The predictions of the Club of Rome did not come true, but they were right in that a finite system like the Earth cannot grow indefinitely, especially not exponentially.
Sustainable growth is an old topic of discussion, I myself dealt with it fifty years ago, when the study "The Limits of Growth" by the Club of Rome was published. The study tried to prove that it is not possible to grow indefinitely, because the Earth's resources run out, the Earth becomes polluted, and the ever-growing population cannot be supplied with food. According to the book's prediction, by the 2030s, i.e. the current period, reserves of important energy sources such as oil or important metals such as copper would be practically exhausted. This was already disputed, for example experts from the University of Sussex pointed out that discovered oil reserves always cover the consumption of approximately the next thirty years, but then new reserves, possibly more expensive to extract, are discovered and the reserves will not be exhausted . The same is true for copper. At one time, the extraction of ores containing three percent copper was economical, today ores containing a few tenths of a percent are also processed. So supplies have not run out, while production has increased significantly and the population has roughly doubled since the study was published.
The predictions of the Club of Rome did not come true, but they were right in that in a finite system like the Earth, it is not possible to grow indefinitely, especially not exponentially, i.e. at the same percentage every year, which with a typical economic growth of five percent at the time, the demands were fifteen would have meant doubling every year. By the way, this pace slowed down significantly following the oil crisis of the seventies, especially in Europe, while growth remained dynamic in the case of the newly catching up countries, mainly in Asia. All in all, we can see an average growth of around three percent in the last fifty years in the world, which means a doubling every twenty-five years.
It should be noted that for the majority of human history (it depends on when we count the history of mankind) the growth - neither of the population nor of the economy - was not perceptible to the population. With the exception of some rapidly developing or newly founded cities, until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people in the twilight of their lives saw essentially the same world as they had known in their youth, population growth was at most one to two tenths of a percent, and technological progress was slow. If someone mastered a profession, he made a living from it for the rest of his life, he did not have to relearn it every few years, as is the case today.
However, certain problems appeared even then. In Mesopotamia , the land became more and more saline over the course of a millennium, and the yield fell by half. As a result, Sumer slowly lost its economic and political importance, and the center of development moved further north. If one looks at the spread of the ancient Middle Eastern cultures on a map, one can observe that they gradually spread westward and then jumped across the ocean, but that was the end of the spatial movement, to the east were India and China.
Today, cultures have encircled the earth, if one part of it has been exhausted, there is nowhere else to migrate.
This is also why it repeatedly arises that we limit growth in some form.
Thomas Robert Malthus is probably known to many , who, based on the processes of his time (and by the way, studying the demographic conditions of many primitive and more advanced peoples), came to the conclusion that while the population (already clearly perceptible in England at the time) was growing exponentially, until then, food production is only slower, according to arithmetic progression, which after a while does not make it possible to support the population. Therefore, in order to avoid the impending mass starvation, he proposed measures that could reduce the number of births. Among other things, he believed that the improvement of living conditions also leads to an increase in the number of births, which is why minimum wages .
Although Malthus's assumptions have not been verified by time, for example the increase in the standard of living led to a decrease in the birth rate , it is still evident today that growth has limits. Malthus's vision of starvation also occurred in both the 19th and 20th centuries, which, in addition to fungal disease (Ireland) and drought (Soviet Union and China) and floods (India), can also be attributed to relative overpopulation: the reserves were not sufficient for to overcome adverse weather conditions. At that time, radical measures were taken in China, couples were allowed only one child, which halted population growth after a few decades, but at the same time created a huge problem, because (obviously due to unauthorized interventions) many more boys were born than girls, and on the other hand, recently the total fertility rate decreased to such an extent (from the previous 5 to 1.7) that the main problem was the aging of the population . Attempts were also made to limit the number of births in India, but due to the country's democratic political system, it could not be implemented. India's population is currently growing by one percent (13 million people) a year and has already surpassed China's population, although it was still two-thirds of that in the 1950s. In India, the food supply was solved with the "green revolution" of the 1960s, but no one can guarantee that a type of fungus will not attack, as happened in the case of the Irish potato blight.
While previously the stability of the population - as Malthus saw - was ensured by nature in its cruel way, human intervention seeking a more humane solution can also be problematic. As we can see in the case of China, it is not easy to keep the total fertility rate at the 2.1 value necessary for stability by artificial means.
It causes a similar problem if we look at the growth of material goods, i.e. GDP.
Where is the upper limit? Today, the difference between the per capita incomes of high- and low-income countries is twenty-fold, and the difference in energy consumption per capita is fifteen-fold. Will today's poor countries be able to live like the rich, and how much of a burden would that put on the Earth , which is already said to be used one and a half times more than what would be sustainable in the long term.
Another problem that few people think about, but that almost everyone has to face, is the maintenance of durable goods produced, especially infrastructural goods.
While it is possible to produce and build - thanks to mechanization and automation - with relatively few people, the maintenance of the same objects already requires manual work. Think, for example, of a simple tire change in the case of a car or even the repair of a dripping tap in our apartment, not to mention large facilities such as roads, railways, public buildings, stadiums, where maintenance and upkeep are all labor-intensive. Even in a household, the existing fixed assets and current income must be in the right proportion to make the household sustainable. The electricity bill needs to be paid, the roof needs to be repaired. At the level of a country, but also globally, this manifests itself in such a way that it is not worth building or producing more than we can ensure the maintenance of. As a tourist or maybe just in pictures, everyone has seen cities overgrown by jungles or covered by desert sand. Once these were all prosperous settlements, but they became impoverished and in the end what was built was taken over by nature.
It should be added to all of this that while nature has managed to dismantle and recycle what it has built, the man of the modern, industrial age has not succeeded in this. While the peasant farms of a few decades ago essentially kept two-thirds of the population free of waste, today we are almost suffocating in waste , most of which is packaging material. Comfortable, productive, but unsustainable.
Today, climate hysteria rivalry that escalates to war ) distracts attention from a much more important issue for the future of humanity, long-term sustainability. It would be high time that, instead of hysteria, we faced the long-term problems of humanity based on historical experience and engineering (and economic) calculations based on reality.
Source: Magyar Hírlap
The author is an economist, advisor to the National Forum, member of the C12 group
Photo: PS TV
