7 ms·

With all respect to the authors, the thinking at that point in time and the impact it made on the world and you: Much of their predictions haven't stood the tes

by wjnc 9y ago

With all respect to the authors, the thinking at that point in time and the impact it made on the world and you: Much of their predictions haven't stood the test of time. -No exhaustible has been depleted yet and the price mechanism combined with technological progress seems pretty able to set incentives straight. Look at what the oil price bubble of the '00s did for electric cars and batteries in the now. -The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled, but not the accompanying food shortages they predicted. I'd argue the shortages of the '80s and '90s are over, although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela). -Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high. -Many more humans alive at lower poverty levels than ever before and ever imagined by the Club of Rome They got the depletion of fish stocks right though. Although arguably, that was the simplest prediction since the 'tragedy of the commons' is so profound in international fishery. The gloom of the club of Rome just didn't work out. I guess outside of way we are treating our environment, humanity has a lot to be proud of. (I feel the environment is going bonkers and we are a plastic-addicted throw away society.)

tiatia 9y ago
Hey Dude, keep bullshitting! "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat... Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt... Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-... Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
jk2323 9y ago
Hey Dude, keep Bullshitting! "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat... Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt... Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-... Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
- vixen99 9y ago
  Thanks! And are the arguments put forward in these links considered at executive level? Seems to me - not at all because preset agendas dominate, drowning out the logic.
- Symmetry 9y ago
  I read the first link you posted and it seemed, if anything, to support the OP's point. Perhaps you could express your objections in your own words?
  - jk2323 9y ago
    Read the second link. Own words? Most of the blog posts are done by people much smarter than me. I could do a 1 or 2 hour PPT Presentation trying to get to the point. I think only a few people would be able to follow me. Not, because I am so tremendously smarter than them (I have a PhD), but because the topic is so tremendously complex and interlinked.
    - jnordwick 9y ago
      r/iamverysmart material
tom_mellior 9y ago
> No exhaustible has been depleted yet What did they predict would be depleted by December 2017, and where did they predict it? Be specific please. > The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled Has it? What does their model predict for December 2017? Be specific. (http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M... shows an almost perfect fit of population growth predictions and historical data until 2014) > Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high. Yes, that's lovely. Where did they predict otherwise, for December 2017? > I guess outside of way we are treating our environment, humanity has a lot to be proud of. (I feel the environment is going bonkers and we are a plastic-addicted throw away society.) Agreed.
- wjnc 9y ago
  Are you not asking of me a much higher degree of rigour than the Club of Rome demonstrated? The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet. See table 4. Add the years in columns 3 or 4 or 5 to 1972. Gold, mercury, silver were predicted to be exhausted by 2017. None are.
  - jk2323 9y ago
    "The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet" You are correct. In fact, they never will be depleted. Same with the oil. Most of the oil that is still in the ground will stay there. "These forecasts are made possible by assuming the limit on the amount of oil extracted is the amount of oil in the ground. In fact, the limit is likely to be a financial (debt) limit that comes much sooner." https://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-randers-2052-energy-forecasts-are-wrong/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-rander... Please also see: Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet https://www.amazon.com/Extracted-Mineral-Wealth-Plundering-Planet/dp/1603585419 https://www.amazon.com/Extracted-Mineral-Wealth-Plundering-P... It is well possible we are beyond the peak already. This brings us to the "Seneca effect" http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-origins-of-collapse.html http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-or... Otherwise: Business as usual.
danmaz74 9y ago
With this kind of long term predictions, it's practically impossible to get the numbers right - ie the number of years it will take for resource X to end, how many billion people Earth can sustain, etc. But this doesn't mean that there are no limits to growth (on Earth): in the last 40 years we invented lots of great technologies that improved the efficiency in how we use lots of resources and reduced the pollution created by production, but there is no silver bullet in sight that could make those disappear. Just like Moore's law, it worked much longer than anybody expected, but in the end we still hit many limits, and we can say for sure it's not going to last forever even if we don't know when it's going to really end.
