The Limits to Growth 50 years later

In this SFI talk Dennis Meadows mentions an important aspect that deserves more attention: he says ( at 22:22 ) that people talk about climate change as if it is the only problem. We just solve this problem – say we limit the temperature increase to 1 or 2 degrees – and everything will be ok. Dennis Meadows says no, this is not the case, because climate change is just one consequence of a system where growth has exceeded the system limits. We pollute the ecosystem by all kinds of waste, not only by climate gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), but also by sewage, PFAS (forever chemicals), nuclear waste, plastics and microplastics, and toxic wastewater from fracking.

Meadows and his coauthors have been warning us for 50 years. They argued convincingly in The Limits To Growth that as long as we have exponential growth in a limited system we will have overshoot and collapse. No matter where the limits are, exponential growth will reach them quickly. If we pass the limits we overshoot the boundaries of sustainable levels and eventually the system collapses through resource depletion and pollution. Fossil fuels are non-renewable. If they are used up, they are gone and will not come back. What remains are piles of waste which pollute the environment. If we have polluted our ground water and agricultural soil by fracking and nuclear waste, it will not be possible to clean it easily.

Ironically the original “Limits to Growth” study was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation by a significant amount of money. The same Volkswagen group that later caused the Dieselgate emissions scandal. The study did not predict the future, it presented a number of scenarios which have different outcomes. Overshoot and collapse are the inevitable result of the “business as usual” scenario in “Limits to Growth” simulations. The problem is so far we have been following more or less the “business as usual” scenario, and if we look at the US we are no longer in the “business as usual” scenario, we are in the “business as usual but even more extreme” version – if we think of the “Drill baby drill” slogan. The situation is even worse than the worst case. We are not only heading for collapse, we have increased the speed to get there.

If you think that a collapse is too farfetched then read the book from Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens [2] or simply imagine Saudi Arabia would announce next month that their oil fields are depleted much faster than previously thought, like Mexico’s supergiant Cantarell oil field for instance, which Dennis mentions in his talk. A global panic and worldwide economic crisis would follow. 80 people in a village can not empty a supergiant oil field in a few years, but 8 billion on Earth can.

Dennis says at the end he used to be depressed about the gloomy outlook and the nature of our species – that we are not doing the fundamental changes we need to make to prevent a collapse although we could, and although we know what it is coming. He got used to it after decades of talking about it, and looking the longer history it might look less significant, but it is of course still frustrating to see the collapse of civilization coming.

In this video he compares our situation now that we have reached peak oil and the limits to growth with a rollercoaster: we have reached the top of the first hill and it is going downhill now. We have no longer control over the direction or the speed. All we can do is hold on and hope that we survive. He believes this is the situation for us on this planet.

[1] The Limits to Growth, Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III

[2] How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, Polity Books, 2020