Wise Up - The Crash Course
Chapter 4: Multiple Other Limits to Growth
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Chapter 4: Multiple Other Limits to Growth
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Reducing consumption key to a sustainable future
http://www.csiro.au/news/The-Limits-To-Growth.html CSIRO Media Release
11 November 2008
The Limits to Growth’ modelled scenarios for the future global economy and environment and recommended far reaching changes to the way we live to avoid disaster.
In a paper published in the current edition of the international journal; Global Environmental Change, CSIRO physicist Dr Graham Turner compares forecasts from the book with global data from the past 30 years.
”The real-world data basically supports The Limits to Growth model,” he says. “It shows that for the first 30 years of the model, the world has been tracking along the unsustainable trajectory of the book’s business-as-usual scenario.”
“The original modelling predicts that if we continue down that track and do not substantially reduce our consumption and increase technological progress, the global economy will collapse by the middle of this century.
“The contemporary issues of peak oil, climate change, and food and water security, resonate strongly with the overshoot and collapse displayed in the business-as-usual scenario of The Limits to Growth.”
This is the first time anyone has comprehensively tested the predictions of the first, and still one of the most comprehensive, global models linking the world economy to the environment.
“We’ve had the rare opportunity to evaluate the output of a global model against observed and independent data,” says Dr Turner.
To date, the recommendations of The Limits to Growth, which included fundamental changes of policy and behaviour for sustainability, have not been implemented.
The Limits to Growth documented the results of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study carried out by Meadows et al, who were commissioned by The Club of Rome to analyse the 'world problematique' using a computer model developed at MIT called World3.
The Limits to Growth became the best selling environmental book in history, selling more than 30 million copies in 30 languages.
“In the years since 1972, The Limits to Growth has provoked much criticism but our research indicates that the main claims against the modelling are false,” Dr Turner says.
CSIRO is investigating how Australia can address the challenges of economic, environmental and social sustainability facing communities across Australia.
To download the full report click here: http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf
Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?, by Matthew Simmons; CEO - Simmons & Co. International
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.
It is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the past 30 years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but halfhearted, responses to the global ecological challenge. We do not have another 30 years to dither. Much will have to change if the ongoing overshoot is not to be followed by collapse during the twenty-first century.
Growth, and especially exponential growth, is so insidious because it shortens the time for effective action, it loads stress on a system faster and faster, until coping mechanisms that would have been adequate at slower with slower rates of change finally begin to fail.
Critical coping factors: number of trained people, their motivation, political attention and will, financial investment and risk that can be handled, capacity to develop, disseminate and maintain new technology, managerial capacity, capacity of media and political leader to remain focused and maintain peace, consensus among voters, degree to which politicians, business leaders and voters look ahead to anticipate problems, available production output.
For the complete paper click here: http://www.greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_of_rome_revisted.pdf
Is oil the only thing that's running out?
Far from it. The recession may have bought us some time as global growth slows. However, says Jeremy Grantham of US fund manager GMO, beyond our debt problems "lurks another longer-term and more important factor affecting future growth – the increasing limitations on resources. We're simply running out of everything at a dangerous rate".
The planet's metal supply is fast depleting, and the quality of what's left is lower: "where 30 tons of copper ore once produced a ton of copper, it now takes 500 tons". Even water's running out.
As the planet's population soars, says Grantham, "we must prepare ourselves for waves of higher resource prices and shortages unlike anything we've faced outside wartime".
Throwing Our Energy at Impossible Dreams
December 15th, 2009
P.F. Henshaw
Anything that reaches its climax at a peak of vitality does so by ending its self-investment in growth at the time its design is complete and worth sustaining. Our economic rule has been closer to "every good thing must be discarded". The alternative is to just turn off the growth pumps when they start to cause trouble, and sort things out to find what's worth keeping. That's the whole formula for sustainability for so very many big and small things people do for themselves, and that we rely on in things that take care of themselves in nature too.
Still, where is the cognitive path? Humanity clearly believes in and is devoting its most concentrated efforts on making its growth machine more efficient, to grow its way out of the earth's ever more severe physical constraints...
Growing your way out of environmental constraints is a plan that does work splendidly sometimes, as for a little chick inside it's egg, yes, or an infant in the womb. Then bursting from severe environmental constraints reveals fields of grain and new worlds of choices waiting, for which the new organism only has a limited appetite. The plan to just crash your limits often enough also works OK in pursuing "the impossible dream" in the worlds of ideas, within the 'noosphere', where the only real limit is imagination and failures of imagination are of little real physical consequence.
