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As an aside Meadow's primer Thinking in Systems[1] should be a required text in middle/high schools (imho).
Donella Meadows died of cerebral meningitis at the age of 59 in 2001[2], I truly wish she was someone we could be hearing from today.
Strongly endorsed for middle/high schoolers introduction. I read it last year and thought it was a good introduction but will feel a little simple for the HN crowd. Most of the value is in The Appendix followed by Chapters 1, 2 and 6, so you could even shorten it more. My only caveat is there's a lot of degrowther propaganda in it that you would need to caution the kids against
> degrowther propaganda
What do you mean by that?
I don't have a copy in front of me but throughout the book there are many comments made against modern society and some of the examples that she gives are clearly 'set up' to be against growth. I didn't realize she also wrote Limits to Growth and according to wikipedia, used some of that work and was edited by an org called the Sustainability Institute which explains it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems%3A_A_Prime...
You seem to conflate the term sustainability with "degrowth" which is just not the case in the book Thinking in Systems. I'm really curious where you picked that up from? In fact, a non-sustainable system is a system that is very far from any growth because it is about to collapse - only a sustainable system is able to grow, natural and artifical alike.
But propaganda? What is the agenda, then, and what would be obtained through that agenda?
There are very clear issues in both society and the environment that are both directly and indirectly caused by the obsession with growth.
The whole book is an argument against growth (cf the title). More specifically, all the models implicitly assume that rising costs will never reduce demand (and thus consumption), drive the search for alternatives, or make increased efficiency economically viable. It like writing a book called "The limits to driving" and showing that pretty much every car on the road will quickly smash into something if the drivers are assumed to continue accelerating in their present direction, and no one is going to use their steering wheel or breaks effectively.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer is an introduction into systems thinking, about stocks (resources), flows (actions) and feedback loops. The book isn't an argument against growth, but an argument for the sustainability of systems, especially how to think about and model them. The boundaries of a modelled system are purely conceptional and won't exist in the real world like we'd wrongly assume, D. Meadows makes this more than clear. I think @arthurjj is reading something into it that just isn't there.
Ah. Thank you. I misread the thread.
This particular subthread is about the book Thinking in Systems, not The Limits to Growth.
While related, they are not the same book.
My bad. Thank you for the correction.
*brakes. Freudian slip much? ;)
If you're curious, Meadows has addresses this common counterargument about price (time stamp directly to the relevant remark, but the whole talk is excellent):
I think that when trying to determine what is propaganda, all else being equal, a good rule of thumb is that the messaging in support of the prevailing system is more likely to be propaganda than the messaging against it. This is due to the simple fact that the prevailing system (in this case growth focus / capitalism) has all societal institutions built to support it.
Hard disagree. Just because people reached a consensus on something doesn't then mean talking about that something is propaganda. Is all talk about modern medicine propaganda? All talk/technology that uses AC electrics over DC?
In the modern world it seems like EVERY discussion is 'why XYZ is wrong' and there is zero defense/explanation of how/why we reached/settled on XYZ (current norms) in those discussion, just attempts to discredit xyz/norms.
I would be an interesting addition to clarify what "resources" mean here.
A common rebuttal of the Meadows report that I keep reading is "they predicted we would run out of resources, and we never ran out of anything."
Do they mean metals ? Coal ? Oil ? (As I understand it, we _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil, but were able to replace it with shale oil et al... so it's unclear [1])
> (As I understand it, we _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil, but were able to replace it with shale oil et al... so it's unclear [1])
That doesn't really change the math. It is a finite resource, the amount consumed keeps going up. There has to be a peak. Growth tends to be to a logarithmic or exponential curve, so adding a huge amount of extra resource doesn't change the date all that much on long timeframes.
Yes, you are totally correct, and yet the Malthusians can be wrong when applying this argument because we humans respond to price signals.
