8: The Limits to Growth
Now that I’ve told you about the Selfish Gene Theory, the Gaia Theory, and the Laws of Thermodynamics, I can tell you about the discoveries of the Club of Rome that began all of this.
All of the discoveries I’ve been telling you about so far have been scientific discoveries about humanity’s relationship to the world. When the Club of Rome was founded, none of this science existed.
The Club of Rome put all of this into motion by using the information they did have at the time. Namely, they began by studying humanity’s relationship to the world mathematically.
In 1968, humanity’s knowledge of the global environment consisted of some numbers. We knew population sizes, acreage of farmland, productivity of farmland, total land area, total productivity of factories, a reasonable estimate of the supplies of natural resources in the world, and some pollution levels. And we had records of how those things had changed over time. That was the most critical part.
The Club of Rome figured out how all of those things fit together. None of those numbers change independently of each other. Any time you change any one of those numbers, at least one other number changes. That meant they had discovered the outline of a gigantic algebraic equation. But nobody knew what it was an equation for, or how to write it down. Basically, they’d discovered that the world was ruled by some gigantic mathematical law, and nobody knew what the law was.
They didn’t have enough numbers to write a literal mathematical equation for what they were trying to study, and there was no way they could get reliable numbers for everything in the world anyway. What they did instead was the next best thing.
A systems theory is an outline of a mathematical equation that doesn’t require complete numbers to make it work. It measures the relationships of numbers to each other. It’s a diagram of which numbers affect other numbers and how. Without having perfect numbers, you can’t tell perfectly how much changing one number will change other numbers, but you can keep track of which numbers will change, and get a general idea of how much they’ll change.
A lot of environmentalists have heard about the I = PAT equation. This is a very simple systems diagram, expressed as a mathematical formula. It says that humanity’s environmental Impact is a product of Population size, Affluence, and Technological level. You don’t need any actual numbers to see how that relationship works. Any time you increase population size, affluence, or technological level, you increase your environmental impact. The amount you increase the environmental impact by raising one of those factors depends on the size of the other two factors. This works on any scale, from a village to a town to a city to a region to a continent to the entire world.
The Club of Rome developed a much more complicated systems diagram, and used all the numbers they had in it, to make it much more specific. Once they’d done that, they could see that humanity had a problem. Some of the numbers involved were constant, some were increasing, and others were decreasing.
The most obvious problem was that land area was a constant, and population was growing. That meant there was an inescapable physical limit on the amount of available farmland in the world. At any level of agricultural productivity, each person requires a certain amount of farmland to produce the food they need to live. If the population kept increasing, eventually there wouldn’t be enough farmland to feed everyone. Famine was a mathematical inevitability. The population growth would be stopped by the physical limitation on available farmland.
A similar problem was industrial productivity. People kept producing more in factories every year, but there was a physical limit on the natural resources available in the world. People were going to stop producing things in factories eventually, because sooner or later they were going to run out of natural resources.
Factories also give off a lot of pollution. That affects the food productivity of farmland. The more people use factories to produce things, the less food each acre of farmland can produce, so the more acres of farmland it takes to support each person, and the fewer people can be supported with the available farmland.
Their systems diagram got a lot more complicated from there, but that’s the basic idea.
Humanity affects the environment in five ways: Population size, usage of material goods, food production, natural resource usage, and pollution. Each person needs food and material goods to live. Material goods are made out of natural resources. Farming, turning natural resources into material goods, and using material goods, all produce pollution.
The population of the world is growing at an exponential rate. We are building factories at an exponential rate. With those factories, we are turning natural resources into material goods at an exponential rate. We are also generating pollution at an exponential rate. When you put all the numbers together, the population is increasing at an exponential rate, and each person is consuming natural resources and generating pollution at an exponential rate. Humanity’s impact on the environment is increasing at a triply exponential rate.
