My Career in Science: the First Months of Freedom!

 

After retiring from my university, I am now involved a lot with the Club of Rome. In the photo, you see me wearing a t-shirt that reproduces the "Base Case" scenario of the 1972 report "The Limits to Growth." On the 50th anniversary of that publication, we published a new report, titled "Limits and Beyond," that summarizes the story and discussed its relevance for us and for our future. 

 

A few months ago I decided to retire. Actually, I ran away screaming from my university, and I never set foot again in my department afterward. And I do not plan to set foot in it again, ever. 

So, how is the life of a retiree scientist? It is a dream. Freedom from bureaucracy, paperwork, research reports, grant writing, attending meetings, being part of committees, all that. I don't have to spend the 1h 30' of commuting time that I used to spend every day to go to my office and back. To say nothing about not having to torture those catatonia-suffering creatures that go under the name of "students." I feel like a retiree executioner! 

More than all, I feel as if I had returned to when I was a postdoc at Berkeley, in the 1980s. At that time, I didn't have paperwork to do, no teaching, no committees, and no performance reports. I could spend 100% of my time on research. It was wonderful: I remember that the libraries of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory were open all night for researchers. And I did spend entire nights browsing the shelves. To say nothing about the bookstores in town: it was there that I discovered the concept of "peak oil." 

Today, university libraries have become fortresses where you can enter only if you are fully masked and if you reserve a seat in advance. But they have become useless: the Internet gives us possibilities that we wouldn't have dreamed of in the 1980s. It is a dream if you are trained in science, if you like science, if you love science, (I still do, despite the sad state of science, nowadays). 

The whole scientific knowledge of the world is at your fingertips. You can jump from paleontology to cosmology, to thermodynamics, to microbiology, or anything you fancy to learn. True, some of this knowledge is hidden behind the hideous paywalls that publishers use to make obscene profits, but I daresay that the relevant knowledge is mostly available for free. Nobody wants to publish behind a paywall anymore, except for papers they don't care much about because it is the cheap way to publish, and it gives them academic "points." But the relevant work, no, everyone wants it to be read!  

That leaves a problem: how do you wade through so much information? The mass of data that you can summon onto your screen is enormous, the problem is that you risk losing yourself in a galaxy of irrelevance. In my case, I rely a lot on blogs. Blogs often provide high-quality information, sometimes truly excellent information written by scientists or by experts in their fields. Nothing like the chaotic environment of social media (to say nothing about the censorship). And nothing like the boring platitude of scientific journals. 

But how do you organize your information flux from blogs? It is easy: you use a feed reader. I am always surprised at discovering how few people use feed readers to organize their information. It is simple, costs nothing, and it insures that you never miss the sources you think are relevant. And you decide what you want to read: you are not a slave to the search algorithms of whatever search engine or social media you use. I use "theoldreader.com," but there are many similar ones. Try one, your views of the world will change. You may also want to try "substack.com" -- it is the same idea: it allows you to select the subjects you are interested in. But it works only with substack blogs, whereas a generic feed reader will cover practically all the available Web sites.

There remains the problem of the sheer limits of time and the capability to absorb so much information. There is the risk to become an Internet larva, spending all the time available surfing this and that. 

I am trying to cope with this problem. For one thing, I am dropping certain activities that I think are too time-consuming, and scarcely productive. For one thing, I am considering whether to resign from my position as editor at the "Biophysical Economics and Sustainability" journal. It is an interesting journal in terms of its theme, but it is still steeped in the old and obsolete scientific publishing paradigm of hiding papers behind paywalls. 

Then, I think I'll drop Twitter, too. Too much noise and too little content. It is not the same for Facebook, which still allows one to present reasonably structured information -- you just have to be careful to avoid censorship, which you can do if you phrase your statements carefully. About Metaverse..... well, I still don't know what it is, but I think that you won't be able to force me into it, not even threatening me with a shotgun.

So, with all this information coming in, what is coming out? A list of what I am doing would be boring for you, but let me just tell you that I am in a burst of activities -- I don't think I've ever been so productive as a scientist as now!