The physical world is different though. We now have a whole planet of leaders who believe we only need to physically grow our economies ever faster to burst out of the limits of an entire planet! They truly act as if wishing we had the limitless resources and freedoms of the past would surely cause them to reappear. That's the worst kind of fundamentalist delusion, a most extreme sort of misguided sophistry.
There's also a need to help people understand why efficiency , productivity, hard work and big families used to be so good for everything. They once both relieved burdens and provided freedoms for people directly benefiting from them, but also created wealth and opportunity for everyone else too. That was the magic of economic growth. The problem now is that the very same things have the reverse effect, and multiply complications and constraints for everyone.
I think that's what has everyone fooled, that as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold of becoming "big", say between 50 and 75 years ago. After that, quite unnoticed, our normal way of relieving burdens on ourselves, hard work, productivity and efficiency, started ever more dominantly multiplying burdens on each other and the earth... More growth now pushes everyone all ever harder against nature's limits instead of giving everyone more freedoms.
Survival isn't cost-effective
Economic forces constrain the future in more global ways as well. Not many people seem to have noticed, for instance, that the grim scenario traced out in the seminal 1973 study The Limits to Growth – still the most plausible map of the future ahead of us, and thus inevitably the most bitterly vilified – is driven by simple economics. As resources deplete, that study pointed out, the cost of keeping resources flowing into to the economy will increase in real terms, as more labor and capital have to be invested to extract a given amount of each resource; as pollution levels rise, in turn, the costs of mitigating their impacts on public health, agricultural productivity, and other core economic factors go up in the same way, and for the same reasons. Those costs have to be paid out of current economic output, leaving less and less for other uses, until economic output itself begins to fall and the industrial world begins its terminal decline.
Now it’s easy to insist, if you ignore the economic dimension, that a society facing this sort of crisis can save itself by launching a massive program to build nuclear reactors, solar thermal power plants, algal biodiesel, or what have you, and of course this sort of claim has seen endless rehashing over the last couple of decades. The problem is that massive programs of this sort pile additional demands on an already faltering economy. Any such program has to be paid for, after all, and by this I don’t mean that money has to be found for it; in today’s mostly hallucinatory economic climate, conjuring money out of thin air is easy enough. No, it has to be paid out of current economic output, which is much less flexible, and already has to cover the rising costs of resource depletion and pollution. This is the trap hidden in the limits to growth; once those limits begin to bite, the spare economic capacity that would be needed to build one’s way out of trouble no longer exists.
The Sixth Extinction
November 30, 2009|By Jeff Corwin
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/30/opinion/la-oe-corwin30-2009nov30
"There is a holocaust happening. Right now," writes Jeff Corwin, author of 100 Heartbeats, in the Los Angeles Times. "And it's not confined to one nation or even one region. It is a global crisis. Species are going extinct en masse." Corwin goes on to explain:
"Every 20 minutes we lose an animal species. If this rate continues, by century's end, 50% of all living species will be gone. It is a phenomenon known as the sixth extinction. The fifth extinction took place 65 million years ago when a meteor smashed into the Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and many other species and opening the door for the rise of mammals. Currently, the sixth extinction is on track to dwarf the fifth."
Peak Soil - Here Come the BRICs
Money is now beginning to move out of BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India & China)
into coveted agricultural and other assets in North America, Europe and Australia.
There is one main catalyst for this move, for instance, during the 21C Commodity Bubble, food
importing nations such as Egypt, China and Gulf States were alarmed to find that they
could not import certain foods at any price. For example, the market for rice broke
down and it was simply not available!
Saudi Arabia is a large food importer and was alarmed at this turn of events. So it is
no surprise to see Saudi poultry producer IFFCO turn up with 19.99% of Australian
farming company Australian Agricultural Company (AACo). AACo’s pastoral
holdings cover the equivalent of 1% of Australia’s land mass, it is has about 600,000
head of cattle and is a significant producer of grain for animal feed.
StockAnalysis expects that we will see more of this movement of funds. Whether it’s
from a Chinese takeover of Ford’s Hummer Division or an Indian company’s bid for
coal resources in Australia’s Canning Basin (Gujarat’s bid for Rey Resources), this flow
of funds will continue. Food importers have also begun to buy up large tracts of
farmland in Canada and the USA. This trend will continue, so subscribers should
expect to see quiet buying of farming land by foreign interests.
Go Next To: Chapter 5 - Our House of Cards Economic System
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