Business leaders from the chemical industry tried to discredit her findings but the scientific authority of her research was such that, under mounting popular pressure, the federal government was compelled to introduce severe restrictions on its use. Carson’s contribution helped set a new agenda for assessing the impact of industry and technology, while also creating a strong political momentum for regulation to protect the environment. In this new climate of public awareness on the interconnectedness between the natural and human world, it was now even possible to argue that some technologies were so fundamentally at odds with natural processes and such a threat to life that they had to be curtailed.

The second major challenge to the consensus on unrestrained growth came from the analysis of the Club of Rome in the early 1970s. This brought together a group of economists with particular specialisms to analyse major trends in the global economy, especially the interactions between population growth, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. Using complex mathematical modelling of these trends, the Club of Rome published its findings in Limits to Growth in 1972.2 It came to the conclusion that with rising population levels and increasing demand for food and energy, the present pattern of consumption would lead to the exhaustion of key finite resources by the middle of the 21st Century.

Mainstream economists attacked the report as alarmist, especially for what was seen as its Malthusian pessimism, criticising both the methodology and its underlying assumptions. Long-term economic forecasting is notoriously difficult, some might say impossible, when attempting to factor in all the variables that may or may not be significant, such as the impact of technological change and innovation. For example, if the exercise had been carried out a hundred years earlier, then the calculations would have been rendered irrelevant because of the subsequent discovery of large oil reserves that transformed industrial society.

In general, the findings of the original Limits to Growth report were roundly dismissed on the basis that, through new discoveries of raw materials, technological innovation and resource substitution, economic growth could be maintained into a new era of global prosperity embracing the developing economies, even as world population doubled from three billion to six billion people.

In general, the findings of the original Limits to Growth report were roundly dismissed on the basis that, through new discoveries of raw materials, technological innovation and resource substitution, economic growth could be maintained into a new era of global prosperity embracing the developing economies, even as world population doubled from three billion to six billion people.

During the 1970s an energy crisis of sorts did occur, when the OPEC cartel restricted oil production and prices temporarily soared before returning to normal levels. The relative ease with which the international economy absorbed oil price increases and returned to trend growth was used as proof that the Club of Rome’s underlying assumptions were unsound.

However, Limits to Growth was not concerned with these sorts of short-term market shocks but with the longer-term trends of resource depletion that were serious and would not be mitigated by technological innovation.

In fact, the model accommodated future discoveries of minerals and energy resources, stressing that the expiry times would depend on those variables. As a conservative assumption it calculated that known resources could be multiplied fivefold and that more energy-efficient technologies would be developed but because of exponential growth, all major mineral and non-renewable energy resources would expire by 2070.

Climate Change and Resource Depletion

By the 1980s, clear evidence from across the world of a growing environmental crisis, coalesced around the new science of global warming/climate change. The burning of fossil fuels and the release of massive quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, coupled with the rapid destruction of tropical rain forests that had acted as a natural sink for carbon emissions, was creating a greenhouse effect capable of raising temperatures worldwide.

Concerns had been expressed in earlier years and some environmental writers such as Rene Dumont had warned in the 1970s that global warming would lead to the melting of the ice caps and to sea level rises by as much as twenty metres.3 However, it was only after a series of reports by American scientists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the popularising of the issue by politicians like Al Gore (soon to become the Vice President of the USA), that the scale of the challenge began to be recognised. The Kyoto Accords, signed in 1997, after long and difficult negotiations, provided an international agreement to collectively reduce greenhouse gases by an average of 5% below their 1990 level.4

It is not surprising that the focus of international efforts should have been on efforts to reduce carbon emissions, given the potentially cataclysmic effects. But this has masked the underlying problem of resource depletion that lies at the heart of the crisis and is making the impact of global warming even more severe. In the thirty-year review of Limits to Growth carried out by the Club of Rome economists and published in 2005, the issue is given the prominence it deserves.5  The most obvious, and increasingly urgent example is oil.

The term peak oil is now being commonly used and refers to the pattern that can be generally expected with non-renewable resources in the 21st Century - not a complete or sudden drying up, but rather lower and lower returns to exploration efforts, increasing concentration in the larger, established sites, a peak of production based on those main sites, and then an inexorable decline. All this at a time of increasing demand through globalised markets, including the rapidly growing economies of China and India.