spodek 9y ago
You've mischaracterized their work. They didn't predict what you said they did. They showed a range of possible outcomes based on assumptions, among many. You seem to have picked one outcome as their only one and called it their prediction. They created a model based on a systems approach whose output depended on assumptions on physical properties of the planet and future human choices. Given the large uncertainties, they ran the model under many sets of assumptions and presented the outcomes. The point of the book is to illustrate and promote a systems perspective, not just a linear, event-based approach, which you seem to prefer.
- wjnc 9y ago
  Say I agree (at least I get your point ;) - I'm curious how does one test (in the empirical science sense) a systems perspective with regards to predictions / scenario's? Because at least in popular opinion the Club of Rome is known for a pretty grim worldview and political advocacy. Perhaps I'm too much schooled in traditional economics but Robert Nobel wasn't too kind [1] and even in my environmental economics classes we spent quite some time deconstructing the Club of Rome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome#Critics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome#Critics
  - Certhas 9y ago
    It's important to understand that the aim of systems isn't to predict things but to understand potential mechanisms. The fact that certain scenarios that the Club of Rome anticipated seemed to not come true also unveiled new mechanisms to us. Predictions can't be the benchmark, we are simply not advanced enough in the science for that. Certainly the social sciences, like economics, should understand that best. Economics has hardly been able to predict anything.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    At some point, there are limits to our ability to empirically test large-scale predictions because we have no ability to run history more than once. This certainly applies to macroeconomics -- how does one empirically 'test' any prediction from a macroeconomic model based on real-life inputs, other than to see what happens? But this shouldn't preclude us from asking the really difficult questions that we care about, rather than restricting ourselves to the realm of physics, where we can get 5 sigmas in classical statistical tests. With regards to Robert Nobel's criticism, the whole point of the Club of Rome's approach is to model a simplified, 'low resolution' view of the world economy in order to embed it in a larger network of information, goods, and energy flows constrained by the environment -- because the boundary conditions matter a lot to how the macroeconomy functions. Sometimes you can get away with a much simpler modeling approach if you actually get all the inputs right. The biggest criticism the Club of Rome has on most macroeconomic models is that it doesn't model the environmental inputs in sufficient detail, and these things really matter a lot in the long run. It is not simply sufficient to take current 'wage levels' or 'capital stock' or even 'level of technology' as a direct input to your DSGE RBC model -- our macroeconomies perform a quasi-ecological function of converting flows of matter and energy, largely taken from Nature and the environment, and converting them further for human use. Understanding the Nature-human interface, then explicitly modeling the stock quantities of the inputs into the macroeconomy must on some level be important, because they are key to how our entire technological society functions. I you're inclined to learn more about their modeling approach at a high level, I highly recommend Thinking in Systems [1]. Read it a week ago and it blew my mind, as its intuitions match up with a lot of patterns that we see over and over again in dealing with any complex network, but presented in a systematic and convincing manner. [1] http://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf http://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf
chappi42 9y ago
> although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela) Considering people who came to Europe in the last time you can at least add Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palaestina, some African countries to this list. And I'd say (apart from often atrocious politics) it's b/c there are too many young men and no work. > Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high with worldwide measurable effects on the sea. (Immission probably due to only 6 large rivers, but still) (many more signs) I fear the Club of Rome will work out very well in time
- wjnc 9y ago
  Don't conflate being critical of the CoR of not being afraid for our environment. Mostly I am saying that the global market has shown to be more robust to changes in population and that supply and demand has been able to accomodate more changes than the CoR held for possible. That's positive point for our global system. It seems robust within the parameters of the last 150 years.
  - chappi42 9y ago
    Yes that's true. Personally I don't care too much about the precise prognoses but about the general idea. 40 years ago, the model was simple and also today I don't think the complexity could be modeled accurately. There are examples in smaller areas, e.g. Easter Island, Trinidade South were 'over-usage' lead to consequences. I could image this to happen to the earth as a whole in time when we do not regulate. The global system seems robust, yes. But there is plenty of oil still and most nations are stable. But who knows? This will/could change. For the former there is technology. But for the latter it seems difficult, a former-china-like-one-child-policy would be in order for certain regions, but I don't see this coming.