Quickly, I am publishing articles in scientific journals, and I am able to publish articles that I see as relevant (and also sometimes fun. That's the way science should be, I think). Among the latest articles, one is a co-authored study on the concept of a 100% renewable-powered society (spearheaded by Christian Breyer). Another (together with Ilaria Perissi) is a re-examination of the "Mousetrap Experiment" that simulates a chain reaction, shown first in Walt Disney's movie "Our friend the atom." Another paper (still with Ilaria) is about transforming the story of "Moby Dick" into a boardgame. The reviewers seem to be a little perplexed, but I think we'll be able to publish it. And there are more papers in the pipeline. 

Then, books. The main one is "Limits and Beyond," a new report to the Club of Rome that reassesses the story of the famous 1972 book, "The Limits to Growth." Then, my previous book, "The Empty Sea" (together with Ilaria Perissi),  is being published in Chinese. It will appear in September. More books are in the pipeline, one is titled "The Age of Exterminations." I think that it will not be easy to find a good publisher for this one -- a little gloomy, to say the least! Anyone among readers has suggestions? 

And then there are blogs and discussion groups. Let me just say that I am fascinated by the concept of "holobiont" and I am dedicating a lot of time to it. I have a blog on holobionts, that I think I will transfer soon to Substack. Right now, the way I see the concept is in terms of the "extended holobiont" synthesis. It will be published (I hope) as a chapter in a new book edited by Jean Pierre Imbrogiano and David Skribna.

The holobiont is, I think, a new paradigm that can help us frame many of the things that are causing us so much trouble nowadays. Holobionts are the building blocks of the ecosystem, and also of human-made social and economic systems.  The whole idea of holobionts is to emphasize collaboration and avoid competition. Holobionts mean sharing, creating, and living. It is the way of all the creatures of the ecosystem. Gaia herself is a giant holobiont -- the master of them all! Then, of course, we are all holobionts ourselves. 

And so, onward, fellow holobionts! 

  

Limits and Beyond: Data Check on World3

 

I have been posting a series of review of the recent report to the Club of Rome "Limits and Beyond." Here is a recent post by Ian Sutton on his blog, "Netzero205."  Many people still think that the original work of 1972, "The Limits to Growth" was "wrong." They'll have to change their minds, sooner or later. Here is a comment on how Gaya Herrington examined how the base case scenario of the 1972 book fared in 50 years. Judge by yourself! 

Chapter 18: Better Windmills

Ian Sutton

The book Limits and Beyond, edited by Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alvarez Pereira, provides a 50th anniversary review of the seminal report Limits to Growth (LtG). The following is from the back cover of the book.

50 years ago the Club of Rome commissioned a report: Limits to Growth. They told us that, on our current path, we are heading for collapse in the first half of the 21st century. This book, published in the year 2022, reviews what has happened in the intervening time period. It asks three basic questions:

• Were their models right?

• Why was there such a backlash?

• What did the world do about it?

The book consists of 19 chapters, each written by a different author, two of whom — Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers — were part of the team that wrote the report.

This post is the seventh in a series that reviews chapters of the book Limits and Beyond. We look at Chapter 18: I did a data check on World3 - Here’s what I found. (Previous reviews are summarized here.)

Four Scenarios

Gaya Herrington

The author of Chapter 18, Gaya Herrington, compares four scenarios from the 2004 edition of Limits to Growth with empirical data. The scenarios are:

• Business as Usual (BAU).

• Business as Usual 2 (BAU2). This is BAU with double the natural resources.

• Comprehensive Technology (CT).

• Stabilized World (SW).

She summarizes her analysis in the following four charts.

A typical example of the comparison of the LTG scenarios and Herrington's data on the real world is shown below. The complete set can be found in her thesis. 

I was reminded of Ms. Herrington’s work by a short conversation with a fellow church member this week. This person understood that the climate is changing (who could not given the events of recent days). He maintained that technology — in the form of windmills — could help save us. But he also realized that windmills have their limitations. For example, they are big and ugly. So, he asked, “Why don’t they make windmills with smaller blades?” In other words, this person accepted the ‘Comprehensive Technology’ approach. (I was restrained enough not to ask that person not look out of the window where he would have seen that the wind was not blowing.)

Currently, we are on the first track: Business as Usual track (BAU). In other words, in spite of the seemingly endless number of reports warning us of our predicament, society has not acted.

Since LtG was published additional resources, such as tight oil, have been made available, and technology has advanced. So BAU2 and CT need to be evaluated since they may represent our future direction.

