Thanks for this analysis, it was a very interesting read!
I think the hard limits on energy will soon hit us really hard. In my opinion, there is no substitute for diesel, which is the lifeblood of modern societies. Electrification will not be able to replace that. So I see a significant contraction in industrial output in the foreseeable future - at least in those countries that no longer have access to cheap energy. Hallo Deutschland.
That's probably correct, but in the Industrialized world it'll take the form of price-fluctuations more than direct collapse. Germany is going to see more extreme results due to energy dependency.
I don't really take any Malthusian cult seriously, except for AI. I'm a part of that cult, I suppose. I'm extremely bullish on it, but I really really hope it takes another decade or two.
We're going to run into SOME type of hard-limit, but if you read through the article, I agree with you. The BaU model in the Limits to Growth is not the one we're on. More a stagnation and less sudden collapse. Restack the article, more people need to let go of their apocalypse-scenarios.
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into a trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself." (p.75)
- The First Global Revolution/A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome, by Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider (New York, 1991)
In 1968, an organization was formed known as the Club of Rome led by two misanthropes named Aurelio Peccei and Sir Alexander King. The organization quickly set up branches across the Anglo-Saxon world with members ranging from select ideologues from the political, business, and scientific community who all agreed that society’s best form of governance was a scientific dictatorship. Sir Alexander wrote: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
In order to finance this paradigm shift, the 1001 Trust was founded in 1970 by Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands. Bernhardt (card carrying Nazi and founder of the Bilderberger Group in 1954) had worked alongside his close misanthropic associates Prince Philip Mountbatten, and Sir Julian Huxley to create the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) just a few years earlier. The plan was simple: each of the 1001 founding members simply put $10,000 into the trust which was then directed towards the green paradigm shift. Other prominent 1001 Club members included international royalty, billionaires, and technocratic sociopaths who wanted nothing more than to manage this promised Brave New World as “alphas”. Many of these figures were also members of the Club of Rome, including Canada’s Maurice Strong, who later became Vice President of the WWF under Prince Philip’s presidency. Strong had replaced another WWF Vice President by the name of Louis Mortimer Bloomfield. Bloomfield was another 1001 Club member whom New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison discovered to be at the heart of the Montreal-based assassination of the anti-Malthusian President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The document which became the bible and blueprint of this new anti-humanist movement that birthed today’s Green New Deal agenda was titled Limits to Growth (1972) and today holds the record as the most widely read book on ecology, having sold 30 million copies published into 32 languages. A recent article celebrating the book’s 40 year anniversary stated “it helped launch modern environmental computer modeling and began our current globally focused environmental debate. After Limits [To Growth], environmentalists, scientists and policy-makers increasingly thought of ecological problems in planetary terms and as dynamically interconnected… It is worth revisiting Limits today because, more than any other book, it introduced the concept of anthropocentric climate change to a mass audience.”
The book itself was the culmination of a two year study undertaken by a team of MIT statisticians under the nominal heading of Jay Forrester and Dennis Meadows. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez today, these young MIT professors were merely cardboard cut-outs selected to deflect from the higher social engineers managing the show from the top.
The MIT study itself was not even begun in the USA, but rather in Montebellow Quebec in 1971, when Club of Rome-backer Pierre Trudeau allocated tax payer money to begin the project. A network of Rhodes Scholars and Privy Councillors centered around Alexander King, Maurice Strong, Maurice Lamontagne (founder of Environment Canada), Michael Pitfield (Privy Council Clerk and founder of Canada’s CSIS) and Governor General Roland Michener, among others, had presided over that meeting. When the Canadian funds had served their role, the project continued to receive its funding from the Volkswagen Foundation, whose Nazi-supporting past should have made some of the MIT statisticians uncomfortable.
Even assuming all of this is true, it has been republished many times in scientific journals with scientific intent. A modeled reality. Regardless of its origins, the model itself seems to hold some validity as it's been roughly accurate over the last half-century. We're approaching the point of model-divergence now. Modeling the very real resource and energy limitations and making reasonable predictions about future-growth based on those limitations is itself a worthy endeavor.
I'm open to criticizing the models themselves, as I do in the article above, but this type of attack on character (valid, commies are evil) doesn't help us to understand the models or their predictions. It's a simple "people who say thing I don't like must be bad" argument. The article does not discuss the character of those who created the models, it discusses the models and the ways in which human growth is hampered by inherent economic and resource limits. That's the point of interest and the reason for reading the text.
It's been republished a few times. There's a lot of stupid and self-aggrandizing nonsense that comes out of the modern environmentalist movements. That's not why I'm interested in The Limits to Growth. As I said in the article, I think that a lot of claims are hyperbolic... but I also think that there are real limits to available resources in terms of ROI and EROI. Rare earths, critical minerals, petroleum production rates are ultimately limited. I do not call for global action to prevent peak-oil (that's silly anyway) I'm examining these materials to get a good look at what the next century might look like.
Read my full article here if you haven't and if you're interested in discussing the material, I'd be happy to speak on the subject.
Thanks for this analysis, it was a very interesting read!
I think the hard limits on energy will soon hit us really hard. In my opinion, there is no substitute for diesel, which is the lifeblood of modern societies. Electrification will not be able to replace that. So I see a significant contraction in industrial output in the foreseeable future - at least in those countries that no longer have access to cheap energy. Hallo Deutschland.
