Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
Donella H. Meadows
Language: English
Pages: 338
ISBN: 193149858X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update.
Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are international environmental leaders recognized for their groundbreaking research into early signs of wear on the planet. Citing climate change as the most tangible example of our current overshoot, the scientists now provide us with an updated scenario and a plan to reduce our needs to meet the carrying capacity of the planet.
Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a striking semblance to the scenarios laid out by the World3 computer model in the original Limits to Growth. While Meadows, Randers, and Meadows do not make a practice of predicting future environmental degradation, they offer an analysis of present and future trends in resource use, and assess a variety of possible outcomes.
In many ways, the message contained in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a warning. Overshoot cannot be sustained without collapse. But, as the authors are careful to point out, there is reason to believe that humanity can still reverse some of its damage to Earth if it takes appropriate measures to reduce inefficiency and waste.
Written in refreshingly accessible prose, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a long anticipated revival of some of the original voices in the growing chorus of sustainability. Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update is a work of stunning intelligence that will expose for humanity the hazy but critical line between human growth and human development.
causes the exponential growth of yeast in rising bread and of money in your interest-bearing bank account. Those are useful. Positive feedback may also be responsible for pest outbreaks in an agricultural crop or for growth of a cold virus in your throat. Those are not useful. Whenever a system stock is embedded in a positive feedback loop, that stock has the potential to grow exponentially. That doesn’t mean it will grow exponentially; it does, however, have the capacity to do so if it is freed
resources, depletion of nonrenewable materials, and filling of the sinks are combining slowly and inexorably to raise the amount of energy and capital required to sustain the quantity and the quality of material flows required by the economy. Those costs arise from a combination of physical, environmental, and social factors. Eventually they will be high enough that growth in industry can no longer be sustained. When that happens, the positive feedback loop that produced expansion in the material
saying that its five-year planning process did not allow rapid change in CFC production. It demanded and got a slower phase-down schedule. Most industrial makers of CFCs were still hoping to maintain at least part of their market. FIGURE 5-6 Projected Growth of Stratospheric Inorganic Chlorine and Bromine Concentrations Due to CFC Emissions Past and projected stratospheric abundances of chlorine and bromine under various policies: no protocol, under the original Montreal Protocol’s
provisions, and under later additional agreements. Sustaining the 1986 production rate of CFCs would have led stratospheric chlorine concentrations to increase by a factor of 8 by 2050. The first Montreal Protocol defined lower emission rates, but it would still have permitted chlorine levels to climb exponentially. The London Agreement phased out most but not all CFC use; it still would have resulted in increasing chlorine levels beginning around the year 2050. Subsequent agreements have slowly
World3 economy allocates more capital to discovering and exploiting them. We assume that the initial nonrenewable resource base can be used completely, though as resources are depleted it takes more and more capital to find and extract those that remain. We also assume that nonrenewable resources are perfectly substitutable for each other without cost or delay. Therefore we lump them all together without distinguishing one from another. By changing numbers in the model, we can strengthen or