I thought it might be interesting to take a look at two seminal publications from the 1970s, to find out how well they have stood the test of time.
The first is the infamous 1971 book “Limits to Growth” (LtG) published by Dennis Meadows et al. It presented a significantly dystopian view of the future, and was the trend-setter for the “doomer” movement. The second is Amory Lovins’ 1976 paper
Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken? (PDF) In contrast to the LtG this paper was decidedly optimistic in its prescriptive view of future possibilities. How closely have events in the intervening 30+ years tracked the projections of each publication?
In the case of LtG, the analysis has already been done for us. A paper was published in 2007 by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO called
A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality (PDF). It was the first study since the publication of LtG to compare the predictions with reality. To cut to the chase, Meadows at al got it pretty much right. Their “standard run” scenario, the one that made everyone sit up and take notice, tracks reality out to 2000 or so very tightly. 7 of 8 indicators are within 20% of their projected values. The one that’s not within that window is death rates, which interestingly enough is balanced by an opposing error in birth rates to make their projected net population growth match the observed value exactly. Given how hard predictions are (especially when they’re about the future, as Yogi Berra famously said), this is breathtakingly impressive performance. Unfortunately, this accuracy gives even more credibility to the gloomy predictions of impending hard limits to the growth of civilization over the next couple of decades.
Lovins’ paper is more of a mixed bag. On one hand, the energy growth projection he warned against in his “hard path” has not come to pass. In fact the actual evolution of energy use in the USA has been remarkably close to his “soft path” projection, at least in quantity. In addition, growing energy efficiency has helped significantly in constraining energy use over the last 30 years. On the other hand, many aspects of the future he was promoting have not come to pass. Of the technologies he was touting, only energy efficiency has achieved the scale he hoped it would, with cogeneration receiving honourable mention.
On the third hand a number of Lovins' predictions were outright failures.
On the “hard path” side of the house, Lovins predicted that the US would have a total of 450 to 800 nuclear reactors in 2000 if the hard path was followed. The actual number today is 104. Although this is far fewer than he projected, nuclear power has by no means withered away to zero as the soft path projection hoped it would.
His prediction of 15 million electric cars by the turn of the millennium has achieved only 1/10 that number, and those are hybrids. The prediction of a continued growth in vehicle fleet fuel economy and the production of one third of the US requirement for gasoline from food-based ethanol have likewise not materialized.
In fact, when we consider Lovins’ chart of the soft path (figure 2 in the PDF) and compare it to the chart above, there is no evidence of any penetration of soft path technologies into the energy mix (except for efficiency as mentioned above). None of the alternative energy technologies, from wind and solar to geothermal have yet made significant inroads into the current energy picture – and certainly not to the scale that Lovins proposed as being possible. Lovins' prediction that a third of American energy could come from soft technologies by the beginning of this century has to be considered one of the biggest failures of this paper.
So here we have two contrasting views of the future, one of which is materializing, and one of which is not. What makes the difference between them? In my opinion, it’s simply the fact that Meadows et al saw human nature as being potentially intractable, while Lovins saw it as essentially malleable. When we were presented with evidence of the need for change, Lovins expected we would change, while Meadows thought we would probably stick with known approaches.
This difference is yet another example of the “triune brain” problem I spoke about in
another post. Lovins has made the classic assumption that we are rational creatures, driven by neo-cortical reasoning. Meadows, on the other hand, appears to be of the opinion that our reptilian and limbic brains will win out.
If environmentalists wish to actually change things, we need to take into account human behaviour as well as science and technology. All the shiny toys in the world won’t do us a bit of good if people resist using them. Unless we accept how humans actually make decisions and can find some way to shift them in spite of that, we are doomed to the disappointment of a "Limits to Growth" future.
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