    - ratacat 9y ago
      I think agricultural collapse is a great place to start researching. The book 1493 all about the ecological exchange of contact with the new world has some phenomenal perspective about it all. Our high input monocropping is pretty tenuous. Look at the lifespan history of commercial pesticides and fungicides, they used to be 30+ years around the turn of the century. Today, a newly discovered pesticide has a lifespan of about three years before it becomes not effective. The extreme lack of genetic diversity in our crops is a time bomb waiting to happen. If you think the Irish Potato famine was bad, it's going to be a mere footnote to the kind of agricultural disasters we will see come out of the next century. Rubber trees are a particularly vulnerable piece, 99% of all rubber produced in the world comes from southeast Asia from a handful of clones brought over from the Amazon. They can't monocrop rubber in South America because of leaf blight. Yet when that blight makes it over to se Asia on somebody's boot, things are going to get weird fast. No rubber means no industrial hoses, gaskets, and tires. We don't have any economic means to reproduce natural rubber. All the computers in the world won't make a difference.
Symmetry 9y ago
They may have been off and potentially very off on the timing. But the amount of physical resources theoretically available to us is certainly limited by the speed of light so even making the most generous possible assumptions exponential material growth can't continue forever.
dredmorbius 9y ago
The fundamental argument of Limits to Growth is a simple one, simpler than you're allowing: it's that there are, in fact, limits to growth. The counterproposition is that there are no limits to growth. This tends to render itself absurd in fairly short order. (Though that fact has done little to dent the propositions's popularity.) You can find proponents of such views easily. Julian Simon is among the better-known, having by a mix of chance and a general failure to understand economics of extractive resource economics, won a rather famous wager. There's M.A. Adelman, an obscure, but influential, M.I.T. economist specialising in petroleum: Minerals are essentially inexhuastible. Oil, gas, coal, and copper, for example, will never be depleted. Investment in exploration and development creates an in-ground inventory of proved reserves, constantly used and replaced. This is an M.I.T. economist. (Simon's arguments are even sketchier.) An oil company CEO -- I can't recall which -- wrote an editorial in one of the major weekly magazines (I think it was The Atlantic though I haven't been able to turn it up), arguing to the effect that there were no limits to oil. This in the 1950s. At the time, the US was some 20 years past its largest-ever on-shore oil discovery, the East Texas Oil Field, and 20 years from its own conventional production peak, in 1972. The world's largest-ever oil field, at Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, had already been discovered. By the 1880s, the general locations of most U.S. oil finds was already well-established: they were betrayed by natural seeps and existing finds, in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and in California. Guides that rapidly appeared on how to get rich (or broke) quick in the Pennsylvania oil fields, such as Dr. Gesners (below) list out a litany of familiar locations and bearing materials, including, yes, tars, sands, and shales, as well as coal. Again: the message is a simple one. Unending constant percentage growth is impossible. At some point it has to cease. The limits are so significant that even very crude estimates (such as those employed by the LTG models) are fairly accurate -- most of those showed a peak sometime in the 2020 - 2040 period, a result which seems borne out. Where history has shown otherwise, it's largely been on either of two bases: 1. The growth trends slowed. This occurred in population after a phenomenal boom in the 1950s and 1960s. This had proved exceptionally concerning at numerous levels. 2. Capabilities have improved, slightly. Most especially in food production. But the improvements have themselves come at a cost of more intensive activity, greater resource utilisation (including of petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides), of topsoil erosion, and of environmental impacts. Those two developments staved off one of the worst predictions, of global starvation by the year 2000. But the avoidance itself came through mechanisms consistent with the general concept. That is: one trend slowed, another increased, but through increased impacts. The net is a slight time shift, but a minuscule one given the history of Earth, or even of Humanity. Ghawar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field Oil, as seen from the 1860s: https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n10/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n1... Some of the cornucopians, and what they've had to say: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1xch1j/bradleys_bunch_a_passel_of_peak_oil_protestation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1xch1j/bradley...
clord 9y ago