Regarding BAU2, Herrington says,

More abundant resources do not avoid collapse in World3 scenarios; its cause merely changes from a resource scarcity crisis to a pollution one . . .  BAU2 essentially tells the story of ecosystem breakdown from accumulated pollutions, including greenhouse gases.

With respect to CT she says,

It assumes unprecedented technological innovation in a world that does not otherwise does not change priorities much. The new technologies do in fact help avoid an outright collapse. However, CT sill results in some declines because technology costs become so high that not enough resources are left for agricultural production, health, and education.

She does, however, point out that many of the assumptions that lie behind CT are highly optimistic, and are not validated by empirical data.

Humanity can innovate itself out of one limit, like to some extent it has with resource constraint. But in a system like our global society, creating a solution to one limit inevitably causes interactions with other parts of the system, sooner or later giving rise to a new limit which then becomes the new binding constraint on growth. This new constraint today is pollution from greenhouses gases.

The conclusion is straightforward. We should drive toward the Stabilized World (SW) scenario. Doing so will not only avoid collapse, it will maximize human welfare overall. In fact, we are heading toward either BAU2 or CT.

Need for Legislation

This post, like all the others in this series, repeats the conclusions that we have heard so often.

1. Climate science tells us that we are heading toward a calamity within the lifetime of most people reading this post.

2. The climate is linked with many other factors in ways that are difficult to understand or even identify. (Maybe Ms. Herrington’s most important point is that the first word in the phrase Limits to Growth is plural.)

3. Communication between the climate community and the world at large has been futile.

4. We are doing nothing effective about these looming calamities.

5. Therefore, we need to . . .

The many reports, books, web sites and blog posts to do with climate change generally stop at this point, or else they make sweeping statements about changing the structure of society.

I suggest that we actually need legislation to take us in the right direction. Voluntarily constraints have not worked — we need enforceable rules.

This is why the proposed Climate-disclosure rule from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is so important. (Similar rules being promulgated in many other nations.) Rules may actually be welcomed by business and industry. They provide a badly needed framework and structure for designing and implementing climate programs. In other words, the rules are not designed to lock people up. They are are designed to help business and industry develop a path forward while still making a profit.

This conclusion is based partly on my experience with the development of process safety standards thirty years ago. The analogy between what happened then and what is (not) going on now in the climate world is striking.

From Limits to Growth to Regeneration 2030. An Article by Jeffrey Sachs

The 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Limits to Growth," in 1972, continues to generate interest. This is the original English version of the article by Jeffrey Sachs published in Italian on "Il Sole 24 Ore" -- courtesy of Susana Chacon. Above, the cover of the recent report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond", that re-examines the 1972 study and discusses its relevance for us

From Limits to Growth to Regeneration 2030

Jeffrey D. Sachs   |   May 26, 2022   |   Il Sole 24 Ore

Fifty years ago, Italian business leaders in the Club of Rome gave a jolt to the world in their path-breaking report Limits to Growth.  That thought leadership continues today as Italian business leaders launch Regeneration 2030, a powerful call for more holistic, ethical, and sustainable business practices to help the world achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement.  The 50-year journey from Limits of Growth to Regeneration 2030 shows how far we have come in understanding the critical challenges facing humanity, but also how far we still have to go to meet those challenges.
 
The half-century since Limits to Growth also defines my own intellectual journey, since I began university studies at Harvard University exactly 50 years ago as well.  One of the first books that I was assigned in my introductory economics course was Limits to Growth.  The book made a deep and lasting impression on me.  Here for the first time was a mathematical simulation of the world economy and nature viewed holistically, and using new systems dynamics modeling then underway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 
 
Limits to Growth warned that compound economic growth was on a path to overshoot the Earth’s finite resources, leading to a potential catastrophe in the 21^st century.  My professor huffily dismissed the book and its dire warning.  The book, the professor told us, had three marks against it.  First, it was written by engineers rather than economists.  Second, it did understand the wonders of a self-correcting market system.  Third, it was written at MIT, not at Harvard!  Even at the time, I was not so sure about this easy dismissal of the book’s crucial warning.   
 
