After 53 Earth Days, Society Still Hasn’t Collapsed

Despite these new pressures, Wellmer sanguinely concludes: “Supply shortages have been forecast frequently in the past. They never actually happened. The self-regulating feedback control cycle of mineral supply safeguards adequate supply over time. There is no reason to assume that this system of self-correcting forecasts will not work in the future.”

For her part, Herrington, unfazed by the past failures of the Limits model’s projections, contrarily concludes that the two of her updated Limits scenarios that align most closely with the data she cites “indicate a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production over the next decade or so, which puts into question the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity’s goal in the twenty-first century.”

If anyone is an unheeded Cassandra with respect to resource depletion prophecies, I am. Given its manifold predictive failures, I confidently expect to report back on the 60th anniversary of The Limits to Growth that it is still “as wrong-headed as it is possible to be.” Happy Earth Day everyone!

via reason.com

Ron Bailey.