> - No exhaustible has been depleted yet I don't think they predicted depletion for our current era in any of the models. The only model that even came close to that was the "Business As Usual" model, which predicts a peak of production around our present time. Looking at current production levels we do see a levelling off of oil production mostly due to declining output from major fields. [0] That said, certainly depletion is a very strong claim that no one has made. > - the price mechanism combined with technological progress seems pretty able to set incentives straight. Look at what the oil price bubble of the '00s did for electric cars and batteries in the now. First of all, switching to electric cars will amount to a shift in what the automobile fleet burns for fuel. Instead of gasoline and diesel, they burn whatever the power plant burns, and that's still predominantly petroleum-sourced. Additionally, current lithium supplies can not support massive expansion of the fleet. If Tesla builds all the gigafactories necessary to convert the fleet (let's assume 100 million EVs per year, which is approx current auto production; requiring 800,000 metric tons of lithium) and runs them for 17 years, they will deplete the known reserves of lithium (13.5 million tons of reserves[1] divided by 800,000 = 16.9 years). Speculative Estimates from[2] Next, A lot of the material required for an EV still has to be sourced from petroleum resources. The metals need to be refined with high-heat processes. The wheels are rubber and sourced from natural gas or oil. Lots of plastics are involved. Mining and transporting the raw resources is still done with diesel machinery. Finally, even if EV rollout is possible, we can't do it for all the people expected to be buying cars in the future. Even replacing the developed world's fleet is a major challenge, but doing it for the world looks insurmountable at this point. Given these real constraints, I'm willing to grant that price mechanism will not overcome these problems, except insofar that it can exclude most of the world from owning cars and other resource-consuming stuff. > - The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled, but not the accompanying food shortages they predicted. The business-as-usual model did not properly account for how extensively we started turning petroleum into food. These days, there is a tremendous amount of embodied energy in most of the industrial food system. > I'd argue the shortages of the '80s and '90s are over, although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela). South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Venezuela. Also likely near-term famines in North Korea and Egypt. There are more active famines in 2017 than any recent time. Whether the number of affected people is similarly high is unknown at present. > -Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high. I'm not sure why this is listed as a positive. Is that what you meant? > -Many more humans alive at lower poverty levels than ever before and ever imagined by the Club of Rome Some models they presented in the book had far more wealth, far lower poverty, and far higher populations than our present. In these models, pollution was also far higher than our present situation. The point was that resources inevitably get converted to pollution somehow. The models show that if we find a solution to our resource problems, we'll end up with more pollution. [0]: http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-october-production-data/ http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-october-production-data/ [1]: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs-2015-lithi.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs... [2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough-lithium-to-maintain-the-growth-of-the-lithium-ion-battery-m https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...
rainingmonkey 9y ago
>although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela). These and many other crises in the world today can arguably be traced to the very kinds of resource challenges the Club of Rome discussed. The 'Arab Spring' in particular has it's roots in (among other things) a decade of poor harvests caused by drought, aquifer depletion and topsoil erosion, which made people move from rural areas to the cities in huge numbers. Once there, persistent unemployment was the fuel, political repression was the accelerant and the spark came from a spike in global food prices caused by bad harvests combined with speculative grain hoarding[1]. We should be especially wary of triumphantly declaring that everything's allright in the world from the position of one of the world's richest societies. When negative changes come they hit the most vulnerable first, whilst those with the most power and wealth use it (perhaps unknowingly) to ensure that their bubble remains as optimistic as ever. We see this demonstrated as the very poorest are hit first (eg. young, black males in the USA), then the working class, then when it hits the middle classes the 'crisis' becomes part of media discourse; throughout the elite remain largely oblivious (eg. Silicon Valley salaries). These are simple narratives and we should perhaps be as sceptical of them as the idea that "Facebook caused the Arab Spring", but they illustrate how we should consider how resource constraints interface with all the other systems of human civilisation. [1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...

