Are there limits to growth

Are There Limits to Growth? Examining the Evidence. Authors Authors and affiliations Charles A. Hall Kent Klitgaard. Chapter First Online: 03 March This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Hall, C. Day Jr. Revisiting the limits to growth after peak oil. American Scientist — See also Turner, Graham M. A comparison of the limits to growth with 30 years of reality. Global Environmental Change —, which arrives at much the same conclusions.

CrossRef Google Scholar. Heinberg, R. Peak everything: Waking up to the century of declines. Gabriola Island B. C: New Society Publishers. Google Scholar. Meadows, D. Meadows, J. Rander, and W. Behrens III. The limits to growth. Washington, DC: Potomac Associates. Roberts, P. The end of food. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hardin, G. The tragedy of the commons. Science — Ehrlich, P. The population bomb. New York: Ballantine Books. Beyond that point it becomes uneconomic growth because it increases costs by more than benefits, making us poorer, not richer.

Unfortunately it seems that we perversely continue to call it economic growth! Economists will note that the logic just employed is familiar in microeconomics — marginal cost equal to marginal benefit defines the optimal size of a microeconomic unit, be it a firm or household.

That logic is not usually applied to the macro-economy, however, because the latter is thought to be the Whole rather than a Part. When a Part expands into the finite Whole, it imposes an opportunity cost on other Parts that must shrink to make room for it.

When the Whole itself expands, it is thought to impose no opportunity cost because it displaces nothing, presumably expanding into the void. But the macro-economy is not the Whole.

It too is a Part, a part of the larger natural economy, the ecosphere, and its growth does inflict opportunity costs on the finite Whole that must be counted. Ignoring this fact leads many economists to believe that growth in GDP could never be uneconomic. Standard economists might accept this diagram as a static picture, but argue that in a dynamic world technology will shift the marginal benefit curve upward and the marginal cost curve downward, moving their intersection economic limit ever to the right, so that continual growth remains both desirable and possible.

However, the macroeconomic curve-shifters need to remember three things. First, the physically growing macro-economy is still limited by its displacement of the finite ecosphere, and by the entropic nature of its maintenance throughput. Second, the timing of new technology is uncertain. The expected technology may not be invented or come on line until after we have passed the economic limit.

Do we then endure uneconomic growth while waiting and hoping for the curves to shift? Third, let us remember that the curves can also shift in the wrong directions, moving the economic limit back to the left.

The task was very ambitious. The team tracked industrialisation, population, food, use of resources, and pollution. They modelled data up to , then developed a range of scenarios out to , depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues.

So were they right? We decided to check in with those scenarios after 40 years. Dr Graham Turner gathered data from the UN its department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the food and agriculture organisation, and the UN statistics yearbook.

He also checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the BP statistical review , and elsewhere. That data was plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios. These graphs show real-world data first from the MIT work, then from our research , plotted in a solid line.

As the MIT researchers explained in , under the scenario, growing population and demands for material wealth would lead to more industrial output and pollution. The graphs show this is indeed happening.

Resources are being used up at a rapid rate, pollution is rising, industrial output and food per capita is rising. The population is rising quickly.

According to the book, to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall — in the book, from about