Julian Simon wrote: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 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.
Plantagenet wrote: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.
Plantagenet wrote:If you want to know how and why the Club of Rome got it wrong, start with the critiques of Julian Simon.
Matthew Simmons wrote: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.
Plantagenet wrote: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."
Plantagenet wrote: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."
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