The Limits to Growth; 50 Years on

Above: Based on the ‘Standard World Model’ generated by the 1972 Limits to Growth study looking into the ‘predicament of mankind’ and the boundaries of our host planet, this image adds the extra dimension of Earth’s carrying capacity (in yellow) which is decreasing rapidly under the strain of exponential growth in human impacts. Image credit: Ian McKay / Deeper Green & Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, 1972.

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Ken Boulding, Economist[1]

Introduction

It was originally ridiculed when it was published in the Spring of 1972 and certainly stirred-up controversy in economic and political circles, but, with fifty years of accrued data to verify its validity, The Limits to Growth (LtG) report must surely be seen as the ‘canary in the coalmine’ of neoliberal growth-based economic theory. The fiftieth anniversary is incredibly poignant, if a little foreboding, as one of its twelve scenarios is proving particularly accurate in defining our times and what might be about to happen. All over the world, people are dusting off their old copies of LtG and reappraising its stunning foray into systems thinking and planetary modelling as well as recognising its importance for societal decision-making. It has been periodically revisited by its own authors and independent experts but its message now, horribly fulfilling its predicted phenomena of ‘decision delay’, means that its twelfth scenario, where we could have achieved an existential equilibrium with our host planet is no longer available to us and we are almost certainly poised for a chaotic epoch of collapse rather than a well-planned descent.

The Limits to Growth was a report which looked into possible future scenarios for humankind’s existence on planet Earth, ‘the predicament of mankind’. It was commissioned by a collective of like-minded thinkers instigated by Dr. Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrial manager. The group would go on to form the Club of Rome. Their first major gathering was in 1970 in the ‘eternal city’, thus the name. Their guiding pursuit was the, “…objective, scientific assessment of the impact of humanity’s behavior and use of resources”[2]. One of the members, Jay Forester, a systems professor at MIT, offered to build a computer programme with colleagues to test human impacts against the planet’s ability to sustain. The team chose five data sets including:

—   population

—   agricultural production

—   non-renewable resource depletion

—   industrial output

—   pollution

The programme they built became known as ‘World3’.  It was then loaded with historical data dating from 1900 through to the early 1970’s. The output graphs of each scenario show the unmistakable upward and downward trends of the basic five criteria and then the predictive modelling takes over with curving trend lines giving us possible glimpses of our future out to the year 2100. Twelve different scenarios were tried out with variations of decision making, population control, resource availability and technological advances forming the inputs and based on what could reasonably be estimated at the time. All but one scenario showed exponential growth in human impacts and reduction in planetary resources then leading to an ‘overshoot’ of the Earth’s carrying capacity. This is then followed by a descent or collapse of first food production and industrial activity and then population decline. The book concluded, “Our goal was to provide warnings of potential world crisis if these trends are allowed to continue, and thus offer an opportunity to make changes in our political, economic, and social systems to ensure that these crises do not take place.”[3]

The findings of the report became a book which would go on to sell millions of copies.  The authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III.

How well did World3 predict the future?

Dennis Meadows, one of the original authors, writes in the 2022 publication, Limits and Beyond[4], that many experts have observed that one of the twelve scenarios “…tracks historical data reasonably well”. He refers to Figure 35 which shows the ‘Standard World Model’ whereby the data inputs assume, “… no major change in the physical, economic, or social relationships that have historically governed the development of the world system. All variables plotted here follow historical values from 1900 to 1970. Food, industrial output, and population grow exponentially until the rapidly diminishing resource base forces a slowdown in industrial growth. Because of natural delays in the system, both population and pollution continue to increase for some time after the peak of industrialization. Population growth is finally halted by a rise in the death rate due to decreased food and medical services.”[5]

Notably, World3 does not track an estimation of the planet’s carrying capacity or the sustaining potential of the biosphere which of course is being inexorably reduced by human impacts. Nor does it model climate change. Such phenomena were barely coined or indeed understood back 1971 so the datasets used were purposefully simplified to the direct interactions between human living systems and the planet. Maybe diagramme 35, familiar to LtG readers, should be updated to show this other dimension (see lead illustration above).

The recent revisiting of LtG and World3 has identified that resource depletion rates have been extended further into the 21st Century than foreseen in 1972 and thus the pollution effects become the predominant limiting trend. “Currently, 50 years after the publication of the 12 LtG scenarios, it appears the “resource crisis” is less likely than the “pollution crisis”.[6] Some cite that the predicted population descent will also be offset but in this instance it is an increase in death rate of other species. For some years now we have been declaring mass extinction events around the world and much of this is being caused by climate change and the human destruction of natural habitats to make way for more mechanised human food production.

