[FRIAM] Limits to Growth

Sun Jun 1 07:24:11 EDT 2025

This is why I’m so excited about electric vehicles—I feel like a kid
waiting for Christmas! Add clean fossil fuel free power stations into the
mix, and voilà: abundant clean energy, no miracle inventions required. Just
some clever tech and a whole lot of charging cables!

On Sun, 1 Jun 2025 at 12:57, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> I believe we all have a slighty distorted view because we were all born
> long after industrialization has started and have seen nothing but growth.
> Industrialization started around 200 years ago in Great Britain and spread
> shortly after to America and Europe. First by exploiting coal and steam
> engines, later by oil and petrol engines. Tanks, warplanes, warships as
> well as normal cars, planes and ships all consume oil.
>
> Richard Heinberg writes in his book "The End of Growth": "with the fossil
> fuel revolution of the past century and a half, we have seen economic
> growth at a speed and scale unprecedented in all of human history. We
> harnessed the energies of coal, oil, and natural gas to build and operate
> cars, trucks, highways, airports, airplanes, and electric grids - all the
> esential features of modern industrial society. Through the one-time-only
> process of extracting and burning hundreds of millions of years worth of
> chemically stored sunlight, we built what appeared (for a brief, shining
> moment) to be a perpetual-growth machine. We learned to take what was in
> fact an extraordinary situation for granted. It became normal [...] During
> the past 150 years, expanding access to cheap and abundar fossil fuels
> enabled rapid economic expansion at an average rate of about three percent
> per year; economic planners began to take this situain for granted.
> Financial systems internalized the expectation of growth as a promise of
> returns on investments."
>
> https://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/the-end-of-growth-book
>
> Heinberg argues the time of cheap and abundant fossil fuels has come to an
> end. There 1.5 billion cars in the world which consume oil and produce CO2.
> Resources are depleted while pollution and population have reached all time
> highs. It is true that humans are innovative and ingenious, especially in
> times of scarcity, necessity and need, and we are able to find replacements
> for depleted resources, but Heinberg argues in his book "Peak Everything:
> that "in a finite world, the number of possible replacements is also
> finite". For example we were able to replace the whale oil by petroleum,
> but finding a replacement for petroleum is much harder.
>
> https://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/peak-everything
>
> Without oil no army would move, traffic would cease, no container or
> cruise ship would be able to go anywhere and therefore international trade
> and tourism would stop. On the bright side no more plastic and CO2
> pollution either.
>
> In his book "End of Growth" Heinberg mentions "transition towns" as a path
> towards a more sustainable society and an economy which is not based on
> fossil-fuels.
>
> https://donellameadows.org/archives/rob-hopkins-my-town-in-transition/
>
>
> French author Victor Hugo wrote 200 years ago that "the paradise of the
> rich is made out of the hell of the poor". If rich people start to realize
> this and help to find a way to a more sustainable, livable society it would
> be a start.
>
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za>
> Date: 5/31/25 5:46 AM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Limits to Growth
>
> I’ve always loved the Simon-Ehrlich bet story—two clever guys betting on
> the future of the planet. Ehrlich lost the bet, but the debate still runs
> circles today.
>
> https://ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlich-bet
>
> This article nails it: over the long term, prices mostly go down, not up,
> as innovation kicks in. We don’t "run out" of resources—we get better at
> using them. Scarcity shifts, but human creativity shifts faster.
>
> The Limits to Growth folks had good intentions, but the real limit seems
> to be how fast we can adapt and rethink. And so far, we’re doing
> okay—messy, uneven, but okay.
>
> Turns out, betting against human ingenuity is the real risky business.
>
> On Fri, 30 May 2025 at 21:51, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>> REC -
>>
>> Very timely...  I did a deep dive/revisit (also met the seminal work in
>> college in the 70s) into Limits to Growth and World3 before the Stockholm
>> workshop on Climate (and other existential threats) Complexity Merle
>> wrangled in 2019....  and was both impressed and disappointed.   Rockstrom
>> and folks were located right across the water from us where we met but to
>> my knowledge didn't engage... their work was very complementary but did not
>> feel as relevant to me then as it does now.
>>
>> In the following interview, I felt he began to address many of the things
>> I (previously) felt were lacking in their framework previoiusly.  It was
>> there all the time I'm sure, I just didn't see it and I think they were not
>> ready to talk as broadly of implications 5 years ago as they are now?
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6_3mOgvrN4
>>
>> Did anyone notice the swiss village inundated by debris and meltwater
>> from the glacier collapse uphill?   Signs of the times or "business as
>> usual"?
>>
>> - SAS
>> On 5/30/25 12:16 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>
>>
>> https://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2025/05/20/limits-to-growth-was-right-about-overshoot-and-collapse-new-data/
>>
>> I remember the Limits to Growth from my freshman year in college.  Now
>> Hackernews links to the above in which some people argue that we've
>> achieved the predicted overshoot for the business as usual scenario and the
>> subsequent collapse begins now.  Enjoy the peak of human technological
>> development.
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>>
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