Limits to Growth

In last week’s post ― Net Zero by 2050 ― we discussed the reports prepared by the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Climate Change). These reports summarize the work done by climate scientists all over the world. The reports are both thorough and conservative, i.e., they tend to underestimate the impact of the climate crisis, and the speed with which it is occurring. For example, the IPCC does not consider feedback effects such as the Blue Ocean Effect. As the oceans and atmosphere become warmer the ice in the Arctic tends to melt. Ice reflects the sun’s energy more than open water (the ‘Blue Ocean’). Therefore, as the ice melts the oceans absorb more of the sun’s heat, so more of the ice melts, and so on, and so on.

One of the weakest assumptions of the IPCC reports may turn out to be that they assume constant economic growth and that if there is a demand for a resource, such as oil, then that demand will be met. The IPCC fails to recognize that infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible.

In the year 1972 Donella Meadows and her colleagues published the report Limits to Growth (Meadows D. H., 1972)¹. The report has since been updated and published as a book (Meadows, 2004)². In spite of the fact that their work was carried out before the advent of high-power computers their predictions are prescient. The authors of the report looked at many of the variables that make up the physical economy and developed a series of charts that suggest what the future may hold. Figure 1 represents their base case.

They then conducted additional runs of the model using different assumptions about the parameters. In all cases the general outline shown in Figure 1 remained the same ― there is a general economic rise until around the year 2030. After that most economic parameters decline quite steeply up until around the year 2070, after which conditions stabilize.

Figure 1
Limits to Growth Chart (Base Case)