Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Model of Human Society Created 50 Yrs Ago Still Forecasts Tough Times Ahead: 'Limits To Growth' 1972
Last edited Sun Jan 2, 2022, 05:41 AM - Edit history (2)
- Author Jorgen Randers speaks at a Club of Rome gathering in 2012.
_____
- Daily Kos, 'Fifty years after it was first created, a model of human society still forecasts tough times ahead,' by Mark Sumner, Jan. 1, 2022. - Ed.
If you were going to create a group to be at the Illuminati center of your conspiracy theory, it would be hard to do better than the Club of Rome. Created in 1968 at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, the “club” is actually a group of 100 former politicians and political leaders, successful business gurus, former United Nations diplomats, world-renowned scientists, and influential economists from around the globe. There’s little wonder that there’s hardly a string-and-and sticky note-covered wall in conspiracyland that doesn’t feature a center circle for this surely sinister group. At various times, the group has included Mikhail Gorbachev and Václav Havel. It’s been directed by economist Joseph Stiglitz, chemist Alexander King, and environmentalist Ashok Khosla.
It’s been widely known for its regular reports forecasting the near future (over 3 dozen of them now) and for its frequent endorsement for the idea of “limits to growth” (LTG).
That’s the idea that, whether in nature or business, every system eventually reaches boundaries based on the available resources, and that reaching such a boundary can have catastrophic effects. The idea that there were limits to the growth of human society was at the heart of the club’s first report in 1972, as well as a best-selling book. Despite the fact that the group’s membership has always been public and the ideas behind the theory being fully described in the book, the Club of Rome almost immediately gained a reputation among the conspiracy-minded as a secretive, elite group. The popular perception of their ideas almost immediately morphed from concerns over how the growing population and limits of material placed bounds on the heights that society might reach, to a scheme to kill off 95% of humanity. The group became connected to claims involving everything from germ warfare to UFOs..
It didn’t help that the 1972 book was based on a model put together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), using the ideas behind limits to growth, and commissioned by the Club of Rome.
- That study predicted that modern society would collapse by 2040. And just recently, a new paper took a look at how those predictions are holding up.
- The Limits to Growth, book first edition, 1972.
The period in which Limits to Growth first appeared came at the end of a decade that included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. The era saw the birth of the modern environmental movement, the passage of the Clean Air Act, the founding of the EPA, and large numbers of dystopian novels & films warning of an over-crowded, over-polluted, resource-poor future. In 1970, Ehrlich made the first of several appearances on The Tonight Show with host Johnny Carson, where he talked to a wide audience about the need for programs of mass sterilization & birth permits.. Both for people who lived through that period and those born after, the idea that we made it to 2021—and a world population of just under 8 billion—without falling into a global conflict over diminishing supplies of oil, or seeing the population drastically reduced from famine & disease, seems like a clear signal that all those old books were exaggerated. Ehrlich made a lot of bad assumptions in The Population Bomb.. As for Silent Spring, well, we banned DDT, the eagle made a comeback, so … all good now.
- The number of people on Earth has doubled since Limits to Growth was first published.
There seem to be few signs of the kind of resource-shortage declines that the work predicted in a world where the amount of material each person consumes—from food, to electronics, to automobiles—is still trending up on a global basis. That makes it easy to believe that all of these old tomes, LTG included, can be safely ignored. But earlier this year economist Gaya Herrington from international accounting & consultancy firm KPMG, took a new look at the old book. With decades of new data and much more detailed information available than the original MIT team, Herrington found that the scenarios outlined in the 1972 work still “aligned closely with observed global data.” In particular, 2 possible futures matched up with what she collected in 2020...