Price signal are only relevant is you have a price elasticity of demand, which oil and gas obviously don't have, as they are the building bricks of modern trade and production. Also if logic isn't enough, you just have to look at oil price/consumption to see how inelastic oil prices are.
> price elasticity of demand, which oil and gas obviously don't have
Not remotely clear. First, we have enormous amounts of coal and uranium, so we can make electricity for thousands of years, and EVs mean that if we have to give up on oil, we can. Second, the U.S. has something like 1,200 years' worth of proven shale natural gas reserves(!), so again, we can make all the electricity we need.
And many countries have vehicle fleets that run on natural gas, so again we could give up on oil if we had to.
Manufacturing natgas-powered vehicles is way less resource intensive, and way more sustainable than manufacturing EVs. And if we have that much in the way of shale natgas reserves then running out of oil won't be as big a problem as you paint it.
The development of natgas-powered vehicles and EVs happened in spite or because of the demand inelasticity of oil.
Growth itself is very ambiguous.
To start with, there will always be a growing number of events that (relatively to our species evolution, until its disappearance) will be in the past. Not necessarily more events with artifacts to which we can have access to though.
It’s not like "consumption" is an act of annihilation of anything, this is all transformations. At least as far as energy-mass equilibrium goes.
In a sense, we can literally lose information, as it will never be possible to access it again, be it a star (the stellar body) existence that is out of observable, a species which disappeared million years ago that has let no trace of its passage on earth, or our beloved ones whose loving memory won’t last much centuries.
Liquid fuel isn’t a finite resource, or is at least only finite to the extent the universe is finite.
Whether we use conventional oil, shale or synthetics is really just an implementation issue. The basic idea of solar energy + hydrogen + carbon is pretty much common.
Wait what are you arguing exactly?
The supply of oil is effectively infinite because it can be derived from things that exist in extreme abundance.
This doesn’t necessitate oil being cheap, just that we’ll never realistically be at a point where we’ve used up all oil.
But wouldn’t deriving oil from other things be drastically less energy efficient than current day oils, and isn’t that the problem with current day forms running out?
It's more difficult than current day oil forms, but not necessarily less energy efficient. The same amount of solar energy would be required, but it'd be gathered through solar panels rather than prehistoric plantation.
Humans have made pretty steady progress in getting in ever more difficult forms of oil. Originally we found naturally near surface reservoirs, then started drilling, then deep sea drilling, and then fracking. Each phase was more technologically difficult.
To be clear I think a lot of technological progress is required for synthetical oil to be economical, but in a discission of resource limits across decades, centuries or millennia it's an important escape path.
Well i guess i just don’t know what the incentive would be to convert solar energy into oil. By the time thats super feasible, shouldn’t batteries be a better option?
Current theory is that there will be peak demand instead. Which is same as "peak", but happens with prices falling rather than increasing.
Interesting! Can you point to a good model that shows demand constrains first and ahead of availability crunch? I never saw anything approaching that result, liquid fuels are hard to replace, no?
We've reached 'peak carbon'. The world is increasingly acknowledging that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increase the overall temperature of the planet, which changes planetary weather patterns, and that this changing climate is expensive to adapt to.
As such, we're emitting a more than economically optimal amount of carbon dioxide, and demand overall should drop. Hence, peak demand. More energy consumption can give us more good things, so the energy consumption itself isn't bad, but we've reached a point where the side effects of the energy consumption are eating into the benefits we get, probably past the point of marginal benefit overall.
mmh sure. I think your take is extremely optimistic, you mention The World as if there were a collective direction, but from where I stand CO2 emissions look like the ultimate example of the tragedy of the commons.
Also the side effects of benefits have large delays, so economics are very dependent on the rate of discount you use for your net-present-value calculation...
I’m a bit confused because you said two contradictory things: “the amount consumed keeps going up” and “there has to be a peak.”
Resource consumption goes up until it reaches a peak, then goes down. Generally, there are plenty of second peaks.
Resources are infinite (Julian Simon).
