5.3 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Limits to Growth | 4/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:56:47.468680+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Positive reviews ==
In 1980, the Global 2000 Report to the President arrived at similar conclusions regarding expected global resource scarcity and the need for multilateral coordination to prepare for this situation. In a 2008 blog post, Ugo Bardi commented that "Although, by the 1990s LTG had become everyone's laughing stock, among some the LTG ideas are becoming again popular". Reading LTG for the first time in 2000, Matthew Simmons concluded his views on the report by saying, "In hindsight, The Club of Rome turned out to be right. We simply wasted 30 important years ignoring this work." Robert Solow, who had been a vocal critic of LTG, said in 2009 that "thirty years later, the situation may have changed... it will probably be more important in the future to deal intellectually, quantitatively, as well as practically, with the mutual interdependence of economic growth, natural resource availability, and environmental constraints." In a study conducted in 2008, Graham Turner from CSIRO discovered a significant correlation between the observed historical data spanning from 1970 to 2000 and the simulated outcomes derived from the "standard run" limits of the growth model. This correlation was apparent across nearly all the reported outputs. The comparison falls comfortably within the range of uncertainty for almost all the available data, both in terms of magnitude and the patterns observed over time. Turner conducted an analysis of many studies, with a special focus on those authored by economists, that have consistently aimed to discredit the limits-to-growth concept over the course of several years. According to Turner, the aforementioned studies exhibit flaws and demonstrate a lack of comprehension regarding the model. Turner reprised these observations in another opinion piece in The Guardian on 2 September 2014. Turner used data from the UN to claim that the graphs almost exactly matched the 'Standard Run' from 1972 (i.e., the worst-case scenario, assuming that a 'business as usual' attitude was adopted and there were no modifications of human behaviour in response to the warnings in the report). Birth rates and death rates were both slightly lower than projected, but these two effects cancelled each other out, leaving the growth in world population almost exactly as forecast. In 2010, Nørgård, Peet, and Ragnarsdóttir called the book a "pioneering report" and said that it "has withstood the test of time and, indeed, has only become more relevant." In 2012, Christian Parenti drew comparisons between the reception of The Limits to Growth and the ongoing global warming controversy. Parenti further remarked that despite its scientific rigour and credibility, the intellectual guardians of influential economic interests actively dismissed LTG as a warning. A parallel narrative is currently unfolding within the realm of climate research.
In 2012, John Scales Avery, a member of the Nobel Prize-winning group associated with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, supported the basic thesis of LTG by stating, Although the specific predictions of resource availability in Limits to Growth lacked accuracy, its basic thesis – that unlimited economic growth on a finite planet is impossible – was indisputably correct.
== Legacy ==
=== Updates and symposia ===
The Club of Rome has persisted after The Limits to Growth and has generally provided comprehensive updates to the book every five years. An independent retrospective on the public debate over The Limits to Growth concluded in 1978 that optimistic attitudes had won out, causing a general loss of momentum in the environmental movement. While summarizing a large number of opposing arguments, the article concluded that "scientific arguments for and against each position ... have, it would seem, played only a small part in the general acceptance of alternative perspectives." In 1989, a symposium was held in Hanover, entitled "Beyond the Limits to Growth: Global Industrial Society, Vision or Nightmare?" and in 1992, Beyond the Limits (BTL) was published as a 20-year update on the original material. It "concluded that two decades of history mainly supported the conclusions we had advanced 20 years earlier. But the 1992 book did offer one major new finding. We suggested in BTL that humanity had already overshot the limits of Earth's support capacity." Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update was published in 2004. The authors observed that "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." In 2012, the Smithsonian Institution held a symposium entitled "Perspectives on Limits to Growth". Another symposium was held in the same year by the Volkswagen Foundation, entitled "Already Beyond?" Limits to Growth did not receive an official update in 2012, but one of its coauthors, Jørgen Randers, published a book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.