Each future human generation having less opportunity and even less purposeful existence. The question even now is do we even have sufficient energy resources given current population energy demands to power technological solutions to reach that stage of human existence where we are no longer dependent on Earth’s economically limited and finite ability to sustain our species? Much less support the BAU economics of our still growing population of unsustainable humans. “Time” as it turns out - is our most finite critical resource. Pointing out the loss of innovation, problem solving, technological development energy limited opportunities window associated with our current energy resource depletion horizon problems, should be at the center of all economic strategies. Economic strategies whose assumptions do not anticipate the dilution and depletion economics of Earth’s finite critical resources on the global economy - simply have no chance for achieving even short term stability, or extending the current window of opportunity for solving current energy and other critical resource limitations, much less having significant success at approaching significant sustainability. Only more or less sustainable for extending a longer term existence, but not forever. In the real world entropy takes its toll and nothing is truly sustainable forever. Yet this energy technology development is not a global funding priority compared to - say weapons development, manufacturing, and sales. While recycling is a good thing, its is also necessary to understand that declining and more energy resources - only make recycling less attractive and less possible over time - without a future essentially “free” and inexhaustible energy source. Especially as a solution to the complex problems of the current context of our growing unsustainable overpopulation and finite critical resource dilution and depletion economic problems. Understanding that in 2021 only 8.8% of 101.4 billion tonnes of virgin materials (a proportionate decline from previous years) were recycled because they were not sufficiently economically attractive - economically possible to recycle - should give a plausibility pause to warm and fuzzy assumptions about the economic viability of circular economies any time soon. Perhaps starting with the economic myths of resource "proven reserves." Another topic your authors should explore and debunk where needed. The broad assumption that the Earth is an inexhaustible supply of everything humans need, should be increasingly and systematically exposed quantifiably as the uninformed myth that it has always been. Including the over due planning and funding of long term strategies to acquire extra-planetary finite critical resources - before we need and economically run out of them here on Earth and thus lose the technical ability to solve gaining them again. While I see the need for your work and am encouraged to see the attention you bring to the problem, IMO you need to focus far more on real economic solutions and less on un-quantified conceptual economic philosophies - like circular economies and or "Doughnut Economics." Without quantifiable inputs and outputs it is far too easy to economically confuse subsistence, decline and economic decay, with optimized economic sustainability. ![]() Far from leading to social collapse, economic growth was thus self-correcting – not to mention the only way for countries to develop out of poverty. Technological innovation will lead to new, cleaner methods of production. ![]() Other resources will then be substituted for it, and it will be used more efficiently. If a resource becomes scarce, its price will rise, they pointed out. In 1972, the book came under immediate fire from economists who claimed that its authors failed to understand basic economics. Exponential economic growth could not go on forever at some point in the next 100 years, it would inevitably run up against Earth’s finite environmental limits.Ī half-century later, with a climate and environmental crisis upon us, the debate triggered by The Limits to Growth has returned with a vengeance. Written for the Club of Rome by Donella Meadows and colleagues at MIT, The Limits to Growth used new computer models to forecast an uncontrollable collapse in the global population and economy if prevailing patterns of environmental resource use and pollution continued. BERLIN – Fifty years ago this spring, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century was published.
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