Limits to Growth
Posted: Mon Feb 26, 1996 6:04 pm
At 03:15 pm 2/26/96 -0500, you wrote:
>One questions the work of the Gods of system dynamics (Forrester et al.)
>at extreme peril, but there were some major flaws with the original Club of
>Rome work as I recall.
>
>As I remember it, the key problem was the absence of a supply/demand
>mechanism as per economic theory.
>On the demand end, as resources grow scarcer, price increases. This
>decreases the demand in two ways; firstly by increasing the efficiency of
>resource utilization (eg. more energy efficient cars, better insulated
>houses) and through substitution of alternative sources of supply (eg.
>natural gas, electricity).
My understanding of the Limits to Growth is that it didnt include a market.
I *think* effects you mention above, however, were addressed:
- By the time resources become scarce enough to really be a measurable
problem, we wont have time to increase our efficiencies (refitting the
entire worlds industrial complex with new technology is a decades-long
project);
- The _Limits_ model aggregated all nonrenewable resources, thus assuming
that we were using them all up at an exponentially increasing rate. So
using substitutes only shifts the problem slightly (and, again, it would
take years to move an entire country to something like alcohol burning cars,
assuming that the infrastructure could be changed over at all);
- And there are other feedback loops in effect. If we manage to keep our
resource usage below the renewal rates of the available resource stocks (for
things like oil, this is unlikely), that only shifts the collapse to some
other part of the system. Decreased resource usage just lets us continue to
populate until we run out of farm land, pollute past the carrying capacity
of the atmosphere, etc.
====
I think that _Limit_s timescales may or may not be on target. But most of
the specific objections Ive heard to the study ("we have enough oil to last
for a century, so who cares about alternate energy sources") still fail to
address the underlying issues: that we are using resources faster than they
are being replenished, and we are destroying parts of our ecosystem with no
appreciation of long term effects we may be having. Those simply arent
sustainable indefinitely. Hopefully, the limits wont be reached in my
lifetime(*), but ...
- Stever
stever@verstek.com
(*) All this talk about an anti-aging drug just compounds the problem.
Imagine what happens to the "population" stock if you insert a step increase
into the value of "average lifetime."
>One questions the work of the Gods of system dynamics (Forrester et al.)
>at extreme peril, but there were some major flaws with the original Club of
>Rome work as I recall.
>
>As I remember it, the key problem was the absence of a supply/demand
>mechanism as per economic theory.
>On the demand end, as resources grow scarcer, price increases. This
>decreases the demand in two ways; firstly by increasing the efficiency of
>resource utilization (eg. more energy efficient cars, better insulated
>houses) and through substitution of alternative sources of supply (eg.
>natural gas, electricity).
My understanding of the Limits to Growth is that it didnt include a market.
I *think* effects you mention above, however, were addressed:
- By the time resources become scarce enough to really be a measurable
problem, we wont have time to increase our efficiencies (refitting the
entire worlds industrial complex with new technology is a decades-long
project);
- The _Limits_ model aggregated all nonrenewable resources, thus assuming
that we were using them all up at an exponentially increasing rate. So
using substitutes only shifts the problem slightly (and, again, it would
take years to move an entire country to something like alcohol burning cars,
assuming that the infrastructure could be changed over at all);
- And there are other feedback loops in effect. If we manage to keep our
resource usage below the renewal rates of the available resource stocks (for
things like oil, this is unlikely), that only shifts the collapse to some
other part of the system. Decreased resource usage just lets us continue to
populate until we run out of farm land, pollute past the carrying capacity
of the atmosphere, etc.
====
I think that _Limit_s timescales may or may not be on target. But most of
the specific objections Ive heard to the study ("we have enough oil to last
for a century, so who cares about alternate energy sources") still fail to
address the underlying issues: that we are using resources faster than they
are being replenished, and we are destroying parts of our ecosystem with no
appreciation of long term effects we may be having. Those simply arent
sustainable indefinitely. Hopefully, the limits wont be reached in my
lifetime(*), but ...
- Stever
stever@verstek.com
(*) All this talk about an anti-aging drug just compounds the problem.
Imagine what happens to the "population" stock if you insert a step increase
into the value of "average lifetime."