Page 16 RAIN November 1980 GLOBAL.2000: The Liillits to Coillputer Modeling I The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the Twenty-First Century, 19~0; Vol. 1, the Summary Report, SIN 041011-0037-8, $3·.so; Vol. 2, The Technical Report, SIN 041-011-0038-6, $13.00; Vol. 3, The Governmenes Global Model, SIN 041-011-00051-l, $8.00. Available from the U.S. Government Printing Office, . Washington, DC 20402. by Mark Ro~eland Two scientific studies which document in great detail the nature of the ecological crisis made quite a splash when they were published in 1972, one in England, the other in the United States. Both were the results of teams of scientists from many disciplines working together and using computer modeling over a long period of time. The Club of Rome-sponsored Massachusetts Institute ofTechnolosy study, The Limits to Growth, offered three conclusions regarding the crisis itself. First, given the present growth trends of industrialization and population, we have at most 100 years before the limits to growth are reached. Reaching these limits would probably result-in rapid and uncontrollable decline in population and 1ndustrial capacity. Second, it is still possible to dainperi and re-direct growth trends so that we can have an ecological and economic equi- _librium sustainable far into the future. Third, there is very little time to waste. As the authors of the British Blueprint for Su,:vival describe it, The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is_ that it is not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of somea~ born today is inevitable-unt~ss it'con- .tinues to be sustained for a while longer by an entrenched minority at the cost of imposing great suffering on the res.t of mankind. • The reason growth cannot be sustained, according to both studies, has-to do with the nature of growth frsflf: • Indefinite growth of whatever type cannot be sustained by finite resources. Th-is is the nub of the environmental predicament. It is still less possible to maintain indefinite exponential growth . .. (from Blueprint) . Eight years later, amidst great hoopla and speech-making, the .U.S. Government has signaled that it is catching on. This summer it released perhaps the most far-reaching and sobering prognosis for human.survival ever delivered by~ v\Testern government-a s,tudy • which acknowledges that the long-time warnings of environmentalists and ecologists are worth listening to and acting upon. • .. If pre?ent trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, _less stable ecologically, and more vulz y 1980 1990. 2000 nerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses i'nvolving population, resources, and environment are . clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the . world's people will be po'orer in many ways than _they are today. For hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it will be worse. Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now-unless the,nations of the world act decisively to alter current trends. This, in essence, is the picture emerging from the U.S. Government's projections of probalile changes in world population, resources, and environment by the end of the century, as pres~·nted in the Global 2000 Study. They do not predict what will occur. Rather, they depict conditio.ns that areJikely to develop if there are no changes in public policies, institutions, or rates of technological advance, and if there are no wars or. other major disruptions . ... (from Global 2000) ' • . . That said, what significance sh~uld we attach to this study? Contributing to the Global 2000 report for.the Council on Envitonmen- . ·tal Quality and the State Department were the Departments of ' · Agricl,llture, Energy, and Interior, the Bureau of the Census, the Agency for.International Development, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the National •Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratimi', and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. , Sounds impressive, yes? Except that, as the report itself admits, . . . the Study found serious incon_sistencies in the methods and -... . assumptions employed by the various agencies in making their projections. . .. [they] contain serious gaps and contradictions that must be corr~cted if the Government's analytic ca,pability is to be improved. It must be acknowledged tl;lat at present the Federal. agencies are not always capable of providing projections of the qual-· ity needed for long-t~rm policy decisions." We'll ignore for the moment that, while the study praises the move to solar and renewables, ,it relied on three year old Depart-· ment of Energy models which show no.significant solar contribu-
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