear inescapable.