And exponential doesnt mean the peak will be in 20 years. It could be 500 years.
Real resources humanity can access are not infinite (scientists & engineers) and economists can get their assumptions wrong (everyone, including economists).
And there is no way our current trend of oil use can be sustained for 500 years. By then our oil use will be negligible compared to what it is today unless something truly bizarre and unforseeable happens.
If we make oil from nuclear or solar power using fuel synthesis, we can carry forward indefinitely.
Yeah but we wouldn't do that. It doesn't make sense to pay the energy conversion costs; it is already more efficient to store power in non-oil batteries.
Not true for aviation, where weight and volume are both constraints.
For me, scarcity arguments based on "preferences" don't make a ton of sense, but I see your point.
I'd give even odds there will always be use cases for burnable fuels, and almost all vehicles use burnable fuels currently. Sure seems a shorter path to just pull CO2 out of the air and keep moving along as we always have, vs electrifying everything.
Conventional has already peaked, and it is possible that even producers will decide to stop extracting nonconventional oil because it is too expensive and the price of a barrel fluctuates too much (IEA 2020)
Grow our civilization’s energy consumption by ~2% yoy and you’ll boil the oceans in 400 years.
Or course, the planet will be uninhabitable much, much earlier, so it doesn’t matter too much.
Maybe we can go with a bit more of nuances here. Uninhabitable is probably an "overstatement", as in, if all human civilizations collapse globally consequently to its collective hubris, chances are good that other species will thrive in this very different world. We can even suppose continuation of some humans but with different life modalities.
I’m not sure which part of ‘boil the oceans’ you think we can sort of exist in. In this scenario we become Venus except with thinner atmosphere, so no balloons to save us.
While such a scenario is certainly possible, it's not something that can be achieved by humanity by solely leverage on its current capacities to transform earth environment.
See for example https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/47070/20231113/earth-s...
So, to answer your question, in the part where humanity can certainly change the world to its own detrimental, but is currently not able to really put it in a state where absolutely no life form is conceivable anymore, and that even putting it a state where some hunters gatherers would not be able to survive is not a 100% garantie outcome of current trends. though I would rather consider the current trend rather awful if you ask.
They're not saying we can exist. They're saying that it's not uninhabitable to something, therefore making the value judgement that it would be uninhabitable is simply not true. Which is another kind of value judgement about how important your own values are.
Provided most energy ends up as waste heat, not as/in stuff, I suppose (leaving aside doing waste heat intensive things off planet and dropping products back to earth etc.).
Managing heat with purely radiators (i.e. no need to dump hot matter into space to lose it forever) is… challenging at scales required. Not saying it can’t be done, but it’s a long shot.
Yes, purely radiating away heat might be tough. That said, 400 years at 2% is more than a factor of 2,500 - I'd expect some quite substantial changes to go with that as far as industry and society are concerned. For example, a lot more energy use might not be waste heat but creation of stuff or waste being high energy energetic radiation.
Your main point might be real, but until we manage to make it work around 0K, i'd have a hard time to believe a carnot engine can have an efficiency close to one. I think current "future" tech aim for something like ~50% (theorical) efficiency, and that's with a _very_ wide temperature differential that would put a real strain on materials.
Someone should have told Intel when they started work on Netburst.
Some optimization required...
This extrapolation is based on "money is a claim on energy", which assumes some kind of linear, or linear-like relationship between energy and wellbeing.
Just because a relationship is linear-ish up to a point doesn't mean it always will be.
The system is trapped in a what-is-measured-is-what-is-managed loop, where we worship "growth" without understanding what it's for.
These can all be true without contradicting one other:
- Many people on the planet can't access as much energy as they need to achieve optimum happiness and wellbeing. Making more energy available to them would alleviate suffering.
- Providing enough for all 9Bn to reach their optimum without destroying the environment will be extremely difficult. There aren't enough critical minerals available with current tech for everyone to live a high-energy electric dream.