Another important message set out in LtG was that no matter how they tweaked the data, be it finding extended resource availability or discovering new technologies to mitigate environmental impacts, these variations merely changed the date of peak planetary exploitation with the population descent always following. That is except for one scenario tried. This one was called ‘Global Equilibrium’. In this version of the modelling, strict birth control measures were put in place by 1975, policies imposed to control per capita material consumption and technological advances brought in to help us be more efficient with energy and resources. The resultant projections described a ‘steady state human system’. In modern parlance, it achieves a societal ecological footprint within Earth’s carrying capacity. If we had taken these steps nearly fifty years ago, equitably applied global living standards might be like that of Italy or South Korea as they are in 2022, according to Dennis Meadows.[7] According to LtG, a truly sustainable global society will require both technological advances and behaviour change.

The Limits to Growth also consciously left out war in its modelling. Ironically, it is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which has given us a dress rehearsal of what it will be like when resource supply drops significantly below demand. These are the downward trends which lead to population decline in the LtG models. We are poised for our first post-invasion northern hemisphere winter. We will see hardship on a scale not seen for many decades in poorer countries and even more plundering of the ‘magic money tree’ in the developed economies as we try to hold off decline. We will see business models, services, product offerings and shopping baskets being re-thought in a new paradigm where we must make things work with less energy and resource consumption per capita.

Making fossil fuel dependent practices less economic to pursue is what a carbon tax was supposed to have done on a more gradual basis to what the war in Ukraine has brought about. Unfortunately, free-world politicians have never been able to properly implement it, although in isolated instances, it has been tried. Take for instance in the UK when John Major’s government introduced the Fuel Price Escalator in March 1993 in response to public protest of the environmental impact of Thatcher’s road building programme and the realisation that exponential growth in traffic was not sustainable on a small island. The policy was to gently escalate the tax of fuel over time. It was reversed in 2000 after aggressive protesting by road hauliers and members of the public.

Russia wanted to play the west for its dependency on oil and gas but, with Ukraine also being one of the major ‘bread baskets’ of the world, the Putin government was also able to weaponise food availability. In so doing, it was messing with not one but two of the LtG trend categories.

Ignoring the message

The carriage on the roller coaster is cresting and the drop is pending. The ‘age of plenty’ is over but there are still many influential voices out there telling people what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. If they do truly believe in ‘sustainable economic growth’ over a ‘steady state’ societal model, then they are gambling at the scale of our host planet.

 In the Limits to Growth, they used the term ‘decision-delay’. The team knew geo-political policy would take time to move towards meaningful sustainable practices. They rather hoped for instance that population controls could be in place by 1975 to avoid an inevitable crash at some point in the Twenty-First Century. It is fair to say that we are globally more aware of the impacts of climate change. Being aware is one thing but unfortunately the scale of policy change simply has not caught up with the magnitude of the predicament.

Many remain unconvinced that climate change is a bad thing or that it is induced by human activity. ‘Climate change deniers’ are prevalent particularly in right-wing political circles and within the fossil fuel and associated industries. Their promise of increased prosperity is defined as greater material wealth and it’s an appealing prospect for voters.

There are other forces in society that use their corporate wealth to mislead and spread doubt by calling into question the credibility of climate change science and the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Such actions by the likes of the Global Climate Coalition and the American Petroleum Institute, whose members included major players in the fossil fuel industry, have set back real action to kerb human impacts on the planet by possibly decades.[8] In the run-up to the Kyoto climate conference in 1997, enough uncertainty about the scientific basis of climate change was spread by big industry that the US senate passed a resolution which prevented the country from signing a climate treaty and thus torpedoing much of the Kyoto Protocol’s hoped for impact on mitigating climate change. What LtG reminds us of though is that regardless of whether or not we believe “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate change”[9], there is no way exponential growth is supportable through the coming decades.

The IPCC has been a force for environmental responsibility across political boundaries but it has been easy prey for those who want to obfuscate the climate emergency agenda. Its remit is focused on communicating the modelling of climate change. It is looking at the symptom and leaving it up to others to address the cause. Should we not have a similar international panel and some form of global governance looking into achievable pathways to what LtG looked at in scenario 12, ‘Global Equilibrium’?