by wjnc 9y ago

tiatia 9y ago

Hey Dude, keep bullshitting! "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat... Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt... Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-... Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

jk2323 9y ago

Hey Dude, keep Bullshitting! "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat... Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt... Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-... Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

vixen99 9y ago
Thanks! And are the arguments put forward in these links considered at executive level? Seems to me - not at all because preset agendas dominate, drowning out the logic.
Symmetry 9y ago
I read the first link you posted and it seemed, if anything, to support the OP's point. Perhaps you could express your objections in your own words?
- jk2323 9y ago
  Read the second link. Own words? Most of the blog posts are done by people much smarter than me. I could do a 1 or 2 hour PPT Presentation trying to get to the point. I think only a few people would be able to follow me. Not, because I am so tremendously smarter than them (I have a PhD), but because the topic is so tremendously complex and interlinked.
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    r/iamverysmart material

tom_mellior 9y ago

> No exhaustible has been depleted yet What did they predict would be depleted by December 2017, and where did they predict it? Be specific please. > The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled Has it? What does their model predict for December 2017? Be specific. (http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M... shows an almost perfect fit of population growth predictions and historical data until 2014) > Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high. Yes, that's lovely. Where did they predict otherwise, for December 2017? > I guess outside of way we are treating our environment, humanity has a lot to be proud of. (I feel the environment is going bonkers and we are a plastic-addicted throw away society.) Agreed.

wjnc 9y ago
Are you not asking of me a much higher degree of rigour than the Club of Rome demonstrated? The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet. See table 4. Add the years in columns 3 or 4 or 5 to 1972. Gold, mercury, silver were predicted to be exhausted by 2017. None are.
- jk2323 9y ago
  "The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet" You are correct. In fact, they never will be depleted. Same with the oil. Most of the oil that is still in the ground will stay there. "These forecasts are made possible by assuming the limit on the amount of oil extracted is the amount of oil in the ground. In fact, the limit is likely to be a financial (debt) limit that comes much sooner." https://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-randers-2052-energy-forecasts-are-wrong/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-rander... Please also see: Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet https://www.amazon.com/Extracted-Mineral-Wealth-Plundering-Planet/dp/1603585419 https://www.amazon.com/Extracted-Mineral-Wealth-Plundering-P... It is well possible we are beyond the peak already. This brings us to the "Seneca effect" http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-origins-of-collapse.html http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-or... Otherwise: Business as usual.

danmaz74 9y ago

With this kind of long term predictions, it's practically impossible to get the numbers right - ie the number of years it will take for resource X to end, how many billion people Earth can sustain, etc. But this doesn't mean that there are no limits to growth (on Earth): in the last 40 years we invented lots of great technologies that improved the efficiency in how we use lots of resources and reduced the pollution created by production, but there is no silver bullet in sight that could make those disappear. Just like Moore's law, it worked much longer than anybody expected, but in the end we still hit many limits, and we can say for sure it's not going to last forever even if we don't know when it's going to really end.

spodek 9y ago

You've mischaracterized their work. They didn't predict what you said they did. They showed a range of possible outcomes based on assumptions, among many. You seem to have picked one outcome as their only one and called it their prediction. They created a model based on a systems approach whose output depended on assumptions on physical properties of the planet and future human choices. Given the large uncertainties, they ran the model under many sets of assumptions and presented the outcomes. The point of the book is to illustrate and promote a systems perspective, not just a linear, event-based approach, which you seem to prefer.