- Some have vastly more energy than they need, and depleting resources to make them richer won't make them, or anyone else, happier. There is a diminishing returns effect beyond a certain point, where a massive increase in consumption only produces a small net gain.
- Nevertheless, the super-rich do not have so much that we could redistribute it all and the poor would also have enough. Liquidate the rich, give it all away and the poor will be.. slightly less poor.
- The relationship between energy and wellbeing is not fixed or linear, and may indeed come down with time. For example, if you have an effective and energy-efficient information system, people don't need to expend as much to live a good life (you don't need to go halfway around the world to find the girl or the job, if it turns out there was a good one in the next town or city over, but if your information systems suck you'll never know). Same for matching buyers to sellers and so on.
$2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Elon Musk counts the same in global GDP as $2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Ghana. I don't need to tell you which one will do more for humanity.
I just want to point out I don't care about numbers in computers, since they rather obviously don't matter for thermodynamics of oceans. Dollar-cheap infinite energy (fusion... if it's here) is actually a scary prospect from the boiling of oceans perspective. Current economic system will need to adapt globally or it'll destroy the civilization it helped create in an epic overshoot.
I don't care if the system understands what's it for as long as the planet remains habitable. Regulators have a tough nut to crack without a world government to prevent runaway collapse due to either scarcity or abundance of energy.
Perhaps. Dollar-cheap infinite energy (massive IF) also means interplanetary civilisation (also massive IF) starts to look viable.
I'm personally not convinced we'll get there. "S"-curves also look exponential in the first half of their lifetime. Trouble ahead, but on the positive side, don't underestimate human ingenuity when it comes to keeping those bread trucks rolling.
Looking at outcomes - within the global top 20% or so of nations, there is little correlation between GDP and happiness, freedom, life expectancy and so on. A net worth of $1B, $10B, $100B buys you weeks (if that) of life expectancy vs $10M. What do we actually think we're going to get in return for boiling the oceans? Food? Sex? Shelter? Love? Or just a bunch of AI-generated VR porn?
They clarified what resources mean in the updates.
They also used simplification models which don't account for many of the cascading problems that can't be directly quantified (i.e. dragon king events, debt defaults/ponzi failures, pollution (pfas). There was an austrian report that showed we are following the business as usual approach, and that we have dangerously overshot.
Brittle systems lead to unexpected and chaotic failures.
Failures in food production, or related logistics; would spell catastrophe since half the population is dependent on peacetime technological production methods.
Best to get this straight from the source[1,2]. Resources are detailed from p.54 onward.
[1] https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n55/mode/...
[2] https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wggray/Teaching/His300/Illustrat...
Shale oil is extremely unreliable, and its producers have barely ever been able to make any margins out of it because the required investments are heavy and constants. Wells reach maturity after months or weeks, and then they need to be replaced. If we have not yet reached peak all oils, then it will probably happen in the coming years.
There’s still plenty of conventional oil capacity in West Africa, Iran and Venezuela.
None of those places are producing at anything close to max capacity. Nobody really cares (other than the people who live there) because the world has enough shale.
A good example is the claim that land is an inelastic resource. The counter point is the supply of accessible land worth utilizing is elastic. Improvements in transportation technology open up more land for utilization.
For a discussion on this see:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story which touches on this (basically the last zookeeper/pet owner is confronted with the requirement that his ménagerie be exterminated) and also did some calculations --- if the earth's crust were converted to biomass, there would be a limiting element if memory serves, phosphorous.
If you run it on defaults for longest possible time (500 years), the outputs will reach the equilibrium state.
It is very simplified simulation, of course. But seems to indicate that even in the absence of expansion beyond our home planet, humanity will not go extinct, but rather settle into some ground state .
I'm not sure how a simplified simulation indicates anything. You have to assume it represents reality, but how is that assumption justified?
It seems unlikely that humanity will go extinct. Even in the case of a massive population crash, there would be many "islands" of communities and all of them would still have quite a few local technologies such as knives and whatever else they can make like basic wheels.
