Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

donellameadows.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–59 of 59 posts

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#51

Post by ratacat »

johnsea wrote: post #28
wjnc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 glo…

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.

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#52

Post by ratacat »

tom_mellior wrote: post #7
wjnc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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/M... shows an almost perfect fit of population growth predictions an…

I think agricultural collapse is a much more likely scenario then us running out of oil. 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

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#53

Post by pygy_ »

wjnc wrote: post #17
johnsea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 effect…

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.

You are disregarding the dissipation side of energy consumption: i.e., concretely pollution and wildlife destruction.

While the supply-side of the equation will at some point prevent growth, the dissipation side is not concerning, but alarming.

While in theory economic growth may stem purely from gains in efficiency, historically efficiency gains have spurred so much activity that the total entropy creation has increased nevertheless.

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#54

Post by pygy_ »

PoachedSausage wrote: post #45
wjnc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Coincidentally, the last 150 years corresponds quite closely with the Industrial Revolution and the age of fossil fuels. With the damage they are doing to the oceans (plastic, acidification) and the atmosphere (global warming, respiratory illnesses etc), it no longer seems quite so robust.

The thing is, even renewable energy sources are not that green. The energy that is diverted for human use used to take part in atmospheric, geologic and biological/ecological processes. It is also disruptive (if less than carbon dioxide emissions).

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#55

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #49
agumonkey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was especially looking for the original conference. It's not the idea but the context I'm interested in. As you said, for the ideas there are a lot of data around.

If you want context, I'd recommend reading books. There's one in particular that has an excellent bibliography, and which I've cribbed from extensively: William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity , published in 1977. I'm linking the 1992 update (which might be found online via LibGen or Bo-ok.org), which doesn't depart much from the original, does extend some observations, and should include the references…

Also noting: Ophuls explicitly supports the view of limits. But he does a very good job of treating both sides of the argument, particularly in his bibliography, and favours steelman rather than strawman opponents.

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#56

Post by agumonkey »

metallah wrote: post #26
agumonkey wrote: post #19

I'm still looking for a video or audio of that conference.

Same. Please let me know if you're able to find anything!

Just got a partial answer from a team member of donella meadows archives saying I'll have to wait a week for the person who knows best about this to come back.

In the mean time, here are the reading suggestions I got:

- http://donellameadows.org/donella-meadows-legacy/danas-writi...

- http://donellameadows.org/archives/the-club-of-rome-and-sust...

- http://donellameadows.org/archives/forty-years-later-the-rec...

I'll ping you when the news come

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#57

Post by tunesmith »

tunesmith wrote: post #50
spodek wrote: post #3

I remember the first time reading this book, or rather the 30 year update -- https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/19... -- thinking, " this is the approach to take to understand how the economy, ecology, pollution, and so on interact." Everything else was just looking at elements. Technology is important, for example, but exists within a system. They looked at the system. They had to simplify and…

I found it fascinating, too... it send me on a hunt to try and better understand their World3 model. I bought Wolfram SystemModeler since one of their extensions has the model, and I also found some online resources that have modeled it through javascript too. One thing that was a little disheartening is that I found that one of the inputs to the model appeared to be highly determinant, and the initial values chosen…

I found it... if you go to bit-player.org/limits and increase the "output consumed" variable by a couple of percentage points, the outlook is massively improved. This implies that as business reinvest less, the outlook improves. So apparently if we want to avoid overshoot and collapse, we should be convincing profitable companies to increase their dividend payouts!

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#58

Post by greglindahl »

clord wrote: post #42
wjnc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - 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 de…

You're aware that the recoverable reserves of lithium are determined by the price, yes? So if the price of lithium rises, it becomes economic to mine lithium which is known but is currently not worth extracting.

Quote from Appendix C of the government report pointed at by [2]: https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/2015/mcsapp2015....

> Reserves may be considered a working inventory of mining companies’ supply of an economically extractable mineral commodity. As such, the magnitude of that inventory is necessarily limited by many considerations, including cost of drilling, taxes, price of the mineral commodity being mined, and the demand for it. Reserves will be developed to the point of business needs and geologic limitations of economic ore grade and tonnage. For example, in 1970, identified and undiscovered world copper resources were estimated to contain 1.6 billion metric tons of copper, with reserves of about 280 million metric tons of copper. Since then, almost 480 million metric tons of copper have been produced worldwide, but world copper reserves in 2014 were estimated to be 700 million metric tons of copper, more than double those in 1970, despite the depletion by mining of more than the original estimated reserves.

Re: The Limits to Growth (1972) [pdf]

#59

Post by agumonkey »

metallah wrote: post #26
agumonkey wrote: post #19

I'm still looking for a video or audio of that conference.

Same. Please let me know if you're able to find anything!

final answer, as far as the archivist knows:

http://www.videoproject.com/Last-Call.html

and this youtube film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc

which has old footage in it but is not the from the 70s conf.

Keep looking

Post reply on HN