Bill McKibben, one of Those To Whom You Should Listen, has written an interesting piece about our current situation and the classic book, Limits to Growth.[1]

A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth (emphasis added):

We’ve known for a very long time now that, in some vague way, we were headed for trouble. Limits to Growth was published in 1972, and its assorted charts and graphs made remarkably clear that, as the authors of that seminal book put it at the time, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

But “the next hundred years” must have seemed a comfortingly long time, because — though Limits to Growth was the biggest-selling environmental book of all time, with 30 million copies sold — it wasn’t enough to divert our trajectory.

I thought of Limits to Growth last week, when Nature published a lead article by a large and illustrious team headed by the Stockholm scientist Johan Rockstrom. Titled “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” it set boundaries for nine interlinked planetary thresholds, arguing that if we crossed them we risked destroying the “unusual stability” that has marked the Holocene, which is the name scientists use for the last 10,000 years, the period when civilization arose.

The almost-good news is, we don’t know enough about two processes that lead to crossing those thresholds — the loading of aerosols and particulates in the atmosphere, and the effects of chemical pollution — to know if we’ve already gone too far.

The bad news is, we’re close to crossing most of the rest of the boundaries. The authors estimate that we currently allow 9.5 million tons of phosphorus to flow annually into our oceans, mostly because of fertilizer use, and that past 11 million tons we may well trigger “large-scale ocean anoxic events.” Ozone concentrations in the atmosphere — 290 Dobson units before the Industrial Revolution and 283 at present — can’t dip below 276 without catastrophe, the authors note.

Oh, and the worse news is, we’re already well past three of the borders. We’re removing almost four times as much nitrogen from the atmosphere for human use as is safe, and the result are things like wide-scale water pollution and the addition of heat-trapping gases like nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. The species extinction rate, the authors argue, is probably 10 times the tolerable level of 10 species per million species per year, though they add that they’re less certain of this than other numbers. “However, we can say with some confidence that Earth cannot sustain the current rate of loss without significant erosion of ecosystem resilience.”

…

Still, the new Nature paper helps enormously. It helps by making clear how interlocked these various phenomena are. Carbon is driving ocean acidification, for instance, just as it’s raising temperature; global warming will accelerate the species extinction that already comes from habitat destruction.

It helps too by removing the temptation for delay — a temptation that never flags. Only true ideologues or the most oblivious among us thought that we’d never reach the “limits to growth,” but plenty of people convinced themselves they were far enough away that they’d be someone else’s problem. You could hear a bit of that attitude on display at the United Nations last week, as President Obama gave an uninspired speech on climate change, explaining all the reasons that significant progress would be hard (the Congress, the overriding imperative to grow the economy), and admonishing people not to hold out for “the perfect” solution.

But the perfect solution is no longer on offer, as Rockstrom et al make abundantly clear. They’re doing us an enormous service by attempting to isolate the bargaining position of the natural world, a bargaining position that we really might want to respect. If the planet says 350, then it doesn’t matter that the U.S. needs to get out of an economic rut, or that China still has lots of peasants who would like to move to the city. We’re going to have to find non-carbon ways to do those things, because the planet is unlikely to suddenly say, “Oh well, 450 then.” The laws of nature aren’t amendable like the laws of man.

I posted a doc alert for the report McKibben mentions when it came out: Document alert: A place for humanity.

[1] And if you haven’t read it, I have two pieces of advice: Get and read the 30-year update edition (Amazon link), and don’t feel bad about not having read it. We all have weird gaps in our knowledge base, and you can always tell people you read the original years ago and never got around to reading the update until now.


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