At some point the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will irreparably drop below plant starvation levels, then humans on Earth will go extinct. Even if not, at some point the atmosphere will thin too much, then humans on Earth will go extinct. Even if not, at some point the Sun will go red giant, and then for sure humans on Earth will go extinct.
Of course, all creatures will eventually. I just meant in the next 10,000 years.
At the rate at which CO2 is disappearing from the atmosphere -or rather at the rate it was disappearing before the Industrial Revolution- we might only have one or two million years left. That's rather soon. The IR may well have added millions of years to the remaining lifetime of photosynthetic and aerobic life on Earth.
Well, even if that's the case, I don't think it's a big loss. All things live and die, and our time will come too.
So why not right now then? What number of years or days or hours would concern you? Are you not concerned about other life besides human life on Earth?
Of course, I want to protect nonhuman life with all my heart. I just don't think it's a big deal if humans go extinct in some thousands or millions of years. I feel much differently about nonhuman life. From the perspective of nonhuman life, we are a disease.
If we're a disease, don't you want to exterminate us?
But then, if all other life is so much better than human life, and if by adding 220ppm of CO2 we extended the time left for that life on Earth by a few million years, didn't our intervention save non-human life from a worse fate[0] than merely having to deal with us? So we can be both, disease and cure.
[0] All life on Earth will go extinct eventually, but if we've added a few million years to its story so far, and we could add more millions later, then maybe saying we've "saved" that life is fair.
>It seems unlikely that humanity will go extinct.
From what our geological archives tell us, this seems rather the most likely scenario, even if we all managed to transform ourselves into wise people whose main trait would be temperance and judicious anticipation driven by efficient peaceful communication leading to the whole humanity living in harmony. Having a species that reach a stable form over million of years is not that easy.
I will bet anything at all, on any odds ratio you name, that humans will go extinct. It's simply a question of when, and how.
(Of course I'm cheating - the bet stays open until I win. On the other hand I will struggle to collect my winnings)
Comment was deleted :(
A couple of years ago I learned it is possible to create glucose directly from solar power. The estimates from the authors of the paper were that earth could feed 1 trillion ppl this way.
True, but the systems that do this most effectively require a lot of other limited resources besides solar power - most notably arable soil, fresh water, time, and usually also some additional processing to render that glucose ingestible for one of those people.
So maybe the Earth could supply 1 trillion people with food if it was turned into a farm planet devoid of any other biodiversity but those required to support human life, assuming those 1 trillion people were living and doing all their non-agricultural industry somewhere else.
Sounds about right. That's the limit from direct thermal pollution. It involves basically turning the Earth into a space station, with air and water cleaned and recycled.
Do you have a reference to the paper?
If the same could be done for amino acids, starting from feces, and if the electro-biological transducer could be mineaturized people could get it installed in their stomachs & bowels, with an extension cord coming out the exit orifice, like a vacuum cleaner...
Now if we could just find a way to iterate on methods of doing that, maybe use evolutionary methods, eventually we’d have practical, efficient methods of using solar power to make food!
For the lazy, the blog post that accompanies it (2012):
http://bit-player.org/2012/world3-the-public-beta
The source code:
https://github.com/bit-player/limits
I haven't read "The Limits of Growth" but I assume it's from a "peak oil" perspective, predicting societal collapse once oil runs out. I think it's pretty clear we're past idea now, with solar energy and other renewable being deployed globally because of the exponentially decreasing economic costs.
One thing I do find interesting is the cyclic nature of the booms and busts of population growth predicted by the model. Even if the assumptions of the model are invalid (short term finite supply of energy) it still might explain some gross level behavior.
Limits To Growth is kind of a test case for whether people got the memo about the academic research crisis or not (which incorporates the replication crisis, but is wider than it).
