the club of rome revisited

Those of you part of the baby boomer generation may remember the Club of Rome. You may remember that the Report to the Club of Rome, a rather popular book, painted a dismal picture of the future. You probably also do remember that it turned out to be wrong. Or was it? Turns out you may be misinformed.

The report to the Club of Rome was published in 1972. It was based on an early computer model done at MIT and it predicted strict limits to future growth on the planet. However, given that it was based on a scientific approach it made certain assumptions and its true predictions were rather far out into the future. They were also not exact dates, but rather crude estimates, give or take 25-50 years. Too imprecise and too far out for any normal person's attention span. Nevertheless it caused a ripple.

Somehow the report got tangled up in the irrational fears and wild predictions surrounding the turn of the century. Many people quickly associated Y2K problems with the environmental and other disaster scenarios that were gaining widespread attention. When nothing happened around 2000, all these scenarios were decisively discarded as unfounded doomsday predictions.

But the report to the Club had already suffered heavy damage beforehand. It had already receded into the background. When it was announced it was quickly followed by several years of high inflation, oil crises, and other turmoil that many took to be early signs of the problem. When these issues were resolved and huge successes were scored, first in the bond markets and then later in the stock market bubble, everyone was convinced it had all been nothing but a false alarm. Decades later the Y2K debacle put the final nail in the coffin.

But what did the MIT model predict ? It basically said the following: if present trends continue, limits to growth will be reached sometime in the next 100 years. Notice that the target year is 2072, and even today that is still quite a ways off. The most probably scenario will then be a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. Sort of like a new Middle Ages. The model was also ran with a set of very optimistic assumptions to see how sensitive it was to disturbances. These optimistic scenarios are often invoked today as solutions to our problems.

The first assumption was that nuclear energy would solve all energy resource problems. That a reduction in pollution from all sources would start in 1975. And that the yield per hectare (100 sq. m) would increase by a factor of 2 starting in 1975. Lastly there would be perfect birth control. Even given those very favorable assumptions growth would end before 2100. Notice that very little time is gained even under extreme measures.

The reasons for this decline were overuse of lands leading to erosion and drops in food production. Resource depletion by increasing prosperity worldwide -although still below current US levels, and the return of pollution causing a further drop in food production. We are actually seeing some of this today in India and China.

The model does not take into account any social adaptation. It assumes we all continue living the way we do now (or did back then). There is a strong implication that we would have to change to stave off disaster.

The model revealed a fundamental problem that cannot be solved with new technology or increases in productivity. New technology and better yields may postpone the inevitable but they cannot remove the problem of essentially exponential growth in a finite and complex space. Given that growth is exponential, any remedy will be increasingly ineffective and buy ever shorter time.

Much can be said about the Report and it is a rather crude approximation to be sure. That is understandable given the limited compute capabilities at the time. But it is for sure that we have not seen the end of the Club of Rome yet. And that burying it prematurely or laughing it away may ultimately prove very foolish indeed.