Forty years helping the world understand 'The Limits to Growth'

Richard Heinberg read “The Limits to Growth” when he was 21 and forty years later he devotes his life to helping the world understand that what was then a carefully considered promise is now reality.

The American journalist, author and educator, who has written extensively on energy, economic and ecological issues, including oil depletion, and serves as the senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, shared his thoughts with Melbournians on Saturday night (September 22).

Richard Heinberg.

Heinberg’s views on dilemmas facing humanity needed to be heard by everyone, especially the “responsible men”, but sadly only about 100 people were at The Wheeler Centre to hear what he had to say.

Naturally Heinberg’s hour-long presentation included many generalizations; generalizations however, that are founded on fact and confirm the predictions of the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth.

Heinberg said the book, for which Donella H. Meadows was the lead author, changed his life.

Meadows was castigated by the establishment, but time has illustrated that what she and her fellow authors had concluded was exactly right.

“The data they had at the time”, Heinberg said, “tended to show a peak a decline in world industrial output sometime in the first few decade of the 21^st century.”

He said that even today many who hear about limits to growth claim it was an idea that had be discredited long ago, but Heinberg said nothing could be further from the truth and as recently as 2008 the CSRIO considered the question of growth and finite resources and found we are right on track.

In a joking manner, Heinberg said; “We’re doing a good job”.

Heinberg explored three facets of the limits – energy, debt and climate – and on the first, energy enables everything we do.

“Without energy nothing happens Many economists will tell you energy represents eight or 10 per cent of the economy because that is how much of our total budget we spend on energy, but that doesn’t capture the importance of energy because if you take away energy then the economy doesn’t just contract by eight or 10 percent, the economy, in effect, goes away,” he said.

Heinberg discussed the ever increasing complexities humanity faces because of the terminal decline of conventional fossil fuels, and the energy they provide along with the added equally important compounding issues of debt and changes human have caused to earth’s environment.

Although he was without direct and precise answers to the difficulties faced by a world burdened by a burgeoning population, man’s seeming incessant need to consume and apparent disregard or ignorance of the fact that we, humans, are an integral part of biosphere, and not separate from it, Heinberg was not hopeful we could slow the dynamic and arrive at a point that enabled us to live a good life.

He did not appear hopeful that his writings, the creation and maintenance of the website, Post Carbon Institute, and educative efforts made through speaking tours such as that presently taking him around Australia, would ever have much impact in the face of the forces ranged against him and others of similar belief.

However, he did see hope through such movements as Transition Towns and similar undertakings that encouraged localism.

Considering the future, Heinberg expected those countries presently described as “developed” would see a noticeably reduction in the quality of their lifestyle, while the rest of the world would see something contrary to that and the two would meet somewhere in the middle.