The World3 model came out of social studies and isn't even really science, given that the authors never tried to obtain evidence for their hypothesis before publishing. World3 is a toy with no predictive value, which is why reimplementing it in HTML is possible: it's just a handful of equations. Such a thing never could make accurate predictions, which was extremely obvious at the time and pointed out by many (e.g. Nordhaus, Smil), but this didn't stop its authors being feted as great scientists regardless.
There's a lot of similarities here with COVID modelling in the sense that these sorts of academic modelling exercises all seem to suffer the same kinds of problems and social failure modes:
• Over-simplified to the point that laypeople can easily spot what's missing.
• Guesses pulled out of thin air are treated as having equal value to measured data.
• An implicit assumption that the population is purely static and doesn't react to changing circumstances in any way. When later the predictions turn out to be wrong it's argued that they would have been right if not for the modelling causing behavioral changes, making the entire exercise unfalsifiable pseudo-science by its own premise.
• Either never validated against reality or actually falsified, but academics pretend otherwise.
• Predictions phrased vaguely enough that what most people would consider to be falsification is later argued to be within the bounds of one of the many possible scenarios.
The uselessness of such modelling exercises is evident in the fact that despite at least 50+ years of investment by academia and government into them, there are no academic computerized models widely being used to predict the course of the society or economy.
The assumption that human behavior and economic system behavior are static is to me the biggest flaw in virtually all of these models that I have seen. It also underlies adjacent panics that arise based on this kind of thinking, like the overpopulation panic. We can see how wrong that was in retrospect, though it may have been right if all behaviors and systems remained static.
I wish the present day underpopulation panic people would get the memo. They are making the exact same errors around mindless extrapolation of present behaviors and trends. Instead of “with these birth rates we will be eating people in 50 years” it’s “with these birth rates we will go extinct!”
There are things to be very concerned about. What happens when you take current behavior and trends and drag it forward on a spreadsheet is not one of them. “If our company continues this growth trajectory we will be worth more than the entire global economy in 25 years!” Every single one of these models and panics is a version of that thinking.
I think a more useful question when faced with such predictions is “how will this not happen?”
This is what the field of complex systems and complexity economics tries to deal with but it doesn't seem like complexity economics has taken off.
With economics too there is a problem that a correct prediction that is acted on will be gamed and become a self defeating seemingly "wrong" prediction.
I think the 2022 recession calls were probably a good example.
If everyone believes there is going to be a recession in the future and everyone acts to avoid the recession we can't know the counter factual in the economy of not predicting the recession to know what was the right prediction.
I have read this process referred to reflexivity but even a best selling trading book by George Soros himself didn't get this idea to stick in the popular mind.
It seems like prediction is not even the right word to use or we should have a different word for a prediction that can influence the outcome of what it is predicting. Then there is even strong and weak versions of this process that we haven't bothered to separate from the proper word prediction in the sense of weather prediction. That the prediction is basically independent of what it is trying to predict.
Complexity research hasn’t given us prediction for complex living systems so much as explain why it’s hard or in some cases impossible.
Unfortunately people keep buying linear models for this.
Sure it took off. There's no conceptual problem with your predictions affecting people such that your inputs change.
This is why I was careful in my post to talk about public sector models (academic, government). There are lots of private sector actors successfully modelling aspects of society and the economy: actuaries, quants, even day traders. They're all acting on the predictions of a private model in a dynamic and even adversarial environment, yet they succeed. The problems here are not on the conceptual level, they're to do with the prevalence of sub-zero intellectual standards in the public sector. Nobody forces academics to make a big fuss over models that have never been validated, or which have massive CIs, or which generate so many or such long term 'scenarios' that they're effectively unfalsifiable.
All these things are the kind of pseudo-scientific modelling practices that result in firings or bankruptcies when done in the "real world". Government subsidies keep the low standards going in the public sector. Ultimately, ending this farce requires the social studies to be defunded, as is now happening in NZ and hopefully soon in the rest of the world.
No, it's a test case for whether people understand exponential growth. The very first chapter of the book goes into this.