Fifty years later, and after countless international meetings, conferences, treaties, thousands of weighty research studies, and most importantly, after another half-century of our actual experience on the planet, we can say the following.  First, the growing world economy is indeed overshooting the Earth’s finite resources.  Scientists now speak of the global economy exceeding the Earth’s “planetary boundaries.”  Second, the violation of these planetary boundaries threatens the Earth’s physical systems and therefore humanity itself.  Specifically, humanity is warming the climate; destroying the habitat of millions of other species; and polluting the air, freshwater systems, soils, and oceans. Third, the market economy by itself will not stop this destruction.  Many of the most dangerous actions – such as emitting climate-changing greenhouse gases, destroying native forests, and adding chemical nutrients to the rivers and estuaries – do not come with market signals attached.  Earth is currently treated as a free dumping ground for many horrendously destructive practices. 

Twenty years after Limits to Growth, in 1992, the world’s governments assembled at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit to adopt several environmental treaties, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity.  Twenty years later, in 2012, the same governments re-assembled in Rio to discuss the fact that the environmental treaties were not working properly.  Earth, they acknowledged, was in growing danger.  At that 2012 summit they committed to establish Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide humanity to safety.  In 2015, all 193 UN member states adopted the SDGs and a few weeks later signed the Paris Climate Agreement to implement the 1992 climate treaty.
 
In short, we have gone a half-century from the first warnings to today.  We have adopted many treaties and many global goals, but in practice, have still not changed course.  The Earth continues to warm, indeed at an accelerating rate.  The Earth’s average temperature is now 1.2°C warmer than in the pre-industrial period (dated as 1880-1920), and is higher than at any time during the past 10,000 years of civilization.  Warming has accelerated to more than 0.3°C per decade, meaning that in the next decade we will very possibly overshoot the 1.5°C warming limit that the world agreed to in Paris.    
 
A key insight for our future is that we now understand the difference between mere “economic growth” and real economic progress.  Economic growth focuses on raising traditional measures of national income, and is merely doing more of what we are already doing: more pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, more destruction of the forests.  True economic progress aims to raise the wellbeing of humanity, by ending poverty, achieving a fairer and more just economy, ensuring the quality education for all children, preventing new disease outbreaks, and increasing living standards through sustainable technologies and business practices.  True economic progress aims to transform our societies and technologies to raise human wellbeing.  

Regeneration 2030 is a powerful business initiative led by Italian business leaders committed to real transformation.  Regeneration aims to learn from nature itself, by creating a more circular economy that eliminates wastes and pollution by recycling, reusing, and regenerating natural resources.  Of course, an economy can’t be entirely circular – it needs energy from the outside (otherwise violating the laws of thermodynamics).  But rather than the energy coming from digging up and burning fossil fuels, the energy of the future should come from the sun (including solar power, wind, hydroelectric, and sustainable bioenergy) and from other safe technologies.  Even safe man-made fusion energy may be within technical and economical reach in a few decades.   
 
On my part, I am trying as well to help regenerate economics, to become a new and more holistic academic discipline of sustainable development.  Just as business needs to be more holistic and aligned with the SDGs, economics as an intellectual discipline needs to recognize that the market economy must be embedded within an ethical framework, and that politics must aim for the common good.  Scientific disciplines must work together, joining forces across the natural sciences, policy sciences, human sciences, and the arts.  Pope Francis has spurred the call for such a new and holistic economics by encouraging young people to adopt a new “Economy of Francesco,” inspired by the love of nature and humanity of St. Francis of Assisi. 
 
Sustainable Development, Regenerative Economy, and the Economy of Francesco are, at the core, a new way of harnessing our know-how, 21^st century technologies, and ethics, to promote human wellbeing.  The first principle is the common good – and that means that we must start with peace and cooperation.  Ending the war in Ukraine at the negotiating table without further delay, and finding global common purpose between the West and East, is a good place for us to begin anew. 

Published in Il Sole 24 Ore for the Trento Festival of Economics, June 4, 2022

The Return of "The Limits to Growth." An interview with Carlos Alvarez Pereira, Vice-President of the Club of Rome

 

Image from "Wired.com" Note that they call the report "infamous" -- they are still influenced by the defamation campaign against it carried out in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The interest on "The Limit to Growth" is returning. 50 years after that a vicious denigration campaign had consigned the report to the trash can of wrong science, we see the study resurfacing, reappraised, reviewed, being discussed again. 

And we are realizing that the study had been correct and that today is still relevant for us. It was never intended as a prophecy of doom, but its true message was drowned in a sea of irrelevant criticism, political slander, and plain insults that prefigured the current way of dealing with "science" in the media. 

