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Originally Posted by sendler
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This article makes a huge mistake that the authors of
Limits to Growth warn about multiple times in the book: the World3 model is not a prediction machine. It is impossible to predict the future; what World3 does is spit out likely scenarios based on current and past trends. At no point do the authors point to specific years or decades as the time we "should" see some effect.
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Free market capitalism only functions with growth. With no growth there is no investment. There is no opportunity for the poor and middle class to ascend. So there is no motivation to work hard. Without growth. By the time we started to figure all of this out in 1970, we were already trapped in a flawed system that requires cornucopian access to increasing amounts energy and natural resources to keep from crashing. In the last 20 years we have grown world debt to a level far beyond what can ever be repaid due to physical limits on resources and energy.
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As the authors of
Limits to Growth point out, we've been in overshoot since the 1970s. Of the four scenarios for future development they present, only two are still possible: retraction in population and resource consumption until we reach an equilibrium with the carrying capacity of the planet, or collapse. Collapse is more likely because of the significant delay in feedback (for example, it's taken hundreds of years of carbon dioxide pollution to raise atmospheric concentrations to a level high enough to have a noticeable effect). Since there are no immediate consequences to overshoot, and the consequences take decades or possibly centuries to come to fruition, we won't do anything about it. Heck, half the people on this thread don't believe there's anything wrong or that there's anything going on we can't solve in future.