wjnc 9y ago
Say I agree (at least I get your point ;) - I'm curious how does one test (in the empirical science sense) a systems perspective with regards to predictions / scenario's? Because at least in popular opinion the Club of Rome is known for a pretty grim worldview and political advocacy. Perhaps I'm too much schooled in traditional economics but Robert Nobel wasn't too kind [1] and even in my environmental economics classes we spent quite some time deconstructing the Club of Rome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome#Critics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome#Critics
- Certhas 9y ago
  It's important to understand that the aim of systems isn't to predict things but to understand potential mechanisms. The fact that certain scenarios that the Club of Rome anticipated seemed to not come true also unveiled new mechanisms to us. Predictions can't be the benchmark, we are simply not advanced enough in the science for that. Certainly the social sciences, like economics, should understand that best. Economics has hardly been able to predict anything.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  At some point, there are limits to our ability to empirically test large-scale predictions because we have no ability to run history more than once. This certainly applies to macroeconomics -- how does one empirically 'test' any prediction from a macroeconomic model based on real-life inputs, other than to see what happens? But this shouldn't preclude us from asking the really difficult questions that we care about, rather than restricting ourselves to the realm of physics, where we can get 5 sigmas in classical statistical tests. With regards to Robert Nobel's criticism, the whole point of the Club of Rome's approach is to model a simplified, 'low resolution' view of the world economy in order to embed it in a larger network of information, goods, and energy flows constrained by the environment -- because the boundary conditions matter a lot to how the macroeconomy functions. Sometimes you can get away with a much simpler modeling approach if you actually get all the inputs right. The biggest criticism the Club of Rome has on most macroeconomic models is that it doesn't model the environmental inputs in sufficient detail, and these things really matter a lot in the long run. It is not simply sufficient to take current 'wage levels' or 'capital stock' or even 'level of technology' as a direct input to your DSGE RBC model -- our macroeconomies perform a quasi-ecological function of converting flows of matter and energy, largely taken from Nature and the environment, and converting them further for human use. Understanding the Nature-human interface, then explicitly modeling the stock quantities of the inputs into the macroeconomy must on some level be important, because they are key to how our entire technological society functions. I you're inclined to learn more about their modeling approach at a high level, I highly recommend Thinking in Systems [1]. Read it a week ago and it blew my mind, as its intuitions match up with a lot of patterns that we see over and over again in dealing with any complex network, but presented in a systematic and convincing manner. [1] http://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf http://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf

chappi42 9y ago

> although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela) Considering people who came to Europe in the last time you can at least add Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palaestina, some African countries to this list. And I'd say (apart from often atrocious politics) it's b/c there are too many young men and no work. > Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high with worldwide measurable effects on the sea. (Immission probably due to only 6 large rivers, but still) (many more signs) I fear the Club of Rome will work out very well in time

wjnc 9y ago
Don't conflate being critical of the CoR of not being afraid for our environment. Mostly I am saying that the global market has shown to be more robust to changes in population and that supply and demand has been able to accomodate more changes than the CoR held for possible. That's positive point for our global system. It seems robust within the parameters of the last 150 years.
- chappi42 9y ago
  Yes that's true. Personally I don't care too much about the precise prognoses but about the general idea. 40 years ago, the model was simple and also today I don't think the complexity could be modeled accurately. There are examples in smaller areas, e.g. Easter Island, Trinidade South were 'over-usage' lead to consequences. I could image this to happen to the earth as a whole in time when we do not regulate. The global system seems robust, yes. But there is plenty of oil still and most nations are stable. But who knows? This will/could change. For the former there is technology. But for the latter it seems difficult, a former-china-like-one-child-policy would be in order for certain regions, but I don't see this coming.
  - ratacat 9y ago
    I think agricultural collapse is a great place to start researching. The book 1493 all about the ecological exchange of contact with the new world has some phenomenal perspective about it all. Our high input monocropping is pretty tenuous. Look at the lifespan history of commercial pesticides and fungicides, they used to be 30+ years around the turn of the century. Today, a newly discovered pesticide has a lifespan of about three years before it becomes not effective. The extreme lack of genetic diversity in our crops is a time bomb waiting to happen. If you think the Irish Potato famine was bad, it's going to be a mere footnote to the kind of agricultural disasters we will see come out of the next century. Rubber trees are a particularly vulnerable piece, 99% of all rubber produced in the world comes from southeast Asia from a handful of clones brought over from the Amazon. They can't monocrop rubber in South America because of leaf blight. Yet when that blight makes it over to se Asia on somebody's boot, things are going to get weird fast. No rubber means no industrial hoses, gaskets, and tires. We don't have any economic means to reproduce natural rubber. All the computers in the world won't make a difference.