The latest evidence of this new interest in the "Limits to Growth" is the interview with the vice-president of the Club of Rome, Carlos Alvarez Pereira, that recently appeared on "Wired".

Carlos does not keep a blog and he doesn't appear so often on the social media, so you may not have heard of him. But he is very active in various sustainability projects. Among many other things, he has edited, together with Ugo Bardi, the new report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond" that summarizes and reviews 50 years of history of the first "Limits" report. Carlos' interview on "Wired" is a deep and wide sweep at the many facets of the problems we face. Absolutely worth reading.

Here are a few excerpts from Carlos' interview. 


Fundamentally, it is about equity, managing the resources in an equitable way, knowing in advance that they're limited. Realizing that it's not higher and higher consumption which makes us live in a good way, have a healthy life and well-being. It's the quality of our relationships with other humans, with nature, that makes possible the scenarios in which you can decouple well-being and the growth of consumption.

............

We have to be in a good balance with the planet where we live. And that part of the message was completely lost, very rapidly. Jimmy Carter, when he was president, was listening to this kind of approach. And then of course, the political mood changed a lot with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan himself has a discourse in which he says, literally, there are no limits to growth. So from a political point of view, there was a complete denial of what the book was saying.

...........

What the system has done, as a mechanism to continue with growth at all costs, is actually to burn the future. And the future is the least renewable resource. There is no way that we can reuse the time we had when we started this conversation. And by building up a system which is more debt-driven—where we keep consumption going, but by creating more and more debt—what we're actually doing is burning or stealing the time of people in the future. Because their time will be devoted to repaying the debt.

.......

The paradox is that capitalism is also based on the notion of scarcity. Our system is organized around the idea that resources are scarce, then we have to pay for them, and people in the value chain will profit from this idea of scarcity. Conventional capitalism is saying that while these resources might be finite, we will find others: Don't worry, technology will save us. So that we continue in the same way.

 

Limits and Beyond: the message from Dennis Meadows. A review of the 3rd chapter

Ian Sutton continues to review on his blog the chapters of the recently published new report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond" (Exapt Press 2022)

by Ian Sutton

We have reviewed the first two chapters of the new book Limits and Beyond. The reviews can be found at The Yawning Gap (Chapter 1) and No More Growth (Chapter 2). In this post we take a look at the third chapter, written by Dennis Meadows, a co-author of the original Limits to Growth. Dr. Meadows reports that he has delivered over a thousand speeches to a very wide variety of audiences. In this chapter the author summarizes “19 of the most common questions, comments and objections” that he has received over the years. Some of his insights are as follows:

• The World3 model continues to be more useful than the “many models advanced by economists who refuted our work since its first publication”.
• He distinguishes between physical and social models. We can predict solar eclipses or the melting point of ice with certainty, but we cannot predict how humans will act. Therefore, the fact that modern computers are much more powerful than their 1972 counterparts is not necessarily more helpful. (Engineers express the same distinction when talking about the difference between precision and accuracy. “When you’ve got baloney, it doesn’t matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney”. Or, “An engineer is someone who multiplies 2 by 2 on a slide rule, gets an answer of 3.9 and approximates to 4”.)
• “Climate change was not a serious concern 50 years ago”. Dr. Meadows argues that the model is nevertheless still valid because, “magically eliminating it would still leave other grave problems”. In other words, climate change is not a root cause; instead it is a symptom of deeper root causes.
• The biggest threat is to our social fabric.
• He concludes by saying that the, “. . . report did not make discernible changes in the policies of the world’s leaders”. However, it did influence the thinking of many individuals.

The fact that Dr. Meadows has worked so hard to deliver the message of Limits to Growth is impressive. The question remains, however, “Why has such communication mostly failed to make a discernible impact on the body politic?”

Dennis Meadows

Communication is, of course, a two-way affair. People such as Dr. Meadows speak, but others have to listen. And, as I point out in The Coffee Shop and Small Potatoes the vast majority of people don’t “get it”. At best, they see climate change as being just one problem among many. Maybe they sense that facing up to limits to growth involves making sacrifice, and most people don’t want to go there. 

One message that we have definitely learned that simply presenting well-researched information is not enough. It is possible that we need some type of '‘social tipping point’ as I discuss in Needed: A Tipping Point.