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CONCEPT – THE LIMITS TO GROWTH
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- Club of Rome: "The Limits to Growth (LTG)" was a 1972 report, commissioned by the Club of Rome, and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 and consists of current and former heads of state, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, et. Since 1 July 2008 the organization has been based in Winterthur, Switzerland.
- The report: LTG used computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources. Its first findings were presented at international gatherings in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro in 1971. More than 3 crore copies were sold since then. The study used the World3 computer model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the earth and human systems. The model was based on the work of Jay Forrester of MIT.
- The 2012 update: In 2012, a 40-year forecast from Jørgen Randers, one of the book's original authors, was published as "2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years".
- Model used in LTG: The model was based on five variables: "population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources". In 1972, all these variables were increasing and were assumed to continue to grow exponentially, while the ability of technology to increase resources grew only linearly. The authors intended to explore the possibility of a sustainable feedback pattern that would be achieved by altering growth trends among the five variables under three scenarios. They noted that their projections for the values of the variables in each scenario were predictions "only in the most limited sense of the word", and were only indications of the system's behavioral tendencies. Two of the scenarios saw "overshoot and collapse" of the global system by the mid- to latter-part of the 21st century, while a third scenario resulted in a "stabilized world“.
- Problems in modeling: A key idea in The Limits to Growth is the notion that if the rate of resource use is increasing, the amount of reserves cannot be calculated by simply taking the current known reserves and dividing by the current yearly usage, as is typically done to obtain a static index. For example, in 1972, the amount of chromium reserves was 775 million metric tons, of which 1.85 million metric tons were mined annually. The static index is 775/1.85=418 years, but the rate of chromium consumption was growing at 2.6 percent annually, or exponentially. If instead of assuming a constant rate of usage, the assumption of a constant rate of growth of 2.6 percent annually is made, the resource will instead last only 95 years.
- Conclusions: The research team came to the following conclusions –
- Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity".
- This includes the following - Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline; Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline; Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline; Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline.
- Growth trends existing in 1972 could be altered so that sustainable ecological and economic stability could be achieved. The sooner the world's people start striving for it, the better the chance of achieving it.
- Criticism of LTG: Peter Passell and two co-authors published a 2 April 1972 article in the New York Times describing LTG as "an empty and misleading work ... best summarized ... as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out". Passell found the study's simulations to be simplistic, while assigning little value to the role of technological progress in solving the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and food production. They charged that all LTG simulations ended in collapse, predicted the imminent end of irreplaceable resources, and, finally, that the entire endeavor was motivated by a hidden agenda: to halt growth in its tracks.
- Positive: In the early years of the 21st century, the tide of opinion regarding LTG began to swing in a positive direction. Reading LTG for the first time in 2000, influential energy economist Matthew Simmons concluded his views on the report by saying, "In hindsight, The Club of Rome turned out to be right. We simply wasted 30 important years ignoring this work.“
- 2016: In 2016, a report published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth concluded that "there is unsettling evidence that society is still following the 'standard run' of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards". The report also points out that some issues not fully addressed in the original 1972 report, such as climate change, present additional challenges for human development.
- Related books: Some are - (1) Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), and (2) Harrison Brown's The Challenge of Man's Future (1956).
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