Symmetry 9y ago

They may have been off and potentially very off on the timing. But the amount of physical resources theoretically available to us is certainly limited by the speed of light so even making the most generous possible assumptions exponential material growth can't continue forever.

dredmorbius 9y ago

The fundamental argument of Limits to Growth is a simple one, simpler than you're allowing: it's that there are, in fact, limits to growth. The counterproposition is that there are no limits to growth. This tends to render itself absurd in fairly short order. (Though that fact has done little to dent the propositions's popularity.) You can find proponents of such views easily. Julian Simon is among the better-known, having by a mix of chance and a general failure to understand economics of extractive resource economics, won a rather famous wager. There's M.A. Adelman, an obscure, but influential, M.I.T. economist specialising in petroleum: Minerals are essentially inexhuastible. Oil, gas, coal, and copper, for example, will never be depleted. Investment in exploration and development creates an in-ground inventory of proved reserves, constantly used and replaced. This is an M.I.T. economist. (Simon's arguments are even sketchier.) An oil company CEO -- I can't recall which -- wrote an editorial in one of the major weekly magazines (I think it was The Atlantic though I haven't been able to turn it up), arguing to the effect that there were no limits to oil. This in the 1950s. At the time, the US was some 20 years past its largest-ever on-shore oil discovery, the East Texas Oil Field, and 20 years from its own conventional production peak, in 1972. The world's largest-ever oil field, at Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, had already been discovered. By the 1880s, the general locations of most U.S. oil finds was already well-established: they were betrayed by natural seeps and existing finds, in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and in California. Guides that rapidly appeared on how to get rich (or broke) quick in the Pennsylvania oil fields, such as Dr. Gesners (below) list out a litany of familiar locations and bearing materials, including, yes, tars, sands, and shales, as well as coal. Again: the message is a simple one. Unending constant percentage growth is impossible. At some point it has to cease. The limits are so significant that even very crude estimates (such as those employed by the LTG models) are fairly accurate -- most of those showed a peak sometime in the 2020 - 2040 period, a result which seems borne out. Where history has shown otherwise, it's largely been on either of two bases: 1. The growth trends slowed. This occurred in population after a phenomenal boom in the 1950s and 1960s. This had proved exceptionally concerning at numerous levels. 2. Capabilities have improved, slightly. Most especially in food production. But the improvements have themselves come at a cost of more intensive activity, greater resource utilisation (including of petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides), of topsoil erosion, and of environmental impacts. Those two developments staved off one of the worst predictions, of global starvation by the year 2000. But the avoidance itself came through mechanisms consistent with the general concept. That is: one trend slowed, another increased, but through increased impacts. The net is a slight time shift, but a minuscule one given the history of Earth, or even of Humanity. Ghawar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field Oil, as seen from the 1860s: https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n10/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n1... Some of the cornucopians, and what they've had to say: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1xch1j/bradleys_bunch_a_passel_of_peak_oil_protestation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1xch1j/bradley...

