In 1972, the United Nations held its first-ever environmental summit in Stockholm. In the run-up to the event, a group of scientists wrote The Limits to Growth, a report for the Club of Rome that became an unlikely bestseller. The authors argued that Earth’s finite natural resources could not support ever-increasing consumption, and warned of likely ecological overshoot and societal collapse if the world did not recognise the environmental costs of human activity. Failure to change course would mean declines in per capita food and energy supplies, increasing pollution, lower standards of living, and the possibility of dramatic population collapses by the middle of the twenty-first century.
In the decades that followed, the report’s startling conclusions were probably more criticised than commended. Many brushed them aside as a Doomsday scenario that human ingenuity and technological progress would render moot. But The Limits to Growth did not provide a single forecast. Rather, the authors explored several alternative paths based on different human strategies, and recent research by Gaya Herrington has shown that three of the four scenarios they outlined align quite closely with empirical data.
This is deeply worrying, because two of these three scenarios suggest a major collapse by mid-century while the third entails a smaller decline. Herrington argues that “humanity is on a path to having limits to growth imposed on itself rather than consciously choosing its own.”
The fourth scenario, which involved significant economic and social transformations, allows for widespread increases in human welfare within Earth’s natural boundaries. This is the motivation behind Earth for All, a new report produced by the Club of Rome’s Transformational Economics Commission (of which I am a member) and a team of computer modellers.
The report’s authors argue that achieving well-being for all on a (relatively) stable planet is still possible, but will require major changes in economic organisation. In particular, it calls for five major initiatives to eliminate poverty, reduce inequality, empower women, transform food systems, and overhaul energy systems by “electrifying everything.”
To flesh out these aspirations, the report advocates specific and interlinked strategies for achieving each one. Of course, this will require significant new investments, led by massive increases in public spending. Higher taxation, especially of the extremely wealthy and of large firms, must therefore be an important part of the agenda. Restricting the wealth and consumption of the super-rich is also important for limiting carbon dioxide emissions and unnecessarily wasteful consumption.
In addition, creating global liquidity (such as by issuing more special drawing rights, the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset) and dealing with the sovereign-debt overhang would give developing-country governments more fiscal space. Global food systems are clearly broken. They currently create unhealthy and unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, as well as enormous waste, and must be upgraded accordingly.
Regulation of markets for the public good will be critical in this process. More systematic and effective regulation is necessary not only with respect to food, but also in markets for goods and services, finance, labour, and land, and to those connected to nature and the environment.
The regulation we need demands democratisation of knowledge and wider access to new technologies, as well as recognition and dissemination of traditional knowledge. Giving women and workers more power is essential, not only for making societies happier, healthier, and more just, but also for stabilising population numbers.
