3 March 2022. Limits | Space
Looking back on the 50th anniversary of Limits to Growth. Stories of space.
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1: Looking back on the 50th anniversary of The Limits to Growth
It’s the 50th anniversary of The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 to a hostile response. The systems model that sits beneath the arguments in the book has been tweaked a bit since then. Broadly speaking the base case—which projects output collapse in the 2020s and population collapse in the 2030s—has been tracking actual global system behaviours pretty closely.
(It’s a little more complicated than that. I wrote a piece about this here a few months ago).
To mark the anniversary, the energy researcher Richard Heinberg interviewed one of the original four researchers, Dennis Meadows, about the books and its legacy. Meadows is now 80, and somewhere in the piece he describes himself as “an old activist”.
(Image from Time magazine, January 1972. Via the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth.)
One of Heinberg’s early questions was about how Limits to Growth differed from the IPCC climate change analysis:
DLM: There are profound differences between what we did and the modeling which has been carried out in support of the IPCC. I respect that effort enormously... But the nature of their analysis is just totally different from what we did... The IPCC model leaves many things exogenous. To use it you have to specify population growth assumptions, economic GDP level assumptions, and so forth. We worked very hard to make the important determinants of our model endogenous. It means that it evolves over time in response to changes that are occurring within the model. Making the important variables, like population, exogenous saves you a lot of criticism. You can give a bunch of different scenarios, and within that set, almost any politician will find something that they like.
Meadows thinks hat in retrospect not having energy as its own element within the model was the biggest omission. Economists tend to misunderstand energy, and—given the influence they have on policy makers—that tends to spill over from there.
We lumped all forms of energy implicitly into either the nonrenewable resource sector, or, in some farfetched way, the agricultural sector. That implicitly assumes that energy is infinitely substitutable—an assumption the economists make all the time, but which is, of course, totally erroneous. I still remember when the oil embargo occurred, I think it was in 1972. And economists said, “Well, don’t worry. The energy economy in the United States is only 4 or 5 per cent of GDP. So even if it stops totally, the GDP isn’t going to go down very much.” Well, of course, that’s just an incredibly silly way of understanding reality. If there’s no energy, there is very little GDP.
Meadows talks about the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) as being the most important ratio here—how much energy it takes to extract or generate more energy.
We know that it’s trending down. Charlie Hall, in his pioneering work, has done the best job I’ve seen to calculate what EROI needs to be in order to sustain an economy as complex as ours. We have a ways to go, but it will be the decline of energy return on investment, which is the biggest problem.
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He also notes that when they wrote the book, human population and consumption were still below sustainable levels for the planet, which obviously is no longer the case. So some of the hypotheses they tested in the models are no longer relevant. What we do need now, he suggests, is a better understanding of sources of change:
There are two ways we change: socially and biologically. Fundamental genetic change in our species requires 3,000 or 4,000 years. It takes about that long before a constructive mutation can become fairly widespread. Social adaptation can, at least in theory, occur quicker, so the question here is: what are the prospects for our social system to change in ways that are more congruent with the reality? It’s high in theory. In practice, I’m not sure. The dominant issue we face is that the current system is serving the interests of many people very well.
But: crises do create the possibility of more rapid change:
(Y)ou need to ask not a physical scientist like me, but a sociologist or political scientist about the prospect for changing society. In the past, change happened rapidly under periods of crisis, not typically during periods of peace and success. As the crises grow we will see what change is available.
For reference, the Association of Professional Futurists published a few years ago a special edition of its Compass newsletter on Limits to Growth, which I edited, which is available on its website as a downloadable pdf.
2: Stories of space
I was doing a little research on space recently, and stumbled across Space Forces, by Fred Scharmen, who is a professor of architecture and urban design. Scharmen has some form here: his first book was also about space.
Space Forces is a cultural history of ideas about space, going back 150 years. He explores seven different visions, and talked to Space.com about the book. He explains that he’s partly interested because attitudes to space always reflect what’s happening down here:
I tried to put these moments into those same kinds of contexts: what's going on in culture, what's going on in science fiction, what's going on in politics? What are people afraid of? What are they hopeful about? And what do these ideas about living in space tell us about what it means to live in a world generally, whether we make that world from scratch out in space or we're producing and making and negotiating with each other in the world we have?
He tells a couple of stories about his research. The first is about the British researcher J.D. Bernal, and Rosalind Franklin, who later discovered DNA. They were colleagues.
Bernal was an English-Irish chemist and scientist who was creating some of these early ideas for, like, let's create a habitat for millions of people that's floating in orbit and they can do science up there and they can expand and live and create a whole culture of their own up there. In his books from the 1940s, he's writing about how genetic modification might be possible.
Leading to the speculation that Bernal’s writing about this possibility might have influenced Franklin’s thinking about what the mechanics might be.
Scharmen also has a chapter about Werner von Braun, the Nazi rocket engineer who was brought to the US after the war, accompanied by a certain amount of reputation-washing. von Braun was the inventor of the V2 rocket, and one of his proposals to the Department of Defense was that they should build a space station as a weapon:
He was pushing the idea of the space station to the American military on the grounds of that same kind of fear of random death from above that was essential to the V2 rocket that he designed. That was the most powerful aspect of the V2, that uncertainty — you never knew when it was going to come for you or where it was going to land if you were in London during the V2 campaign... It's not just the German Nazi rocket science that von Braun brought over, but it's sort of Nazi methodologies for waging war that he brought over that were essential to his worldview.
Something similar comes through von Braun’s science fiction novels.
When his people get to Mars, the elder Martians even tell them, "Yes, it's necessary to go through periods of war and suffering and slavery to find peace and to find technical prosperity in the future, and we know that and you're learning those lessons too, you young humans."
All of which makes me realise that Tom Lehrer’s satirical song about Werner von Braun was right on the money.
The book was finished before the big boom last year in billionaire-driven space flight, but Scharmen has an interesting point to make about the tensions inherent in private space flight:
Private spaceflight companies have to speak to investors on the one hand and say, "Oh, no, this is going to be a profit-driven enterprise, we're going to realize the return on investment. It's safe, it's not going to be about risk-taking, or the construction of any new or weird economics or politics." But they have to turn to public audiences and say, "This is breaking new ground, this is a dangerous adventure undertaken on behalf of all humankind, and we're building access to space for everybody."
Notes from readers
The idea of the ‘15 minute city’—which I wrote about here yesterday—goes back originally to work developed by the American urbanist Clarence Perry. He described the ‘neighborhood unit’. More on that here, including a useful sketch diagram. Thanks to Noah Raford for making the connection for me.
Notes on Ukraine
There was a fine personal piece on the Ukraine by Dave Pell yesterday (thanks to John Naughton’s newsletter for noticing it). Here’s an extract:
As a teen during the Holocaust, my dad was hunted by Ukrainian henchmen working for the Nazis. When history pushed, he pushed back. Today, he would be proud of the courage shown by Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky. When the U.S. offered him an escape route, he responded, “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” Man, I wish my dad — who survived the Holocaust because he got a gun and ammunition — was around to hear that line from a Jewish leader in Europe.
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