Introducing an item on this morning’s Today programme, Justin Webb said that some people ‘may actually be able to remember’ the publication of Limits to Growth.
Well if there are plenty of people around who can remember the Coronation there certainly must be plenty more who remember the Club of Rome’s computer which, forty years ago, told us when we were going finally to run out of all the natural resources on which we depend. It was odd how even the BBC newswriters of the 1970s kept using that formulation, implying that if a computer said so it must be true.
That might (just) have been understandable at a time when not so very many people had any experience of how computers worked, & neither the phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’, nor the saying that ‘computers are stupid, they only follow instructions blindly, doing exactly what they are told’ had not yet become common currency.
Even in our supposedly more computer-literate age however, in this morning’s interview with Bjorn Lomborg, Evan Davies used the formulation ‘the computers they were using in the Seventies got it wrong’.
Evan redeemed himself however by summing up the environmental debate as a clash of two mindsets – those who hold that we shall be able to cross that bridge when we come to it, & those who believe that we are rushing to hell in a handcart.
I am firmly in the former camp – have been since I read & absorbed The Limits to Growth; innovation has always saved us in the past, & today’s wasteful ways never last as long as we think they will anyway.
Even if I am wrong, the alternative – to cut down drastically on our rate of consumption - would only give us a few years more, since we must one day reach the limit, so what’s the point of that?
Unless of course you believe that your descendants will somehow find some totally novel solution of their own, or that the wanton wastrels of the earth will by that time have made themselves extinct, leaving people like you to enjoy a newly paradisal world.
This is not to say that waste & profligacy are OK, or that there are not unexpected downsides to our ingenious inventions, that we do not need to try harder. They are not, there are, & we do.
It is more like the general argument between optimists & pessimists. Sure, pessimists can never suffer the crushing disappointments of hopes dashed, but the price they pay is living a life being miserable about things which never happen.
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