Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele

J’ai l’habitude de voir les écologistes et les futurologues parler des limites de la croissance (« The Limits to Growth »). Je suis moins habitué à voir des spécialistes de l’investissement mentionner des recherches liées aux limites de la croissance. C’est pourtant ce qu’a fait récemment Joachim Klement dans sa lettre d’information quotidienne. Bien entendu, quiconque écrit sur les limites de la croissance doit d’abord procéder à toutes les vérifications d’usage. En effet, la combinaison des mots « limites » et « croissance » dans le titre a suscité un grand nombre de réactions critiques, allant de la déformation pure et simple de l’ouvrage à l’incompréhension du modèle de dynamique des systèmes qui le sous-tend.

I’m used to environmentalists and futurists writing about The Limits to Growth. I’m less used to seeing investment writers mention research that’s linked to The Limits of Growth. But that’s what Joachim Klement did in his daily newsletter recently.

I’m used to environmentalists and futurists writing about The Limits to Growth. I’m less used to seeing investment writers mention research that’s linked to The Limits of Growth. But that’s what Joachim Klement did in his daily newsletter recently. Of course, anyone who writes about Limits of Growth has to do all the usual disclaimers first. This is because the combination of the words “limits” and “growth” in the title produced a lot of critical responses, on a range from straight-up hatchet jobs which misrepresented the book, to people who didn’t appear to understand the systems dynamics model that sat behind it.

Before you read this, a word of caution. You may want to prepare yourself a stiff drink and sit down before you read the following. I think most people who read this will at some point in their life heard about the Club of Rome’s Limit to Growth publication from the 1970s. Back then, the Club of Rome asked the MIT to produce a series of forecasts for the world’s industrial and services output, food production, and pollution levels to the year 2100. Almost from the get-go, these forecasts were derided as scaremongering and flat out wrong. But were they really?

After 50 years, there is still an ongoing debate about the Limits to Growth (LtG) study. This paper recalibrates the 2005 World3-03 model. The input parameters are changed to better match empirical data on world development. An iterative method is used to compute and optimize different parameter sets. This improved parameter set results in a World3 simulation that shows the same overshoot and collapse mode in the coming decade as the original business as usual scenario of the LtG standard run. The main effect of the recalibration update is to raise the peaks of most variables and move them a few years into the future. The parameters with the largest relative changes are those related to industrial capital lifetime, pollution transmission delay, and urban-industrial land development time.

conférence de Dennis Meadows, analyste des systèmes, initiateur et co-auteur du rapport Les limites de la croissance, Club de Rome, 1972 lundi 19 septembre 2022 ENS de Lyon, amphithéâtre Mérieux

Le rapport Meadows est le livre fondateur des actions de transition écologique. En voici un résumé destiné aux lycéens.

In 1972, a book changed the world. The Club of Rome commissioned a report that shifted how we see what humans are doing to the planet. Looking back five decades later, what happened next, what did we do and not do, what did we learn, and what happens now? In The Limits to Growth, a team from MIT studied the way humans were using the resources of the earth. Using sophisticated computer modelling, the researchers developed scenarios to map out possible paths for humanity, the global economy and the impact on the planet.

Presentation of the book "Beyond the Limits," a new report to the Club of Roma edited by Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alvarez Pereira. It tells the story of the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth" and its relevance 50 years later.

Researchers must try to resolve a dispute on the best way to use and care for Earth’s resources. Fifty years ago this month, the System Dynamics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge had a stark message for the world: continued economic and population growth would deplete Earth’s resources and lead to global economic collapse by 2070. This finding was from their 200-page book The Limits to Growth, one of the first modelling studies to forecast the environmental and social impacts of industrialization.