clord 9y ago

> - No exhaustible has been depleted yet I don't think they predicted depletion for our current era in any of the models. The only model that even came close to that was the "Business As Usual" model, which predicts a peak of production around our present time. Looking at current production levels we do see a levelling off of oil production mostly due to declining output from major fields. [0] That said, certainly depletion is a very strong claim that no one has made. > - the price mechanism combined with technological progress seems pretty able to set incentives straight. Look at what the oil price bubble of the '00s did for electric cars and batteries in the now. First of all, switching to electric cars will amount to a shift in what the automobile fleet burns for fuel. Instead of gasoline and diesel, they burn whatever the power plant burns, and that's still predominantly petroleum-sourced. Additionally, current lithium supplies can not support massive expansion of the fleet. If Tesla builds all the gigafactories necessary to convert the fleet (let's assume 100 million EVs per year, which is approx current auto production; requiring 800,000 metric tons of lithium) and runs them for 17 years, they will deplete the known reserves of lithium (13.5 million tons of reserves[1] divided by 800,000 = 16.9 years). Speculative Estimates from[2] Next, A lot of the material required for an EV still has to be sourced from petroleum resources. The metals need to be refined with high-heat processes. The wheels are rubber and sourced from natural gas or oil. Lots of plastics are involved. Mining and transporting the raw resources is still done with diesel machinery. Finally, even if EV rollout is possible, we can't do it for all the people expected to be buying cars in the future. Even replacing the developed world's fleet is a major challenge, but doing it for the world looks insurmountable at this point. Given these real constraints, I'm willing to grant that price mechanism will not overcome these problems, except insofar that it can exclude most of the world from owning cars and other resource-consuming stuff. > - The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled, but not the accompanying food shortages they predicted. The business-as-usual model did not properly account for how extensively we started turning petroleum into food. These days, there is a tremendous amount of embodied energy in most of the industrial food system. > I'd argue the shortages of the '80s and '90s are over, although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela). South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Venezuela. Also likely near-term famines in North Korea and Egypt. There are more active famines in 2017 than any recent time. Whether the number of affected people is similarly high is unknown at present. > -Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high. I'm not sure why this is listed as a positive. Is that what you meant? > -Many more humans alive at lower poverty levels than ever before and ever imagined by the Club of Rome Some models they presented in the book had far more wealth, far lower poverty, and far higher populations than our present. In these models, pollution was also far higher than our present situation. The point was that resources inevitably get converted to pollution somehow. The models show that if we find a solution to our resource problems, we'll end up with more pollution. [0]: http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-october-production-data/ http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-october-production-data/ [1]: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs-2015-lithi.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs... [2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough-lithium-to-maintain-the-growth-of-the-lithium-ion-battery-m https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...

rainingmonkey 9y ago

>although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela). These and many other crises in the world today can arguably be traced to the very kinds of resource challenges the Club of Rome discussed. The 'Arab Spring' in particular has it's roots in (among other things) a decade of poor harvests caused by drought, aquifer depletion and topsoil erosion, which made people move from rural areas to the cities in huge numbers. Once there, persistent unemployment was the fuel, political repression was the accelerant and the spark came from a spike in global food prices caused by bad harvests combined with speculative grain hoarding[1]. We should be especially wary of triumphantly declaring that everything's allright in the world from the position of one of the world's richest societies. When negative changes come they hit the most vulnerable first, whilst those with the most power and wealth use it (perhaps unknowingly) to ensure that their bubble remains as optimistic as ever. We see this demonstrated as the very poorest are hit first (eg. young, black males in the USA), then the working class, then when it hits the middle classes the 'crisis' becomes part of media discourse; throughout the elite remain largely oblivious (eg. Silicon Valley salaries). These are simple narratives and we should perhaps be as sceptical of them as the idea that "Facebook caused the Arab Spring", but they illustrate how we should consider how resource constraints interface with all the other systems of human civilisation. [1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...