The inputs don't matter that much when you are growing exponentially. By the time you get pricing signals, you are already cooked.
Its like bacteria in a petri dish, one day you are at 12% full, then, 25%, then 50%, then 100%, then you die off.
We are already seeing the early signs of the system collapse with climate change and we have more and more people pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
The keystone of modern society is agriculture, which was only possible because the climate stabilize 20k years ago. We are destabilizing that climate and are in uncharted territory. We had the opportunity to do a course correction when the book was published but people like you down played the ramifications. In the last 50 years we have done nothing and are now cooked.
Bacteria in a petri dish aren't a useful analogue for the real world. It's a fully artificial environment.
Bluntly, "you don't understand exponential growth" is the sort of thing said by people who don't understand it themselves. I'm really sick of this meme. COVID was full of nonsense being talked about exponential growth, and I was calling it out from the start (e.g. here on HN [1]). A huge number of people are confused about this topic, probably because so many of the self-proclaimed experts presented by media and government are also confused.
Limits To Growth and similar socialist/green arguments have several problems with the concept:
1. An implicit assumption that populations naturally grow exponentially until they run out of resources. They don't. There are many periods in human history where populations were stable for thousands or even tens of thousands of years, or where they actively shrunk despite not fully exploiting their resources. Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the history of the Australian Aboriginals and the whole modern developed world are examples of this.
2. An assumption that GDP cannot grow forever, even though it can. GDP isn't a natural resource, it's a number on a ledger. Nothing stops GDP growing exponentially because it's basically a multiplier of population and productivity (broadly defined as "technology"), and there's no known limit on technological progress.
3. To try and make (2) seem more plausible they ignore the possibility of technological progress reducing resource requirements. This is the problem Malthus had. But technology fundamentally changes the relationship between man and his environment, eliminating some constraints whilst creating others. Before fission was harnessed, nobody cared about uranium extraction. The resource was ignored by all arguments about limits to human growth. After reactors were invented uranium limits suddenly became relevant and coal limits became much less relevant, but uranium is abundant and power plants need hardly any, so this basically eliminated electricity generation as a meaningful constraint on human growth. For the societies that choose to use it, at least.
I learned these lessons the hard way early on in life. It was 2004 and there was one of the semi-regularly occurring peak oil scares happening at that time, which a friend turned me on to. The argument for peak oil at first seems irrefutable: oil is a finite resource, fields run dry, we're using lots of it and in many use cases there's no known replacement. On top of that, in 2004 world production wasn't increasing despite prices growing to never before seen levels, which gave the appearance of unsolvable supply constraints, and there were signs that the secretive Saudis could not pump more. The scare ended thanks to a few things: the 2008 recession (killed some demand for a while), the Bush Iraq troop surge, and fracking. The latter was known about in peak oil circles but at the time the technology was not yet proven, and many dismissed it as delusional "cornucopianism", meaning the belief that the needs of humanity can be solved through technology. Others said it can't work because of a pseudo-economic concept called EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Of course we know what happened next: the US made fracking work and the US oil industry went from long term decline to the world's top producer of oil again. That broke the back of OPEC and prices fell again, albeit not to the low level they were at pre-2004.
Ironic that the model is all about how finite resources must eventually run out, and so production cannot grow without limit, whereas in the real world it’s consumption which seems a more pressing threat. We are probably capable of producing and burning more than enough fossil fuel to render the climate very human-unfriendly.
I remember when gasoline hit $3 per gallon and people were extrapolating that it was starting to run out, and would eventually reach $100/gallon, triggering global wars and a mass switchover to electric vehicles.
20 years later and I just filled up my car for $2.89 ...
A lot of terrible things were done as a result of this, including China’s one-child policy.
What's with the weird jump in life expectancy around 47 years in or so? It's especially visible at higher values of the 4th slider.
There's a retort called "Models of doom" that I haven't read but can vaguely guess what it'll say. When was the world supposed to have ended by now?
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