Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (43 page)

From the time of the economic crisis of the 1970s, the construction of an alternative business-friendly and business-funded intelligentsia in a host of think tanks enabled the precepts of neoliberalism to flourish in individual countries. Corporate leaders simultaneously established international lobbies and institutions to serve the same interests, often bypassing regulatory measures enacted by democratic national governments. By the new century, business priorities were entrenched in public discourse, government policy, and international institutions. Economic growth was established almost everywhere as the only way to solve anything. Environmental protection and social justice, both national and worldwide, were deemed to depend on it. But while these are the widespread beliefs, reality lies closer to the reservations expressed forty years ago by the MIT team.

In chapter 14, I return to the MIT researchers’ projections and the way their work was distorted to create the prevailing popular view of them as sloppy peddlers of doom. I compare their actual output against recent statistical analysis, to check the plausibility of the much-repeated claim that the Club of Rome got it wrong.

IV

In Conclusion

A sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. It would be neither for nor against growth.… Before this society would decide on any specific growth proposal, it would ask what the growth was for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last, and whether it could be accommodated by the sources and sinks of the planet.

—Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jørgen Randers, 1992

14

The Limits to Growth
after Forty Years

Nowhere in the book was there any mention of running out of anything by 2000. … The Club of Rome got the whole picture right. It was the rest of us who missed the mark!

—Matthew Simmons, 2000

When
The Limits to Growth
first appeared, its message was taken seriously for several years. However, the efforts of the US presidents Nixon and Carter and the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau died away with their tenure in office. Carter’s
Global 2000
was ignored by President Reagan and played no part in anyone’s planning for the future. The UN environment agencies that were founded in the 1970s, though they have since assembled immense amounts of data and plugged away with conferences, projects, and reports, were gradually overshadowed by the trade-oriented institutions of the neoliberal “revolution” that took hold in the 1980s. More growth was confidently adopted as the solution to the problems growth had generated, while decision making about the means to that end was removed from democratic institutions and handed over to the “free market.”

In the scientific community, concern did not abate. The team at MIT went on to publish
Beyond the Limits
in 1992, arguing that the human impact on the natural world was by then exceeding the earth’s replacement abilities. In 2004, they published
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update,
which continued to argue that the general shape of their thesis remained correct. Each of the UNEP GEO reports warned of a deepening crisis, and GEO-4 suggested that numerous geophysical processes were approaching irreversible “tipping points.” During the 1990s the human ecologist William Rees and his doctoral student Mathis Wackernagel, an engineer, developed ecological footprint theory, which aimed to quantify the precise extent to which economic processes are extracting more than the natural world is renewing. Their findings underscored the message of the MIT team.

Ronald Bailey’s Attack on
Limits to Growth

As outlined in part III of this book, think tanks have played a significant role in campaigning against environmental concern, and this has included direct attacks on the idea of geophysical limits. In the first decade after its publication, fierce criticism of
The Limits to Growth
, largely by economists, was accompanied by widespread interest and emulation, with record sales and the commissioning of parallel studies by President Carter and Prime Minister Trudeau. By the early 1980s, however, Julian Simon, associated with the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, was prominent in amplifying the initial attacks on the concept of limits. The Cato Institute published three of Simon’s books and dozens of his articles. Simon saw the human intellect as the “ultimate resource.” He told interviewer William Buckley that “in the end, copper and oil come out of our minds.”
¹
Simon saw no need to limit the growth of population or production and, like Kaysen and the other economists discussed in part I, believed resources for expansion to be infinite.

It appears to have been Ronald Bailey who initiated the specific distortions of the
Limits
work that furnished the popularly accepted formula for contempt. Not a scientist, Bailey was a science and technology reporter for
Forbes
magazine from 1987 to 1990 and has been a science reporter for the libertarian magazine
Reason
since 1997. Like Simon, Bailey was closely associated with the Cato Institute, but it was another libertarian think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), that appointed him its Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism in 1993 and published several of his antienvironmental books. Bailey is still a fellow with the Cato Institute and an adjunct analyst at the CEI.
²

In 1989, Bailey launched his attack on
Limits
and the Club of Rome with “Dr. Doom,” a scathing portrait of Jay Forrester, in
Forbes
. Forrester was a pioneer of the new discipline of systems dynamics and the architect of the initial models from which World3, the computer model used by the
Limits
researchers, was developed. In the same issue, Bailey attacked Bill McKibben’s new book,
The End of Nature
, as “garbage” in an article titled “Hi There, Bambi.” The titles of these articles point to the contrast between the advocacy writings of Bailey and similar writers and the peer-reviewed work of serious scholars.
³
Bailey is emblematic of many opponents of
Limits
: a think tank fellow and a publicist for the free market viewpoint rather than an evidence-based analyst. Astonishingly, his distortions were adopted by many more reputable economists.

