[MJ]

Does anyone have a link to a full transcript of "Limits to growth" by the Club of Rome?

[Don_Quichote]

http://www.clubofrome.org/archive/reports.php

[clv101]

It's a book, published 1972. A full transcript would be a breach of copyright.

Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

[Doly]

If you are interested in the computer model, you can download it for free from a company called Vensim. Search for it on Google.

[MJ]

Ok, tnx a bunch, ppl

[roccman]

Hmmmmmmmm...kinda makes you wonder where some people go to school...or maybe that in fact was Ian's issue.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-welsh ... 49539.html

"Needless to say, we haven't run out of the resources that Limits to Growth expected us to run out of, though with the rise of Peak Oil and such, the triumphalism of the late nineties, where practically every commodity's price was at generational lows, is not quite so sharp. Nonetheless, it's certainly the case that the Club of Rome got it wrong - at least in terms of timetable, and perhaps overall. It's worth, in this time of the resurgence of environmentalism, and the basic argument that there are limits to growth "the rest of the world can't have a Western style of life", to walk back and examine why the Club of Rome got it wrong"

BIG SNIP

"We could try and find, in other words, efficiencies and substitutions The original "Limits to Growth" was wrong because it didn't take substitutions, efficiencies and technological growth into consideration - if we want the current limits to be mitigated we have to work those three things -- efficiencies, substitutions and technological advance, as hard as we can."

You can post a comment on Ian's blog if you feel so compelled.

[Plantagenet]

If you want to know how and why the Club of Rome got it wrong, start with the critiques of Julian Simon.

[CrudeAwakening]

Ah, yes, Julian Simon, responsible for such timeless quotes as:

Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.

It's just a shame he died before he could witness his ludicrous remarks put to rest.

[Plantagenet]

The Club of Rome was ludicrously wrong in their predictions of an imminent collapse of civilization in the 70-80s due to a global shortage of raw materials.

Simon explained where they went wrong. Simon engaged in a famous bet with Paul Ehrlich over the cost of a basket of such commodities projected into the future, and was proven right over the time frame of the bet.

Oil is by far the most important global raw material and commodity, and its price followed Simon's model quite well up to 2005-6, when we reached Peak Oil. The current high prices of oil reflect supply shortages caused by Peak Oil. Simon predicted that when commodity shortages occur, the commodity is replaced by something else. He would therefore predict that as oil prices go even higher, oil will be replaced by other alternative energy sources, which will ultimately produce even lower priced energy then oil.

[MonteQuest]

Give me a break. One of the most persistent myths is that The Limits to Growth was a gloom and doom book that predicted that we would run out of resources in a few years.

They did not.

They actually concluded:

It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his or her individual human potential.

[MonteQuest]

The Club of Rome was ludicrously wrong in their predictions of an imminent collapse of civilization in the 70-80s due to a global shortage of raw materials.

Have you read the book? Their conclusions seemed to indicate that the world would run out of many resources by the year 2000. Sadly, many misread the book, which only claimed the resources known then would run out by now. This was based upon computer simulations projecting growth with known resources.

[threadbear]

If you want to know how and why the Club of Rome got it wrong, start with the critiques of Julian Simon.

I would say the Club of Rome has clearly been vindicated by recent events. Anyone who would argue with Malthus, at this point, should have their heads examined.

[rsch20]

Matthew Simmons wrote an article addressing this topic.

http://greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_ ... isted.html

here's the most relevant snippet, though the whole thing is an educating read.

WHAT THE LIMITS TO GROWTH ACTUALLY SAID

After reading The Limits to Growth, I was amazed. Nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000. Instead, the book's concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years later. There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil shortage, or limit to any specific resource, by the year 2000.

The members of the "Club or Rome" were also not a mysterious, sinister, anonymous group of doomsayers. Rather, they were a group of 30 thoughtful, public spirited-intellects from ten different countries. The group included scientists, economists, educators, and industrialists. They met at the instigation of Dr. Aurelia Peccei, an Italian industrialist affiliated with Fiat and Olivetti.

The group all shared a common concern that mankind faced a future predicament of grave complexity, caused by a series of interrelated problems that traditional institutions and policy would not be able to cope with the issues, let alone come to grips with their full context. A core thesis of their work was that long term exponential growth was easy to overlook. Human nature leads people to innocently presume growth rates are linear. The book then postulated that if a continuation of the exponential growth of the seventies began in the world's population, its industrial output, agricultural and natural resource consumption and the pollution produced by all of the above, would result in severe constraints on all known global resources by 2050 to 2070.

2050 isn't here yet so yea, we are still right on track for the Club of Rome to be completely correct.

[Plantagenet]

Wikipedia notes that "The Club's early prediction that the world would exhaust its supply of raw materials by the 1980s and 90s was clearly wrong."

The Club of Rome has updated their 1972 book twice. The two newer editions of their book "Limits to growth," push their predictions farther into the future.

Cheers!

[MonteQuest]

Wikipedia notes that "The Club's early prediction that the world would exhaust its supply of raw materials by the 1980s and 90s was clearly wrong."

Wikipedia is perpetuating the myth.

Read the damn book! They never said that quote.

[TheDude]

Wikipedia notes that "The Club's early prediction that the world would exhaust its supply of raw materials by the 1980s and 90s was clearly wrong."

I pulled up the Wiki article on Hitler one day and was surprised to find out he stammered and was prone to flatulence.

Thanks for the link to the Simmons article, rsch.

[Tyler_JC]

The blue line is the nominal commodities prices index.

The red line is the inflation-adjusted commodities prices index.

We have a long way to go before commodities prices are as high as they were in the 1970s.

I'm not saying we won't get there, but it gives you a rough idea of where we're headed. We need to almost triple basic commodities prices before we're forced to conserve in the same way that we did in the late 1970s.

[oowolf]

The graph on page 53 (Limits to Growth, 1st edition), predicting atmospheric CO2 levels, based on 1950's data is exactly spot on!

[MonteQuest]

Here Meadows responds to the myth that they "got it wrong."

http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/storie ... _ASPO5.pdf