Back in 1968, the Club of Rome ran all the numbers through their mathematical formulas. On our current course, we were going to run out of farmland and natural resources some time in the 21st century. When that happened, billions of people were going to die. Our food productivity depends on our usage of natural resources, because a lot of our natural resources are used to build farm machinery. If we run out of farmland and our population keeps growing, we’ll have to start devoting more and more of our natural resources to farming to increase our food productivity. But eventually our natural resources will run out. Then we won’t be able to maintain our industrialized agriculture, so we won’t be able to maintain our food productivity. That means we won’t be able to produce enough food to keep everyone alive. That means worldwide famine killing billions of people, and inevitably, a lot of wars and plagues along with it. With that set of numbers, most of the population of the world would be dead by 2100.
Then the scientists tried changing numbers. They guessed that perhaps we had underestimated the supplies of natural resources in the world, they guessed that people could develop a lot of new technology to solve various problems, they guessed that people would start recycling more, that people would find easy ways to boost the food productivity of their farmland, and so on. They made wildly optimistic speculations, beginning with assuming there were twice as many natural resources in the world as anyone realized. But no matter what combination of numbers they tried, global environmental disaster always struck in the 21st century, and billions of people always died.
Then they tried a different approach to the problem. Instead of changing the numbers themselves, they tried changing the rates at which the numbers were changing. They went back to the real numbers they’d started with. They found that if they just changed two things, global environmental disaster could be avoided, and most people in the world could be better off by the end of the 21st century than they are right now. Of course, 96% of the world’s population doesn’t live in America. By 2100, everyone in the world, including Americans, could have something less than an average American standard of living as of 1968. Americans would have to make some sacrifices, but global poverty could be ended. By 2100, everyone in the world could have an average American standard of living as of 1950, or something like that—that’s the basic idea, anyway. I’m not talking about owning specific material possessions or everyone owning a house in the suburbs or anything, I’m talking about everyone working for a living, getting enough to eat, living lives free of oppression, and dying of old age—and having all the things they need to make those basic things possible.
In 1972, four scientists from the Club of Rome published their discoveries in their book, The Limits to Growth. By doing that, they changed the very future they had predicted by raising people’s awareness of the problem, and people acting differently as a result. That was, of course, the whole reason they published their book.
A lot of good came of their publishing their book. So 20 years later, they started writing a sequel, as a progress report. By now, there were environmental activists hard at work all over the world. But when the scientists started putting all the numbers together again, they realized the news wasn’t nearly as good as it appeared on the surface. They titled that sequel Beyond the Limits to Growth.
Ten years later, they wrote another sequel, called The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update. They published that in 2002.
They had a lot more information, a lot more numbers, and a lot more science to use by now. And all the numbers still indicate global environmental disaster and billions of deaths in the 21st century.
In The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update, the scientists give a lot of specific examples of ways to recognize that problems are growing, and what would need to be done to solve them.
Basically, right now we’re living 20% beyond what the world can sustain. 20% of the things we’re using right now are things we need to keep the global environment functioning.
To solve the problem, all we have to do is to use our resources differently. Cutting down on the world’s population wouldn’t hurt, but we can do all of that we need over time just by everyone having smaller families.
Reducing our population size could be accomplished over generations by each woman limiting herself to having whatever number of children would let two of them grow up to be adults. In America, that means having two children. In countries with high child mortality rates, that means something more than two—at least, until their living conditions improve. The population decrease could be left to some women choosing to have less than two children or not being able to have children for whatever reason.
Zero population growth necessarily depends on identifying all the problems that make population growth seem like a good idea to people, and changing them. For instance, in a lot of impoverished countries, large families are the Social Security system. Parents have 6 or 8 children so that when they’re too old to work anymore, their children will be able to provide for them. We used to do the same thing here in America. But if every couple in your country has 8 children, you get 400% population growth every generation, which means 4 times as many people having to feed themselves every generation, just to be able to feed their parents. The environment can’t withstand that forever, which means sooner or later the country is going to run out of farmland.
Using our resources differently will mean using them more efficiently, and redistributing a lot of them. That obviously means gigantic economic and political changes. With our current political and economic systems, the easiest way to cut 20% out of our impact on the environment would be to take it from the people who are already the most economically marginalized and the least politically powerful. But that will never work, because half the population of the world barely has enough to live already.
People who can barely get enough to live have very little choice in what impact they have on the environment. They have whatever impact on the environment they need to have to keep themselves alive.
If those people are ever going to get the things they need to live, they’re going to get them because the people who could afford to part with them hand them over.