The Meadows team at MIT published their first sequel,
Beyond the Limits
, in May 1992, just before the Rio Earth Summit in June.
⁴
Bailey published
Eco-scam
in February of the following year, devoting a chapter to the question of geophysical limits. Here he distorts what Meadows and colleagues had claimed in 1972 about resource constraints and establishes the version that has become the widely accepted reading. According to Bailey, “they have been proven spectacularly wrong. In 1972, [they] predicted that at exponential growth rates the world would run out of gold by 1981 … petroleum by 1992 and copper, lead, and natural gas by 1993.”
⁵
None of this was claimed by the Meadows team, but the precise error has been repeated endlessly by many commentators, including the writers of UNEP’s
Global Environment Outlook 3
(GEO-3) report.
⁶

Bailey had engaged in sleight of hand. The figures he quotes in
Eco-scam
⁷
are based on column 5 of table 4 of
The Limits to Growth,
“Non-renewable Natural Resources.” This contents of this table did not form part of the World3 model and did not contribute to the trends discerned from World3 output; its aim was to demonstrate how exponential growth in demand quickly diminishes supply (see table 14.1 for representative entries from the original table 4).
⁸
Column 5 states the years taken to use the
known reserves
of key resources if continued average growth in demand is assumed. The figures are those of the US Bureau of Mines. Bailey ignores the subsequent column, which shows how, in an exponentially growing system, a fivefold increase in the resource base does not multiply years of supply by five. This column, too, is merely illustrative of the unexpected effects of exponential growth and makes no claim the world will “run out” of anything. The figures in the table are not, in any case, part of the World3 model.

Bailey also ignores the overall analysis of potential resource scarcity expressed a few pages further on: “
Given present resource consumption rates, the great majority of the currently important non-renewable resources will be extremely costly 100 years from now
” (emphasis in text).
⁹
This refers to the year 2072 and, in the second decade of the century, seems a plausible suggestion. None of the
Limits
books warns of resource exhaustion by the end of the twentieth century, or even at any specific date in the twenty-first. All of them offer a range of options about what society might do—from business as usual to strategies involving different degrees of “a deliberate turnaround, a correction, a careful easing down.”
¹⁰
Various scenarios were run through the computer to reflect these different options. “It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability,” the
Limits
authors wrote in the introduction to the first book.
¹¹
Although they were very clear that such options existed, it appears that most of their critics thought any interruption or reduction in economic growth was out of the question. Thus, models with scenarios that moderated rates of growth were sometimes totally ignored, as in an early review in the
New York Times Book Review
, which claims that the
Limits
researchers “jigger the assumptions just enough to eliminate non-catastrophic possibilities” to ensure that the world economy “obligingly” collapses.
¹²
This review’s reference to a “false inevitability of doom” is based on ignoring the scenarios that do not lead to collapse; these are the subject of the entire fifth chapter, which discusses the models that yield a stabilized world. In a 2007 book chapter, Dennis Meadows notes that this is only one among many false and misleading statements made by the reviewers and suggests that they did not finish the book. Meadows enumerates several other false statements, including the claim that
Limits
states reserves of vital materials will be exhausted within forty years, an error similar to Bailey’s. Meadows concludes that the reviewers were engaged in deliberate misrepresentation.
¹³

Bailey’s claims were widely adopted. The
Economist
, for example, stated that “the Club of Rome … said total global oil reserves amounted to 550 billion barrels … [and] made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc.”
¹⁴
The figure 550 billion barrels of oil does not appear at all in table 4, where the figure for
known reserves
(not total reserves) is 455 billion, a figure supplied by the US Bureau of Mines in any case, not the Meadows team (see table 14.1).
¹⁵
As far as I can ascertain, the
Economist
was responsible for this specific mistake. An article in
Foreign Affairs
lampooned
Limits
as part of “the ‘sky-is-falling’ school of oil forecasting [which] has been systematically wrong for more than a generation,” and also reproduced the
Economist
’s error.
¹⁶
The British journalist Matt Ridley quoted the
Economist
verbatim in his Prince Philip Lecture of 2001.
¹⁷
Soon after, the Australian economist Chris Murphy remarked in an interview on ABC television’s
Four Corners
that “they were claiming by now we would have run out of aluminium and we would’ve run out of natural gas about 10 years ago.”
¹⁸
Another well-respected Australian economist, John Quiggin, claimed that “the Club of Rome model … predicted that reserves of most minerals would be exhausted before 2000.”
¹⁹
These generally reputable but mistaken commentators might have misread the table in
Limits
themselves, or perhaps they were simply reproducing Bailey’s error, having encountered his claims in the vast think tank echo chamber.