Why I don´t like limits to growth

“The Limits to Growth” (LTG) is the near-legendary book from 1972 attributed to Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jörgen Randers and William W Behrens III. I say “attributed”, because according to Dennis Meadows (who is the copyright holder and often regarded as the main author), the book was really written by his wife Donella. LTG is almost infamous for being the book everyone talks about and nobody reads, and in an interview made in 2012, Dennis Meadows said that even LTG´s admirers probably didn´t really understand it. Both LTG and the so-called Club of Rome, which commissioned the work, have acquired demonic status in a wide variety of conspiracy theories. A bizarre detail is that some of the people who attacked the work back in 1972 are still attacking it today, for instance the LaRouche Movement!

I recently decided to grab this bull (or is it a Satanic goat) by its horns and actually read the book. Or at least look through it – it´s not an easy read, although it´s less daunting than it looks like, with its strange and hard-to-understand graphs. If you don´t feel up to it, begin by listening to some lecture or interview given by Dennis Meadows on YouTube. One reason why the work has been misunderstood might be the sensational marketing. My copy comes with scary blurbs predicting fast collapse, inevitable doom and (at best) a ten year period in which to solve the problems, or else! The real predictions, such as they are, of Meadows & Co are less apocalyptic but precisely for that reason more serious. 

“The Limits to Growth” is based on two presuppositions which the authors never bother proving, since they regarded them as obvious – something Dennis Meadows later regretted. One is that growth is always exponential. The other is that Earth´s resources really are limited. The conclusion is therefore über-obvious: exponential growth is impossible on a finite planet. The authors admit that without extremely detailed data, it´s impossible to “predict” exactly when resources will run out. The point of their models is to show the dynamics of a system in which everything (or almost everything) grows exponentially except the actual resources. Still, LTG does contain predictions of a sort. The authors´ models show that if growth continues to be exponential, Earth´s resources will run out at some point during the 21^st century, specifically in the middle or late 21^st century. And yes, the transition period from exponential growth to contraction will be brief, perhaps only a decade or so. This could indeed be called a collapse. In recent interviews, Dennis Meadows have pointed out that we are right on track to a mid-century collapse, perhaps beginning already in 2030, since all curves are still “heading upwards” in the usual exponential fashion, except food production, which is actually growing less than LTG predicted. That everything is growing is a good sign…if you think resources are infinite. If not, good luck and God help you!

An important point made by LTG is that you can´t stop exponential growth in just one area – if you do, growth in other sectors will eventually lead the system to collapse anyway. Thus, zero population growth doesn´t help in and of itself if resource extraction, food production and pollution continue to rise exponentially. This should give pause to those who believe that less people will give the remaining ones (i.e. the Western upper and middle classes) enough resources to continue the party more or less indefinitely. Although “The Limits to Growth” hardly mentions climate change, they do include pollution as an exponential growth curve. In several of their future scenarios, economic growth is indeed stopped by an extreme increase of environmental pollution. More food production doesn´t save the day either, unless population and pollution is sharply regulated. An increase in food production will simply lead to more people and resource extraction, leading to a collapse just as in the other scenarios. And since growth is exponential, even a doubling of the available resources will postpone the collapse for only a few decades! Thus, none of the standard solutions to our predicament supported by both leftists and right-wingers (find more resources, produce more food, curtail population growth) are powerful enough to break free from the limits to growth on a finite planet.

So what is the solution? The authors frankly admit that they don´t have any detailed political prescriptions. They can only offer advice in principle: do away with exponential growth, or collapse will inevitably happen. Thus, only a system where population, resources, pollution and food production are “frozen” and remain in equilibrium is sustainable. LTG does indicate that solutions must be global in character, and that they should include some kind of international redistribution system whereby the richer nations share their resources with the poorer ones. On one point the warning of the authorial team is particularly dire: equilibrium must be reached ASAP. If equilibrium isn´t reached until the year 2000 (almost 30 years after the book was published), collapse will happen during the 21^st century anyway, due to run-away population growth, resource depletion and other problems. In *that* sense, “The Limits to Growth” really did believe that we only have (or rather had) about 10 years left to save the world, as indicated by UN Secretary-General U Thant in a statement included in my copy.

LTG has been criticized for not viewing technological progress as exponential. However, it´s difficult to know what this could possibly even *mean*, unless it simply indicates that new technology uses up previously untapped resources, say turning locust swarms into food, or dead people into soylent green. But even then, there is an obvious limit to growth: energy isn´t unlimited on a finite planet. Nor, of course, are the resources themselves. The critics of LTG really envisage a future in which we use cold fusion power to feed 20 billion people with bread made of hard Martian rock… Of course, no such inventions are even on the horizon today, and as the system is slowly grinding to a halt, chances are we´ll never see them in the future either. What we will see is probably something similar to the scenario in LTG, or – if we´re lucky – a slightly slower transition from here to there.

I can´t say I like that prospect.