The ‘Limits of Growth’ report: 40 years later II

In my previous post, I revisited the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits of Growth (LoG) and its stark warning of civilisational collapse by c. 2040. In this post, I examine how the alarmist interpretations that followed the report reshaped policy, public debate, and decision-making.

The great merit of The Limits of Growth (LoG) report was to have exploded the whiggish myth that humanity’s doings always improve on ‘nature’ and are inherently benign. This myth presided over many a massive transformation of the landscape, all done without any thought to the consequences, or even awareness that feedback loops might emerge.

The wake-up call was needed. The associated alarmist tone of impending global catastrophe distorted the ensuing discourse in major ways, and created new myths in the process. These distortions still reverberate, often subtly. Below are some examples, which have much in common with Bjørn Lomborg’s view (see ‘Environmental Alarmism, Then and Now: The Club of Rome’s Problem – and Ours’, though my angle may be somewhat different.

Centralising and autocratic drift

By analogy from mechanics – action ↔ reaction – we tend to address ‘big’ problems with ‘big’ means. ‘Big’ implies centralisation. With centralisation of means comes centralisation of decision-taking: we need ‘one’ to decide for the ‘many’, lest we end up with a gaggle of discordant opinions. Centralised decision-taking soon metamorphoses into decision-making – ‘big’ means tend to be autocratically designed and applied.

When in dire straits, the Ancient Romans appointed a dictator. Was it the better strategy? We’ll never know. We practise affirmation bias: we celebrate captains who saved their ship from disaster but ignore how many drove their vessels to their doom and thus never came back to tell the tale of autocratic blundering. So we believe in solutions that match the challenge (the alternative being, e.g. that we may achieve ‘big’ effects by quietly replicating ‘small’ solutions).

Population control is a good example. Whether the ‘one-child policy’ of China or India’s sterilisation programme found part of its intellectual origins in LoG we’ll never know. Their ruthless implementation created high human costs. Their demographic impact will reverberate far into the future. The long Western experience that poverty reduction in general and education (in particular education of women) tend to reduce fertility was discounted. If it was discussed at all, most likely it was judged to be too slow, too unpredictable. Direct action trumped adaptation, and we privileged ‘shooting’ the target rather than ‘working toward it’.

A collateral effect of centralised policies is their coarseness. Like in a game of ‘Chinese telephone’, only simple choices have a chance to survive the length of the chain of command. The outcome is often simplistic and maladapted (Lomborg rightly makes the case of DDT. The ‘simple’ policy – worldwide ban – turned out to be simplistic, preventing many a useful if limited application, e.g. against malaria or other tropical disease vectors. Once such a simplistic policy is in place, however, adjustment to local conditions is an uphill battle).

I would not dare to judge which approach would have been better at the time – but I regret the centralising and autocratic bias in policy, to which the alarmism of LoG contributed. I’d concur with Lomborg that LoG might have implicitly shrunk the scope of the possible and the horizon of the imagination.

Tokenism

Here an old Chinese adage: ‘A march of a thousand li begins with a first step.’ How true. Unless the ‘first step’ is all we do – or this step is in the wrong direction.

Lomborg argues against many environmental policies that LoG has spawned. In a rush to ‘do something’, policies were adopted which, though certainly useful, were not the most effective had all options been weighed rationally.

If ‘saving lives’ from pollution is the overall goal, he rightly argues, air pollution abatement would have been far more effective in terms of human lives saved than recycling, or even control of ‘noxious’ pesticides. (In the West, it may be outdoor pollution; in the ‘rest’, it is indoor pollution – smoke from using dung or green wood for heating. Here in particular, a decisive policy would have saved millions of lives yearly.) A current example of tokenism is the rush to produce fuel from cereals and sugar cane to mitigate CO₂ output without reflecting on the implication of this new demand on food prices.

Easy policies were chosen because they showed ‘political commitment’ – they were symbolic. Symbols, however, tend to take on a life of their own and escape rationality. Though merely a token or a means, symbols signify ‘the whole’ and henceforth become unassailable (I’m abstracting here from the private interests that incrust any policy). The symbolic means replace the goal, and we never query it forthwith (we’d rather not ‘lose face’ than be effective). Symbolic policies trump effective policies – and inferior path-dependent outcomes ensue.

Lomborg’s general point – that we should give all policies an even break, and not just lick a few that are ‘sexy’ and ‘easy’ but contribute little to the ultimate outcome – bears reflection. A policy of ‘easy steps first’ may waste critical time. If we want to climb Mt Everest, climbing the hill next door because it is an ‘easy’ step in the right direction may not be very helpful.

All too often, it seems to me, we rush into the generous gesture – without follow-up. Democracies are particularly prone to tokenism and symbolic gestures – I may call it short-termism. We have here a self-fulfilling prophecy. Symbols are meant to signify commitment. The longer we dwell on symbols, the more we delay implementing the commitment. Hence the need for further symbolic action to symbolise the commitment.

Factionalism

‘Big’ problems tend to be perceived as urgent. Under time pressure, strategic discussions soon take factional character, because discussions are often cast in all-or-nothing terms.

Here is what Lomborg has to say:

Alarmism creates a lot of attention, but it rarely leads to intelligent solutions for real problems, something that requires calm consideration of the costs and benefits of various courses of action. By implying that the problems the world faces are so great and so urgent that they can be dealt with only by massive immediate interventions and sacrifices – which are usually politically impossible and hence never put into practice – environmental alarmism actually squelches debate over the more realistic interventions that could make a major difference.

And I could only concur.

As an agronomist, I might make one example: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The promise of GMOs for increasing food production is significant. No wonder some companies rush to produce them and push them down the throat of an unprepared populace. The discussion has become mired in theological issues (Swiss law obliges researchers in the area to take the ‘dignity of plants’ into account) as well as economic ones (main issues are the rights of private entities to patent GMOs and the impact of such seeds on rural development). Biodiversity is another justified concern. Both alarmism and corporate greed are poor counsellors, and we should try to elide both of them from the deliberations. (In a previous post, I referred to the fact that in the last eight million years genetic change in mainly tropical grasses – maize and sugar cane are examples – made them better photosynthesisers than the established ones. The ‘C4’ plants began replacing the ‘C3’. They displaced forest and changed the climate through complex feedback mechanisms involving fire. Genetically grafting ‘C4’ photosynthetic mechanisms into ‘C3’ crops may yield substantial productivity increases).

To the question ‘Will civilisation survive?’ I have no answer, of course. I strongly believe in the law of unintended consequences, however. I’ve read too many Greek tragedies in my youth, I’m afraid. By trying to avoid fate we edge closer to fulfilling it. I’d rather stake the future on enablers and rational deliberation, rather than policies dictated by alarmism – or greed.

But that’s just an opinion, of course.

The post was first published on DeepDip.

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