The upwards growth trend in the make-believe world of neoliberal economic thinking never had a top it. It would always be cropped out in the graph. In the real world, which happens to be a finite planet with real laws of physics, we must reject the exponential GDP growth ethic we have been sold and wake-up to the fact that we have overshot the planetary limits with this model and reached a peak of exploitation. Of course, the LtG ‘Standard World’ scenario indicated that economies would start peaking and flat lining into the 2020’s. Here in the UK, flat lining growth is not seen as reaching a planetary limit but a failure of previous policy not to have grown the economy hard enough. When Elizabeth Truss became the new British Prime Minister in September of 2022, she pledged to ‘do unpopular things’ to grow the UK economy. Times are tough and saving the planet, the slow-moving existential threat, will be moved down the political agenda yet again in favour of accelerated use of natural capital.

Where do we go from here?

To overshoot means to go too far, to grow so large so quickly that limits are exceeded. When an overshoot occurs, it induces stresses that begin to slow and stop growth. The three causes of overshoot are always the same, at any scale from personal to planetary. First, there is growth, acceleration, rapid change. Second, there is some form of limit or barrier, beyond which the moving system may not safely go. Third, there is a delay or mistake in the perceptions and the responses that try to keep the system within its limits. The delays can arise from inattention, faulty data, a false theory about how the system responds, deliberate efforts to mislead, or from momentum that prevents the system from being stopped quickly.

Donella Meadows, A Synopsis: Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update [10]

 Donella Meadows was the lead author of LtG and she revisited the original work with Beyond the Limits to Growth and then again in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. These works started to look at the legacy, what the global societal responses had been and where might ‘we’ go from here. The inertia of neoliberal economic theory was more difficult to shift than the team had hoped so the more pessimistic scenarios looked the more likely of outcomes even by 1992. However, the projections of the ‘Standard’ World Model’ showed growth limits being reached in the 2020’s and then population decline occurring into the 2030’s. We are where we are and perhaps the best time to have fixed the proverbial roof has now passed.

Meadows likened the global economy to a car needing to slow down early enough to avoid a crash rather than leaving it too late and hitting a ‘brick wall’ with catastrophic consequences. Up to this point, it has been tricky for LtG converts to argue for that pre-emptive slowing down with imposed limits. The upwards growth of material wealth for all was too seductive. Supporters of the status quo have only needed to point to the unprecedented prosperity enjoyed in the developed economies since WWII to keep public opinion on-board and get themselves either (re-)elected or sell more of their planet-harming stuff.

The real thinking starts now. It is the ‘where do we go from here’ question that we must find answers for and it should surely be a new path for our human evolution. It will have to be a shift away from the value systems which created fixations around material wealth and instead be concentrated on achieving equitable well-being for all. Donella Meadows offered hope and a new ethical compass in her writings:

People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfilment.

― Donella H. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update [10]

As Kate Raworth points out in her book, Doughnut Economics, “No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one.”[11] Raworth suggests the pursuit of a non-linear economic model whereby society should operate within the planetary limits of natural capital which she calls the ‘Ecological Ceiling’ but above that of social deprivation which she calls, the ‘Social Foundation’. She communicates it with a simple concentric diagramme which looks very much like a doughnut with the doughy ring representing, “the safe and just space for humanity”.[12] It provides a theoretical model and ethos which responsibly responds to the central warnings from LtG.

Replacing a non-sustainable economic model with a perpetual one will be a monumental challenge for humanity. It is not an overnight change nor something we can do within a typical political cycle. The timeframes maybe measurable in generations but it must be started without further delay. Mindsets need to change and we will need international cooperation and governance on a scale not seen before.

Read more about economic growth and what it means for the planet in the Deeper Green post, Sustainable Growth; an Oxymoronic Myth

[1] U.S. Congress. Energy Reorganization Act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress. First Session, on H.R. 11510 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973). Pg. 248.

[2] https://www.clubofrome.org/history

[3] Meadows, D.H. et al., The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972. Pg. 186.

[4] Meadows, Dennis, The Limits to Growth, Ed. U. Bardi & C. A. Peireira, Exapt Press, 2022. Pg. 57.

[5] Meadows, D.H. et al., The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972. Pg. 186.

[6] Randers, Jørgen, The Limits to Growth, Ed. U. Bardi & C. A. Peireira, Exapt Press, 2022. Pg. 48.

[7] Meadows, D.H. et al., The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972. Pg. 62.

[8] Big Oil v. the World, Episode 1, ‘Denial’, BBC Two, July 21, 2022.

[9] Statement from the IPCC Madrid, Climate Change Conference 1995, The Science of Climate Change.

[10] Meadows, Donella; Randers, Jorgen; Meadows, Dennis, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.

[11] Raworth, Kate, Doughnut Economics, Penguin Random House, London, 2017. Pg. 245.

[12] Raworth, Kate, Doughnut Economics, Penguin Random House, London, 2017. Pg. 11.