Since materially poor people can’t afford to make the choice to lead environmentally sustainable lifestyles, environmental sustainability depends on getting rid of the lower class, worldwide. Getting rid of the lower class necessarily depends on getting rid of the upper class, because that’s what will happen when you redistribute resources from the way they’re distributed now to the way they will need to be distributed to let people stop taking whatever toll they need to take on the environment to keep themselves alive.
Escaping the environmental crisis necessitates a redefinition of the concept of “rightful ownership”. The concept of rightful ownership that will enable people to use resources in the way people will need to use resources to escape the environmental crisis will be what we already call the Use-Value economy.
The immediate problems that overpopulation are causing could be solved by our cutting back on our environmental impact by 20%. The term “overpopulation” only refers to what number of people your economic relationship to the environment can support. A better term than “overpopulation” would be “over-exploitation of the environment”.
Once again, solving this problem depends on identifying the problems that make over-exploiting the environment seem like a good idea to people, and solving those problems.
A lot of people whine and whimper that the world is going to end if we change our economic system. No, only Capitalism will end if we change our economic system. As long as people need food to eat, there will always be work for people to do.
In the same way that overpopulation can be ended by women practicing zero population growth, over-exploitation of the environment can be ended by people practicing zero economic growth. An increasing population requires an increasing exploitation of the environment to maintain the same economic level for the people. People can also over-exploit their environment by trying to raise their economic level. Or both, which is what’s happening now.
Zero population growth makes zero economic growth possible. Zero economic growth means that every time one factory machine breaks down, you build one factory machine to replace it.
Zero economic growth makes solving the environmental crisis possible. Once you stabilize your economic relationship to the environment, you can cut 20% out of your environmental impact, and be down under the physical limitations of the environment.
Cutting 20% out of an ever-increasing economic relationship to the environment doesn’t accomplish anything in the long run. Technically, you wouldn’t be cutting 20% out of your economic relationship to the environment; you’d just be making it 20% more efficient. But as long as you keep making a problem worse faster than you’re making it better, you’re not solving the problem. An ever-increasing economic relationship to the environment that’s made 20% more efficient only produces 20% more; it doesn’t reduce the environmental impact of your economy.
An end to economic growth doesn’t mean an end to economic development. People are always looking for new and better ways to do things. With an end to economic growth, people would still be free to find new and better ways to use the economy they have. Basically, equating economic development with economic growth is just economics for lazy people.
The big question is: Where do we cut out 20% of our environmental impact?
The short answer is: Everywhere. In fact, the best solution to the environmental crisis is to cut as much as possible out of our environmental impact, because everything we cut out beyond 20% is a safety margin we’re building into our economic relationship with the environment. It isn’t possible for us to say that we’re over-exploiting the environment by exactly 20%. Neither is it possible to say exactly what that 20% refers to—we might be over-exploiting one part of the environment by 10% and another part by 30%. Ultimately, we won’t be living at the physical limitations of the Earth until we’re living below the physical limitations of the Earth, because we can get a good idea what the physical limitations of the Earth are, but we can’t be exactly certain. Environmental sustainability depends on keeping a safety margin and monitoring our relationship to the environment, so that if we start seeing warning signs that we’re over-exploiting the environment, our safety margin will give us time to react.
In The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update, the scientists give a lot of examples of warning signs that an environment is being over-exploited. Basically, when you have to start devoting more and more of your economy to making your economy continue to function, you know you’re in trouble.
The eternal question of any economy is: Where are the resources the economy depends on going to come from?
Some warning signs that your economy is in trouble are:
Having to invest more in claiming low-quality resources because the high-quality resources are gone.
Having to invest more in claiming hard-to-reach resources because the easy-to-reach resources are gone.
Having to clean up your own pollution because the environment isn’t cleaning it up fast enough anymore—or at all.
Poverty increasing because resources are being diverted away from people who need them.
Health care and education systems breaking down because resources are being diverted away from maintaining quality of life just to maintain life at all.
People fighting wars over resources because there aren’t enough to go around anymore.
Governments breaking down because the decision-making elite take advantage of their positions to protect themselves.
Does any of that sound familiar?