The Club of Rome  The Prophets of Degrowth

Imagine if, many decades ago, someone had warned society against the dogma of limitless growth — that it could have problematic effects in the medium term and that it was necessary to consider that resources might not be inexhaustible and that environmental problems might become cumulatively worse. This was precisely the case, and therefore, any contemporary debate on the questions of growth cannot ignore these facts. Introducing: The simultaneously inspiring and tragic story of the Club of Rome.

Aurelio Peccei | © Koen Suyk / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons It was toward the end of the 1960s that Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei became concerned about the future of humanity. Worldwide student protests, the ideological division of society into capitalists and anti-capitalists, and the environmental damage caused by industrialization — which was then becoming noticeable — made the planet’s prospects seem bleak. And he was not alone — a growing group of intellectuals felt the same way. In the spring of 1968, Peccei organized a conference in Rome, but he was not satisfied with the outcome: The results seemed too hesitant, too weak, not concrete enough. He gathered a group of participants who felt the same way: The Club of Rome was born.

A Weighty Voice

Numerous meetings of a constantly expanding circle of mathematicians, systems theorists, economists, and historians from the U.S., Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany followed. In the coming years, they dedicated themselves to the task of creating visions for a sustainable future by modeling possible scenarios. Immediately, the first results — based on the highly simplified "World 3" model — attracted great attention in scientific circles and were published in 1972 in the book Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome, commissioned by the Club of Rome and written by Donella and Denis Meadows of the System Dynamics Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  The publication established the Club of Rome as a weighty voice in international politics and economic and social science. However, the book’s forecasts were widely criticized as inaccurate because they used roughly estimated figures. For example, it predicted that oil reserves would be exhausted in 1990, and natural gas in 1992. These figures were not questioned, and factors such as technological progress, more efficient use of resources, and new inventions were ignored in the model. Despite its dismissal as a “horror story” until today, especially in conservative circles, The Limits to Growth was a great success with the public and caused a furor
in the discourse, but its actual, concrete influence on political events unfortunately remained limited. Yet, as the years go by, it is becoming increasingly clear how the reality of the climate crisis threatens to outstrip even the Club’s boldest predictions. Studies such as that of Dutch scientist Gaya Herrington now support the Club's predictions and suggest that the global climate situation would look much more positive today had the warnings of the early publications been taken seriously.

By 2023, there had been more than fifty "Reports to the Club of Rome", dealing with various aspects of economic growth, the finiteness of resources, population development, and even questions of social justice, and they have always been received with huge interest and debated on a global scale. Their actual influence on world affairs is difficult to measure, but one thing is certain: whoever is publicly (and obviously wrongly) contradicted by a U.S. president (as in Ronald Reagan's famous statement "There are no such things as limits to growth (...)" or makes it into a keynote speech by arch-conservative German politician Wolfgang Schäuble has been noticed by powerful decisionmakers. And that's something.

09/2023