- Read More + Comments,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/1/2069964/-Fifty-years-after-it-was-first-created-a-model-of-human-society-still-forecasts-tough-times-ahead
___________
- SELECT COMMENTS:
- "I think we’re most likely on our way to the crash, as there is no way to get individuals or countries to voluntarily reduce economic growth at an individual or societal level. The stable scenario could emerge after the crash, though, how Western Europe and Japan emerged from the ashes of World War II with more egalitarian, stable, and peaceful social, political, and economic systems. It’s worthwhile to start developing models for that, even though they are unlikely to be realized till after a painful and horrific crash. The only way to avoid the crash would be to develop game-changing technological innovations to not just slow but actually reverse the worst effects of the climate crisis—I have some hope for that as well."
_____
- "Along with much of the world, the US is being devoured by minimally restrained capitalism. Since the Industrial Revolution, in the late 18th century, technology and capitalism have enabled and encouraged the overpopulation of our species by allowing us to survive despite having exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. Our obscenely bloated numbers have lead to wars, famines, pandemics, gross social inequality, toxic environments, and a warming planet that may well extinguish us, not to mention countless other species. Unable or unwilling to forgo the comforts that technology and capitalism offer, we’re all responsible for writing the horror story we are living.
From the beginning of the industrial age, we’ve been continually warned about the dangers that technology would bring. Adam Smith advised us against the dangers of unrestrained capitalism. Yet we never saw fit to abandon—or even to diminish—the fervor of our individual & collective quests for more—more material comforts, more riches, more “success.”.. I don’t hold out hope that we will experience a sudden epiphany & consequently re-order its values. The appeal of technology & its abettor, capitalism, is a siren call too powerful to ignore. We’re too habituated to comforts of modern life to ever seriously consider adopting a lifestyle that requires significant sacrifice."
_____
- "The crash is likely to be climate related and likely to be brutal. Avoiding it is possible. Coming through it gently enough to reach some utopian stable scenario doesn’t seem feasible to me. At least not without an awful lot of mitigation. Though I suppose hunter-gather (or subsistence agriculture) societies in the remaining habitable parts of the planet would be “stable”.
10 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
- 'Soylent Green' (1973) Official Trailer - Charlton Heston, Edward G Robinson Movie HD.
*Film's opening: "New York City, in the year 2022..." With the world ravaged by the greenhouse effect and overpopulation, an NYPD detective investigates the murder of a CEO with ties to the world's main food supply.
______
- Soylent Green is a 1973 American ecological dystopian thriller film directed by Richard Fleischer, and starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young and Edward G. Robinson in his final film role. Loosely based on the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, the film combines police procedural and science fiction genres, the investigation into the murder of a wealthy businessman and a dystopian future of dying oceans and year-round humidity, due to the greenhouse effect, resulting in pollution, poverty, overpopulation, euthanasia and depleted resources.
- Plot: By the year 2022, the cumulative effects of overpopulation, pollution and an apparent climate catastrophe have caused severe worldwide shortages of food, water and housing. There are 40 million people in NYC alone, where only the city's elite can afford spacious apartments, clean water and natural food (at horrendously high prices, with a jar of strawberry jam fetching $150).
- The homes of the elite are fortressed, with private security, bodyguards for their tenants, and usually include concubines (who are referred to as "furniture" and serve the tenants as slaves). America has also adopted the metric system.
In the city live NYPD detective Frank Thorn & his aged friend Sol Roth, a highly intelligent former college professor & police analyst (referred to as a 'Book'). * Roth remembers the world when it had animals and real food; he has a small library of reference materials to assist Thorn. Thorn is tasked with investigating the murder of the wealthy & influential William R. Simonson, a board member of the Soylent Corporation, which he suspects was an assassination. The Soylent Corporation produces the communal food supply of half of the world, and distributing the homonymous brand of wafers, including "Soylent Red" and "Soylent Yellow".
Their latest product, "Soylent Green", a more nutritious variant, is advertised as being made from ocean plankton, but is in short supply. * As a result of the weekly supply chain and distribution bottlenecks, the hungry masses regularly riot when supply runs out, and are brutally removed from the streets by means of "Scoops" -police crowd control vehicles that literally "scoop" the rioters from the street with large hydraulic shovels..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
