The Limits to Growth was a propaganda publication put out by the so-named "Club of Rome," notorious for their outright prevarications and spectacularly failed predictions, and it requires an act of stupendous evasion or laziness or both to not know this.
Limits to Growth explicitly predicted that "by 1992 the world would exhaust all its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc." The diametric opposite of that is the case: we've never had more.
The peak-oil scare which the Limits to Growth and so many others propounded has also been exposed as a total canard — as no less than even the left-leaning Atlantic Magazine and Grist have conceded.
“I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has characterized the last twenty, and will probably characterize the next ten or twenty years, is nevertheless, not only geologically but historically, a temporary and vanishing phenomenon — one which young men will live to see come to its natural end” (1886, J.P. Lesley, state geologist of Pennsylvania).
“There is little or no chance for more oil in California” (1886, U.S. Geological Survey).
“There is little or no chance for more oil in Kansas and Texas” (1891, U.S. Geological Survey).
“Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels of oil, perhaps a ten-year supply” (1914, U.S. Bureau of Mines).
“Oil reserves to last only thirteen years” (1939, Department of the Interior).
“Oil reserves to last thirteen years” (1951, Department of the Interior, Oil and Gas Division).
“We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade” (President Jimmy Carter speaking in 1978 to the entire world).
“At the present rate of use, it is estimated that coal reserves will last 200 more years. Petroleum may run out in 20 to 30 years, and natural gas may last only another 70 years” (Ralph M. Feather, Merrill textbook Science ConnectionsAnnotated Teacher’s Version, 1990, p. 493).
“At the current rate of consumption, some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil … will be used up within your lifetime” (1993, The United States and its People).
“The supply of fossil fuels is being used up at an alarming rate. Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use” (Merrill-Glenco textbook, Biology, An Everyday Experience, 1992).
Contra the Club of Rome’s incessant fear-mongering, population growth has been steadily, provably, inexorably slowing since the late 1960s.
Food supply has not, contrary to the Club of Rome’s dire predictions, "collapsed." On the contrary, 1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve.
Malnourishment and famine have not overtaken the world "by the year 2000." On the contrary, malnutrition has dropped by more than half, from 35% of the world’s population to under 16%.
Nor are we choking on pollution.
"Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse. In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost three million people — roughly one in 500 — died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people.”
Contrary to what Limits to Growth predicted, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.
No matter the inveterate pessimism and no matter the unlikely alliances forged by religious conservatives, eco-fundamentalists, nostalgic aristocrats, and dispossessed anarchists — all of whom were united worldwide around the noble cause of persuading the world that we should all be scared to death, guilt-ridden, and ready at any moment for the end of the world — the decades since Limits to Growth was published simply have not cooperated with their grave predictions of annihilation and death and doom:
In actuality humanity has seen the sharpest decrease in poverty, hunger, ill-health, and illiteracy in all of human history, and in the 1990s — the decade when, according to Club of Rome (et al), the world would be entering the end times, numbers in poverty fell in absolute as well as relative terms.
In fact, any generation born in 1990 or after has experienced more leisure time, more wealth, education, cleanliness, including clean food and water, better health, medicine, travel, music, movies, games, computing, light, warmth, and much more — as well as fewer climate-related sicknesses, injuries, and death — than any other generation in human history.
The non-partisan International Disaster Database, which tracks all climate-related deaths from such things as cold, heat, drought, floods, and other storms, reports in no uncertain terms that climate-related deaths have not just fallen but plummeted, even as C02 levels of the earth have risen — from .02 percent to .03 percent.
“In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any program embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” wrote Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, both of whom explicitly advocated forced sterilization and eugenics, among other criminal acts and human rights violations. They argued as well that mass death was not only inevitable but also that human numbers would fall to two billion worldwide, and the poor would get poorer — all before the year 2000.
They were flatly, unequivocally wrong, just like Club of Rome and Limits to Growth.
The truth is that this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how very wrong Club of Rome was, how outrageous — how preposterous, how criminal— their failed predictions.
My comment here is not intended for the true believers, like the writer of this article, who are far too deep into the dogma to ever get out. It's for those readers who simply don't know what’s true and what isn’t: Limits to Growth, like all propaganda, has been absolutely sunk by time. This entire worldview belongs to the culture of despair, and it worships at the shrine of doom-fueled-by-prevarication.
I myself have written an entire book on this subject, and I want to assure all non-indoctrinated readers out there who are not yet blinded by this secular doomsday dogma that by any reasonable standard imaginable, human progress has made the world a far, far, far, better place — by light years — and it is romantic nonsense to lament the passing of the grand carefree days of primitive barbarism, when death and disease ran rampant, average life expectancies less than forty years of age, and poverty ravaged all humankind.