That's probably correct, but in the Industrialized world it'll take the form of price-fluctuations more than direct collapse. Germany is going to see more extreme results due to energy dependency.
I don't really take any Malthusian cult seriously, except for AI. I'm a part of that cult, I suppose. I'm extremely bullish on it, but I really really hope it takes another decade or two.
We're going to run into SOME type of hard-limit, but if you read through the article, I agree with you. The BaU model in the Limits to Growth is not the one we're on. More a stagnation and less sudden collapse. Restack the article, more people need to let go of their apocalypse-scenarios.
I made sure I didn't like it before I read the whole thing, because I have virtue. Aristotle talks about this.
It just popped up in my feed at the exact time you posted it.
The Limits to Growth is a scientific publication.
First premise incorrect.
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into a trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself." (p.75)
- The First Global Revolution/A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome, by Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider (New York, 1991)
And this: https://orientalreview.org/2019/07/31/the-genocidal-roots-of-the-green-new-deal-the-limits-to-growth-and-the-unchaining-of-prometheus/
The Club of Rome and 1001 Nature Trust
In 1968, an organization was formed known as the Club of Rome led by two misanthropes named Aurelio Peccei and Sir Alexander King. The organization quickly set up branches across the Anglo-Saxon world with members ranging from select ideologues from the political, business, and scientific community who all agreed that society’s best form of governance was a scientific dictatorship. Sir Alexander wrote: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
In order to finance this paradigm shift, the 1001 Trust was founded in 1970 by Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands. Bernhardt (card carrying Nazi and founder of the Bilderberger Group in 1954) had worked alongside his close misanthropic associates Prince Philip Mountbatten, and Sir Julian Huxley to create the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) just a few years earlier. The plan was simple: each of the 1001 founding members simply put $10,000 into the trust which was then directed towards the green paradigm shift. Other prominent 1001 Club members included international royalty, billionaires, and technocratic sociopaths who wanted nothing more than to manage this promised Brave New World as “alphas”. Many of these figures were also members of the Club of Rome, including Canada’s Maurice Strong, who later became Vice President of the WWF under Prince Philip’s presidency. Strong had replaced another WWF Vice President by the name of Louis Mortimer Bloomfield. Bloomfield was another 1001 Club member whom New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison discovered to be at the heart of the Montreal-based assassination of the anti-Malthusian President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The document which became the bible and blueprint of this new anti-humanist movement that birthed today’s Green New Deal agenda was titled Limits to Growth (1972) and today holds the record as the most widely read book on ecology, having sold 30 million copies published into 32 languages. A recent article celebrating the book’s 40 year anniversary stated “it helped launch modern environmental computer modeling and began our current globally focused environmental debate. After Limits [To Growth], environmentalists, scientists and policy-makers increasingly thought of ecological problems in planetary terms and as dynamically interconnected… It is worth revisiting Limits today because, more than any other book, it introduced the concept of anthropocentric climate change to a mass audience.”
The book itself was the culmination of a two year study undertaken by a team of MIT statisticians under the nominal heading of Jay Forrester and Dennis Meadows. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez today, these young MIT professors were merely cardboard cut-outs selected to deflect from the higher social engineers managing the show from the top.
The MIT study itself was not even begun in the USA, but rather in Montebellow Quebec in 1971, when Club of Rome-backer Pierre Trudeau allocated tax payer money to begin the project. A network of Rhodes Scholars and Privy Councillors centered around Alexander King, Maurice Strong, Maurice Lamontagne (founder of Environment Canada), Michael Pitfield (Privy Council Clerk and founder of Canada’s CSIS) and Governor General Roland Michener, among others, had presided over that meeting. When the Canadian funds had served their role, the project continued to receive its funding from the Volkswagen Foundation, whose Nazi-supporting past should have made some of the MIT statisticians uncomfortable.
Even assuming all of this is true, it has been republished many times in scientific journals with scientific intent. A modeled reality. Regardless of its origins, the model itself seems to hold some validity as it's been roughly accurate over the last half-century. We're approaching the point of model-divergence now. Modeling the very real resource and energy limitations and making reasonable predictions about future-growth based on those limitations is itself a worthy endeavor.
I'm open to criticizing the models themselves, as I do in the article above, but this type of attack on character (valid, commies are evil) doesn't help us to understand the models or their predictions. It's a simple "people who say thing I don't like must be bad" argument. The article does not discuss the character of those who created the models, it discusses the models and the ways in which human growth is hampered by inherent economic and resource limits. That's the point of interest and the reason for reading the text.
Ok. I will locate my notes. I was big into the book late 70’s later thought different.
It's been republished a few times. There's a lot of stupid and self-aggrandizing nonsense that comes out of the modern environmentalist movements. That's not why I'm interested in The Limits to Growth. As I said in the article, I think that a lot of claims are hyperbolic... but I also think that there are real limits to available resources in terms of ROI and EROI. Rare earths, critical minerals, petroleum production rates are ultimately limited. I do not call for global action to prevent peak-oil (that's silly anyway) I'm examining these materials to get a good look at what the next century might look like.
Read my full article here if you haven't and if you're interested in discussing the material, I'd be happy to speak on the subject.